Amade M’charek: Beach Encounters

[Music] good evening ladies and gentlemen and a very warm welcome to this afternoon's lecture by ahmad mishadik we would like to welcome on this occasion not only our speaker who is a fellow of the iwm currently but also her discussant especially um and that is i mean we welcome always all our discussions but there is a special warm welcome for uh makaverlu who has not only been associated with the institute for many many years as a non-resident permanent fellow who has had some very important projects on gender at the house at the institute but in this particular case we owe her a real debt of gratitude for bringing a mud to us and i will say more in a moment something about that ahmad mishrik is professor of anthropology of science at the department of anthropology of the university of amsterdam since 2008. her research interests are very very broad and very unusual they're in the field of forensic anthropology of forensics and race with a particular focus on the social aspects of various biomedical technologies and practices such as human genetic diversity diversity in medical practice and forensic genetics this is a very unusual career because she worked as a population geneticist at the forensic lab in leiden so she's really had a couple of years of lab experience in turning this laboratories and forensics into an object of ethnographic inquiry but also using the techniques to further the study of anthropological questions so a for this very very neutral profile and for a very prolific academic output uh with the subject which i will come to in a moment a month was given in 2014 the highly prestigious erc the european research council consulted data grant which enables her to do the research which we are going to hear something on today her research is on something a project which is called race face id it's on face making and race making we will learn something about both these aspects in forensic identification the aim of the project is to develop both theoretical concepts and frameworks but also methods with which to understand the simultaneous presence but also the absence of race in science and in society so what she does is something which is i think uh um very different from what is usually done in our discipline i should say my discipline also anthropology which is to say race is a social construction so it just takes a social constructivist approach which is part of the story but not the whole story as we are going to learn so what she does is she takes biological factors into account and thus goes beyond a social constructivist paradigm to unravel in a way how race is shaped as a set of relationships between the social the biological and the technological so it's a complex study which is actually i think of interest not only uh to those who are critical of the entire constructive race but is also in constant dialogue with those international sciences in the life sciences who are not quite convinced that the idea should be thrown out of the window she has two other very uh interesting projects and i'll mention them in a moment she has a very very interesting book which for those of you who don't know it you should take a look at and that is her ethnographic study of scientific practice related to the human genome diversity project so this is her monograph which appeared with the cambridge university press and i can recommend it very very highly she's working on two projects one with a very intriguing title dutchness in genes and genealogy and i hope we'll get to discussing that in the discussion but it's about how dutchness being dutch is enacted in collaborations between archaeologists genealogists and population geneticists and she's the founding chair of the european network for the social studies of forensics and is convener of a series of seminars on the relevance irrelevance of race in science and society she won last year and was awarded the emma goldman prize this year an award which was instituted by the flex foundation and that is where i come to my very sincere words of gratitude for mick verlo who not only i think is one of the founders a founding members of the foundation with um a set of colleagues but she also had this wonderful idea to bring the award and the award ceremony and the six winners to the iwm so the flex foundation owes initiator of this entire um award which is given for looking at questions of gender questions of race questions of inequality in a larger holistic perspective and we hosted the ceremony at which the awards were presented and hope to do that next year as well and this links us to the present colloquium for today but the interesting thing about the award is that it's not restricted to people who are just working in the ivory tower on issues of inequality gender differences diversity but also interested equally in public outreach and in public spirited engagement in the field and with that i want to mention a singular achievement of ahmadis which i hope will get to talk about with you in the discussion and that is she's chair of the stitching drowned migrant cemetery it is a foundation which is committed to setting up a dignified cemetery for migrants who have drowned in sarsis in her native tunisia and with that i give you the word and a warm welcome to both of you thank you thank you so much alini for that very generous introduction and um thank you mika for acting as my discussion today um i'm incredibly grateful to have won the emma goldman prize just for connecting my name to emma goldman is already a big honor i thank you also here i hope the sound is okay um thank you for being here um i think shadini was promising you something that i will not deliver today which is um that i would be talking about race and forensic much um i won't actually um it is indeed the project that i have been working on with a large team for a while and um it is also very important part of my work but it led me to a corner uh i would and and that corner became a site of research that was actually small it was intended to be small and it grew bigger and bigger [Music] and i think it will be the the the direction that i will be moving into for the coming uh years to come if that is allowed so yes let me just read it out and we'll i hope it will be clear so the paper i'm presenting today is a drawing together of some of the ingredients for a book that i'm currently sketching and i will contain my own word but also the work