Mediating Mobility Nonfictions is dedicated to expanding and deepening the range of contemporary documentary studies. It aims to engage in the theoretical conversation about documentaries, open new areas of scholarship, and recover lost or marginalised histories. Other titles in the Nonfictions series: Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties by Dave Saunders Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice edited by Alan Grossman and Áine O’Brien The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture edited by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television by Timothy Boon Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch edited by Joram ten Brink Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain by John Wyver Chavez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – A Case Study of Politics and the Media by Rod Stoneman Documentary Display: Re-Viewing Nonfiction Film and Video by Keith Beattie The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film by Laura Rascaroli Playing to the Camera: Musicians and Musical Performance in Documentary CInema by Thomas Cohen The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary by Alisa Lebow Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence edited by Joram ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer Documenting Cityscapes: Urban Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film by Iván Villarmea Álvarez Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Documentary by Paolo Magagnoli Mediating Mobility VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF MIGRATION Steffen Köhn WALLFLOWER PRESS LONDON & NEW YORK A Wallflower Press Book Wallflower Press in an imprint of Columbia University Press publishers since 1893 New York cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press. Cover image from Laura Waddington film’s Border (2004) © Laura Waddington. A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-231-17888-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-17889-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-85094-0 (e-book) Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America. c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii INTRODUCTION 1 Anthropology, Migration and the Moving image ChapTeR ONe 30 Migrant in/visibility ChapTeR TwO 53 Migrant Experience ChapTeR ThRee 84 Migratory Spaces ChapTeR fOUR 109 Migratory Times CONCLUSION 138 Possibilities NOTES 154 FILMOGRAPHY 157 BIBLIOGRAPHY 159 INDEx 173 v 00 - prelims.indd 5 8/1/16 22:30:32 Acknowledgements T his book would not have been possible without the continuous support of numerous individuals over many years. Fist of all, I wish to thank Prof. Matthias Krings, Prof. Anton Escher and Prof. Karl N. Renner for providing a stimulating work environment and for their continuous intel- lectual and moral guidance and encouragement. I further want to thank Nanna Heidenreich, Laurent van Lancker and Antje Weitzel for sharing texts, films and knowledge with me; and Sandra Sievers for helping me obtain many of the films I analyse throughout my work. In addition, I wish to thank my good friends and colleagues Felix Girke, Judith Beyer, Gerd Becker, Laura Münger, Florian Walter, Eva Knopf and Danilanh Lathnotha for reading chapters in their various drafts and for providing insightful criticism and comments. The artists Sylvain George, Raphael Cuomo, Maria Iorio, Bouchra Khalili, Elias Grootaers, Alex Rivera, Ursula Biemann and Zineb Sedira (and her gallery Kamel Mennour) were so generous as to share their work with me, and their unique approach to filmmaking was a constant source of inspiration to me in my practical and theoretical work. For friendship, collaboration (and the occasional distraction when needed) I express my infinite gratitude to Johannes Büttner, Henrika Kull, Leonardo Franke, Helge Peters, Lola Abrera, Barbara Breitenstein and Irina Breitenstein. Thank you for being you! I have presented versions of chapters at various international events. These include the 12th EASA conference in Paris-Nanterre, the workshop ‘Mobile Images – Images of Mobility’ at the University of Cologne, the ‘Arts with(out) Borders’ conference at the University of Bern, the 17th IUAES world congress in Manchester and the 35th DGV conference in Mainz. I am grateful to the conference organisers, panel conveners and participants at these events for the opportunity to test my ideas and for their engagement with them. This book has evolved over many years. Parts of chapter three have been published as ‘Organising complexities: the potential of multi-screen video-installations for ethnographic practice and representation’ in Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 27:5 (2013). Another section of the same chapter was included in ‘Screening Transnational Spaces’, Anthrovision 2:2 (2014). I am grateful to the publishers and editors for their permission to reproduce this material here. vii The fieldwork for this project was funded by the Research Unit Media Convergence and the Center for Intercultural Studies at Johannes Gutenberg- University Mainz, as well as by the Film and New Media Fund for Emerging Filmmakers Rhineland-Palatinate and I wish to thank these institutions for their support. I am especially grateful to Paola Calvo for creating such wonderful im- ages and to my family for their enduring support, without which I could never have completed this work. My deepest gratitude, however, goes to those people that granted me so much insight into their lives and shared so many intimate moments with me during the fieldwork and filmmaking on which this project is based. Opara Onyekachi, Shahbaz Aakthar and Ilham Regadda in Melilla, Halidi Yahaya Soidikh and Sitti Aboudou in Mayotte, and Serpil Çelik, Axel Hartfiel, Mercedita de Jesus, Patricia Rendon and your families, may you cross all the borders and overcome all the barriers you are faced with in your lives! viii INTRODUCTION Anthropology, Migration and the Moving Image I n June 2015, the performance art group Center for Political Beauty staged their latest intervention right in the political heart of Europe. For The Dead are Coming, they brought the corpses of illegalised migrants who drowned at the continent’s external borders to the German capital Berlin in order to rebury them at exactly the place where, according to the group, the most important decisions against Europe’s humanity are taken. This public action was based on intensive research the collective conducted on the harrowing conditions under which the bodies of those who die on their way to Europe are treated at the continent’s border regions. The group visited secret mass graves and cooling chambers in Greece and on Sicily where they found the dead anonymously piled up in trash bags. They were able to identify some of the victims and managed to contact their relatives with whom they opened the humiliating graves, exhumed the bodies and planned the reburial of the deceased migrants. Their transfer to the German capital was not only meant to bring the migrants’ journeys to an end but also to generate attention and put pressure on European leaders to make them face a growing humanitarian crisis. The group first organised the burial of a 34-year-old woman from Syria, who drowned near the Italian shores, in an Islamic cemetery in Berlin’s south-western Gatow district. This happened before the eyes of the international media but in the absence of her surviving husband and three children, who are in Germany and seeking asylum but were not allowed to travel to Berlin due to a law that prevents asylum seekers from moving freely within the country while their applications are being processed. A couple of days later, they gave the body of another 60-year-old Syrian a final resting place in Berlin and then called for a ‘March of the Determined’ during which they announced their intention to bury more bodies right in the forecourt of Angela Merkel’s Federal Chancellery in the midst of the city’s government district. With these burials, the Center also aimed to lay the foundations for 1