of a friend an artist from the south of tunisia mustand le hedid and i will introduce him to you shortly the book is obviously still a puzzle it will contain pictures of massen's art his poetry as well as short essays photos and stories that are based on my own research in this book we want to attend to migrant death but we want to take the place which is the beach and the shores where bodies are found seriously and take account of that place and what that gathers together so the book is part and parcel of this wonderful emma goldman award the book is about death and dying in the med and it addresses the question of how did these bodies end up here a forensic question for excellence but a question that we will not answer in any linear way we want to attend to bodies in a more generous way i would say by juxtaposing different material traces and weaving multiple stories together stories that we on the habit of keeping apart stories about ecological disasters over fishery colonial extractions violence brain drain borders migration and death and the book wants to make three intervention so first precisely by attending to death and dying and situating this not just in europe's border management regime but in a much wider context we make a political intervention we want to demonstrate that we what we are facing is not so much a humanitarian crisis but a political crisis that implicates us in profound ways second working with a broad collection of traces we want to make a theoretical contribution by showing that what we came to know as europe's migration crisis is not so much a crisis but a chronic situation a manifestation of europe's ongoing post colonial involvement on the african continent the reasons why millions of people are adrift and will be adrift for years to come and three methodologically we also suggest a shift from forensics aimed at providing evidence about a single fact a single event or the identification of one individual to also entail forensics as an art of paying attention to a broader picture a move from towards materiality and material traces that could help us to articulate the ambivalences and politics of politics of persistent colonial relations so this is to give you um a bit of a context for the snippets of stories that i will now turn to as i started to follow the traces of bodies that in recent years went missing in the mediterranean i found myself moving away from europe from its soil its politics and ways of knowing the dead this movement was neither firm nor fast it was more like a meandering of a creek hesitant and full of ambivalences for was not this crisis so already so hyped and refugee camps already so crowded by researchers yet i kept moving wondering who are these people that did not make it to europe alive i started to ask this question also because of hold on yes because i was i'm involved in this um in this project the erc project that looks at various forensic technologies that are aimed at giving a face to an unknown person a suspect or a victim of crime and this is what shalini was mentioning earlier this erc project so here we look at three technologies of giving a face there's dna so going from dna traces that are found at the crime scene and the dna that you can extract from that and trying to say something about the appearance of the unknown person and the second technology that we look at is craniofacial reconstruction so the reconstruction based on the skull and the third is the most classical one could say technology of producing um a picture or a composite based on eyewitness account and you can do this of course by drawing but also by computerized technologies the idea is to follow from the laboratory research develop and development laboratory to the courtroom the relation between the individual and the collective that is already there because you don't know you start with a large collective and slowly but surely try to work yourself towards an individual and to see how this relation changes when this relation becomes racialized this is a way of learning about how race is made relevant in specific practices so we study as i say that these technologies in learning in order to learn something about how race becomes relevant in knowing the individual and also what race is made to be in forensic research we have this tendency to think of phrase as the biological well it has never been solely the biological never in the history of uh our i don't know piles and piles of book that we have produced since the 18th century well precisely because the combination of biology crime and race is pretty intense and has a long history and because it might lead us to see race everywhere and this is something that i was quite nervous about of ratifying race ourselves as researchers specifically in continental europe where race is not a common word so to speak we have all sorts of nice words culture religion and language and so on to to do diversity but because we don't use race that's uh in our language i was pretty uh anxious about doing this research so because of that i was thinking of a contrasting project a case outside of the criminal justice system where these technologies do something nice in medical practice but also in the stuff that i will be talking about today now reading about the migration uh reading about dead migrant as they were filling our newspapers almost on a daily basis in 2015 and 16 and after i was soon to find out that although there was um effort made by ngos to count the debt there was hardly any political interest in identifying them and giving them a name or face and this situation is now slowly changing we can discuss that later i don't go into that here and while figuring out the little bit of identification that was happening i found myself in the south of tunisia in the town of zarzis which is actually my hometown it was fishermen that led me there i learned about their work as first responders rescuing people at sea but also taking care of dead bodies or helping the coast guard by estimating for them where and when they could expect a body that the wind will take to a specific place on the shores of zarzis the work inspired me to think about forensics forensic infrastructure as emerging rather than fixed and rigid as we know it in the criminal justice system and to think about how the knowledge of fishermen becomes temporarily part of that forensic process such as indicating how fast bodies would move about but it also helped me to broaden the notion of forensics in more radical ways from an objectified practice that is aimed at producing scientific evidence bringing evidence to the forum as ayal wiseman has it to forensics as an art of paying attention as a possible mode of tracing of facing and accounting for the for the refugee crisis exploring forensic as an art of paying attention i am inspired by the belgian philosopher and chemist is the best tangier paying attention is precisely an art she says because it is a matter of learning a matter of cultivating and tasting as to distinguish and differentiate paying attention creates obligations and it does so for example for fishermen you cannot look away you have to turn around and help says slakha dinum sharik who's actually a cousin as i found out so making ourselves pay attention creates an obligation an obligation to imagine to check and to trace paying attention is therefore a way of establishing connections between things that we are in the habit of keeping separate connections between here and there between us and them between now and then but it was not just the fisherman who brought me to the south of tunisia also litter waste did the material traces of the so-called refugee crisis and obviously i was not the only one who was drawn to the who's drawn by the heaps of orange life vests backpacks golden foil blankets wood wreckage and what have you traces of the dramas at europe's border and as i arrived in zarzis on my first field trip i mean i know the place very well but this was my first official professional field trip in june 2016. i was to found out that litter played a pivotal role in the care for the dead bodies that wash ashore in one of the conversation i had with dr manji slim was the head of the red crescent in the south of tunisia and was responsible for the management of dead bodies he said the cemetery of migrants and zarzis is a problem the city owns that slot of land but it's actually a landfill so that means you cannot dig a proper grave so the bodies that have been washing ashore since the late 90s have not been left there on the beaches they were obviously not litter they were buried but as i visited the burial site several times i came to realize that the difference between litter and human remains is not that stable and this is to give you this is how the cemeteries sometimes look like this is the old provisional cemetery and not the one that you mentioned the shalini that we are currently working on and it's getting there and it's going to be beautiful um yes so it sometimes it looks like this in june 2017 i was there when a young boy six or seven years old was buried after the cursory medical examination and after having waited for hours for for permission from the prosecutor to bury it was already in the middle of the night we then drove outside the city behind the police and an excavator in fact one that is used during the day to clean up the dirt in the city yusuf the driver of the excavator dug the grave and provided us with light as to bury the boy but when i returned to zarzis in november that year and this was after a period of heavy rain i visited the cemetery again but i was baffled that i could not recognize any structure in the in it graves was washed were washed away and litter had come to the surface as you can see here and as i walked around champs dean who buries many of these bodies asked me to walk behind him as not to step on the graves he knows the sight by heart at a certain moment i paused and i was staring at some bones expecting them to have belonged to an animal i moved about and finally i dared to ask and i said is that him the young boy sure sam sadine those are probably his ribs now this was obviously a painful moment human remains as little but what if we were to take litter as human remains seriously litter as human remains what if we would attend to litter forensically forensics in the sense that i propose here as an art of paying attention and it is at this point that i would like to introduce you to my friend massen and i would like you to first meet him via documentary that was dedicated to him and to his work through um by um al jazeera it was called the garbage artist of zarzis and it was broadcast in 2017 november 2017. let's see if the technology won't fail us the first three minutes no no you have to start earlier no youtube yes can you go back to the beginning please to the beginning yes very beginning is [Music] um um [Music] m [Music] from um do you want to continue the presentation of the movie um well let's leave it there it's okay yes i'll continue with the presentation thank you so during my field trips i kept hearing about this mother mostly in pejorative wordings as someone who was somewhat odd if not weird but when i finally finally found out where he lived and visited him in june 217 we talked for three hours in a row to return the next morning at five and go for a long walk where i would learn about his work of collecting stuff and about the landscape that he engages and since then we kept talking and walking along the coast of zarzis and musson would teach me about the ancient and contemporary history of the people and the place and what you see here is um are pictures of our most recent walk four weeks ago i will come back to this uh at very end of my of my talk but here i would like to point out what you see the boat there in the left is actually one of the boats that has been used by migrants and that was drifted to the shore and you can see that it has um there's impact before side probably they were stopped by coast guards that took people off the boat and also you don't find any traces of the people so they left orderly so to speak after this impact rammed against the boat yeah so you did not have a chance to hear more about muslim but massen is a retired postman he jokes about himself saying that he used to collect and distribute letters and now he collects and distributes litter but in fact he ended up being a manager of one of the main post offices in zarzis he's a respected amateur archaeologist has told himself the english and german language because he loves books and since decades he's member of the board of the city library he's a blogger and a poet and precisely because he speaks his mind on a wide wide range of societal issues and because he did so already under the ben ali regime he became enemy number one for the local authorities did you ever go to jail i asked him i wish i had he answered that might have been much easier i was talked by the authorities provoked on a weekly basis at least three times a week they would come after me i kept record of the numbers of files that i got while driving 65 fines pure provocation enemy number one i ask well you know in 1996 i made lots of noise especially because of the graveyard of the haraga and haraga is an arabic word for those who burn it's a complicated word that i've just written something about but let's say that it means undocumented migrants so people were buried he says but no one was allowed to know where and i made a point that they were dumped on a waste yard the city council didn't like that and although i have a responsibility towards my family i never stopped denouncing and protesting it is my obligation to take notice it is my obligation to speak when he was about 40 years old as you just heard martin had started to walk the beaches and to collect traces of movements he collected anything that washes ashore and would at a certain point use it for artistic configurations initially his work focused on what he calls an ecological action movement so protesting the ecological problems but confronted with dead bodies already in the 90s he had started to collect the traces of migrants that did not make it to europe alive i'm going to show you just a couple at random things that he did he works a lot with shoes in this kind of circles this is one of the most recent it's not a good picture but it's actually quite good [Music] and this one i like best with the chicken um for more than a decade mustang had been collected endless numbers of shoes and slippers clothes and accessories and used these in his artistic work these configurations as he calls him are to be found in his yard and in the small museum that he had initiated but also in the landscape around zarzis and they are always open for others to change them as they feel he actively invites visitors to touch and engage with the material yet walking around in his yard a museum is overwhelming because he had collected so much stuff i asked him one day do you have any hierarchy you know things that are more more important to you than others and he looked at me and his answer came promptly these are all sea bottles message messages in bottles they carry messages and lives in them i need to take them very seriously all of them not all the time but sometimes to be sure mustang is not simply interested in the intrinsic qualities of these objects he takes them out of their context juxtaposes them displace them in such a way as to unfold where they came from or to provoke radically different stories and other engagements so here one placed in the landscape but i wanted to share this one with you this for example is a dna double helix in the middle of the landscape in a supratu indicating there's life here even if it looks very deadly to you his configurations would occasionally draw attention to the objects in other cases it is the landscape that comes into moves into view a landscape that people would otherwise pass without noticing this landscape is also one that is threatened by environmental problems that have to do with a company that is nearby i will say something briefly about it so these are sometimes amazing landscapes such as the subra typically coastal landscape uh here the subra is um a saline flat so where you go where you can mine for salt and i cannot but give you apparent thesis about colonial extraction about that so imagine i've shown you the slide with the graveyard next to the grave there's a big hill which is obviously a hill made of litter and waste that has been dumped there if you climb up the hill you see this this is salt that is that collect collected by the french company cortisol cortisol has been there during colonial era so since the 20th century they have been mining for salt extracting it and even today and even after the revolution they still buy the salt for five tunisian cents for one tonne so one thousand kilogram the salt is put on these trucks every single day you see them pass by to the port of zarzis and transported to europe very easily and not far from there many small boats departs with people on them that try to reach europe which have much more difficulties to arrive so to speak um and this is interesting to see how colonial legacies are still are actually no legacies but current practice so back to mohsen one huge artwork that mustang has made in the 90s consists of multiple configurations in his yard and are made through plastic bottles that are filled with water and you see them here on the roof the whole place was filled with these water i filled maybe 100 000 bottles i feel them to answer to the thirst and greed for water of my ancestors a response to the lack of water that they experienced and had to face and so this is his yard that bare yard i mean he has a family um with amazing configurations i mean i was not there this was before my time in the in the early 90s but i've seen pictures so he filled these bottles with water but he was surprised by what the bottles did while representing the need this is what i mean by what they did while these bottles represented the need for and the pivotal role of water of his ancestors of our ancestors the bottles did something surprising as well they collected and gave back sunlight so every morning the yard that was filled with this bottle became an orchestra of sunlight bottles that's come to be a common part of massen's repertoire and you see them all over in the landscapes such as here and while protesting the environmental problems the plastics and other litter causes the bottles become the very device actually to appreciate the environment perhaps then one can read instances of waste allegorically as an art of meaning something other and more that what than what is being said now since he has been collecting so many sea bottles and not just plastic ones but huge number of glass bottles mustang had decided to quantify them he found out that the bottles that wash ashore in zarzis in this was in the early 2000s display a variety of 700 to 800 different bottles and studying the labels and caps of these bottles he concluded that 85 percent of them must have come from italy and the rest mostly from greece now his expertise on sea bottle is often called upon by designers filmers sorcerers and here you see him at one of these conferences on bottles and when he told me about his typical dynamic and engaged way about about this in a typical dynamic and engaged way i said to him you know you talk about being angry about moving fast and hard but everything you do is actually slow slow movements and meticulous labor so mustang looked at me then in silence with a faint smile on his face i want to end here but not quite i would like to end with a short film two minutes or so about the the most recent walk that we uh made along the shore um to be sure we found lots of stuff there clothes and i mean apart from the first boat that you saw lots of clothing and bottles or what have you and but also this boat and this boats i found dramatic uh particularly dramatic because the crime is so visible of what has happened to these people and a couple of days before we went there we were actually borrowing a number of people seven people in the new cemetery um it might have been they they could have been on this boat so here you see that it is not the coast guard that have taken the people out of the boat because their stuff is still there lots of it actually i'm not a professional filmer so this was just in the moment i had to do something so it's um so here you see it there was apparently a hole in the boat it was quickly repaired just by putting a bit of wood against it and imagine people get on the boat mostly at night they don't know where they get into and from the outside it all looks very fine you will see it nicely covered up here very smooth but no chance i think we can leave it there thank you thank you thank you very much i think it's uh i think through your presentation you just do not just talk about the art of paying attention because you're also doing it right you're also showing what it means to pay attention and um i think in in your presentation and i've also been reading uh some of the work that fits with this like the article that you did with sarah casartelli on on a forensic identification of death migrants in italy i think it becomes clearer and clearer what your project is about and [Music] for me it it somehow a concept that i've always been fascinated by and this is the concept of sub-alternity now i'm i'm in general and politics and and you you you want to understand if you're in general in politics why it is that in politics some people do not seem to matter some people do not seem to have a voice and if you look at a scholarship on gender and politics then sub-alternity and then it's somehow a bit perverted counterpart of empowerment um is is is a crucial concept concept of trying to understand why it is that certain people do not seem to be a person in politics certain people do not seem to be a political subject and because they are not a political subject they cannot have a voice you can only have a voice if you are a political subject if you're recognized as belonging to a particular political community and in all this work on on sub-alternity on it's of course about real people somewhere that are alive somewhere a live human being somewhere so in in that sense it would seem that once you lose your life you lose any possibility for being a political subject but in the case of these droned migrants and i think there must be other categories of people that are in that category it seems that also retrospectively they seem to have lost their subjectivity altogether not only are they not a political subject now they're dead but also they're denied any political subjectivity ever in their life they're erased somehow from uh from the world in that in that sense so i think when i um read for instance i think in in the the article with sarah casartelli you elaborate on that and say if you if you start this work of identifying these dead migrants these bodies become people they belong they become individuals that belong to a community rather than objects or waste or litter to be disposed of and in that sense it is a chance to become a political subject even when their life has been taken from them through all the political dynamics uh around them and um so it's through this material forensic work but also maybe through this artistic work that museum is doing that these drunk people become part again of a collective of human beings so i i i'm wondering if what you're working on is um is also about this about not just and i in that sense is um a very positive type of work that you're doing no it it is of course it's it's atrocity right what happens and to be confronted with these atrocities but what you're doing is you restore something in in a way you um you you make these people again part of a collective of of human beings and in that sense also you you point at a way of maybe maybe we shouldn't just be concerned about who gets a voice which is like what and who gets agency which is what the sub alternative literature would would make us focus on but maybe we should also think more about the art of listening the art of paying attention because without anyone who's listening or anyone who's paying attention there can be no voice they can be um they can be no agency in a political sense so i think i want to thank you because i got this like insight from from listening uh to you and and reading uh this work that maybe this focus on the active part of people should just speak and and who's who can speak and who cannot speak but also people should listen and people should pay attention and why i think this is so important is i think because it shifts away um from the duties and obligations of the people who have no voice through the people who do have a voice and who are in the position that they could listen that they could pay attention and and i think for that i think theoretically there is a wealth of things still to be explored in this so that's i think what i like a lot about your work so so thanks so much um uh making for these comments uh this for a very very powerful presentation thank you very much we can open the floor right here to questions if i don't see anyone right away maybe i could begin with one with to just start the discussion going and then i'll pick up questions from the chat as well so we can i can read with um sarah whoever has posed a question to you who's not in the room um what i was thinking about listening to you was in a sense um a double erasure if you like because these are people who may have had good reason not to want to be identified so they themselves have tried to obliterate the traces of their identity they may have documents which are forged they may have no documents at all they may have thrown away i mean in your case of course none of them are alive to be able to uh tell you that tale but the erasure which is happening afterwards is already on top of an erasure of their identity which they have very good reason not to want to be recognized and then of course you don't quite know or maybe the question to you is yes you do want to trace them give them a face a biography you want that they be buried also because their family is uh to be notified is interested in the variant and not only however that but for the family this is also a question of maybe not wanting to reveal that a family member is missing or has crossed or tried to cross in this particular fashion through and then you have all the people who are involved in these crossings who are making a living out of helping a migrants cross they have an equal interest in erasing all the work that they are doing so in a sense there are multiple layers of erasures here on and then you are trying to reconstruct the traces not only of a person but a journey the belonging to a community the the um um on top of the other issues which are happening so i was hearing you i was just struck by the fact of just how much has to be excavated and that's it and this was my so this was sort of my my ethical question political question was if it should be as excavated and how much there is to be excavated so that's so just just sharing with you some thoughts listening to this very very powerful and moving presentation yeah thank you celine thank you also mika for your comments um uh no i shouldn't shouldn't do them together um i think there are so many um layers to this question and also so many practices that speak to it so yes there are people that of course do not travel with their own identity papers for very good reasons other people that hide them or burn them there are people that burn their fingers or what have you to not be identified here in europe because that's what we do we register people that way um and and should should we then be uh undoing that or uh identifying uh people um i think that's that's a difficult question to answer in uh in general what what i started out saying is that i find it uh remarkable that europe is really not interested in helping out in doing this identification work we do this you know the moment the airplane crashes or whatever happens for european citizens no millions and even millions of people of money is invested in order to identify the tiny little bones that we find and for good reasons and um so that's that's a sharp contrast with what is happening in the in the mediterranean and also despite i mean we are getting organized in europe so the southern european countries um greece uh spain italy malta uh and and even without from the netherlands icmp which is an organization that um well was grounded in to identify the 8 000 men that were massacred uh so they are willing to organize but there is no money there is no funding there is no political interest in doing this so that is already something that we needed to account with this with this work if you identification is immensely difficult in this case first of all most bodies have disappeared they went to this bottom of the sea so they are not there that you can't find them there's only a tiny fraction that would be found either in europe or in northern africa um once you find the bodies and there's it's you can you can't do your conventional forensic technologies it's really novel kind of work that needs to be developed in in doing that now the international community committee for for the red cross the icrc is now beginning to collect dna to compare uh to bodies that are found here in in certain places in africa people are hesitant to do so you don't know whether the dna will end up maybe your relative is alive and they're just after that person you don't know there's no reason to trust european organizations and so it's it's uh it is hard and there are different levels of complexities now i must say that i'm where we stand now with a forensic work and i was recounting about fingerprints you know you can't do fingerprints because the epidermis gets loose in the sea but there are novel technologies being developed to get underneath not on the epidermis but underneath it and that might be a way of identifying people so we're looking for new technologies and at the same time uh i think this work that i um although i'm you know this is what we are doing in zarzis we are developing a kind of forensic mode of working in order for if relatives in the future are interested in figuring out um what happened to their they could have a possibility to go there but most work is really it's it's a political project it is a political project to make us here in europe understand uh that this is not really about individuals this is a huge political problem that we are having that is we have inherited for uh centuries and that we are reproducing it is about that i think mostly for me at least a yeah for you very important presentation and i wanted actually to ask you to if you could speak more or to elaborate on your point about framing this situation as the crisis versus chronic situation and i wanted to ask about the political dimension of this framing as a crisis because it occurred to me that uh these practices of dehumanization of basically burying people in the landslides how they fit into this framing of the crisis or how they become possible due to the framing of the crisis and at the same time like it struck me that actually that this artistic work how it provides a very alternative way of recovering this situation from framing it as a crisis as something exceptional because there is both exceptional and something that you want also to overcome and to forget as something that can be left behind and how this artistic work somehow recovers this recovers these traces and resist to this framing but if you could speak more about this crisis versus chronic situation framing thank you i think i think it is very problematic to speak of a crisis when it comes to migration and and there is no such reason no reason to do so of course there are certain peaks as we have seen with war in syria or the effects of the arab revolutions uh but i mean the moment you attend to what is happening you see that this is a long something of a long duration that something that is has been happening ongoing i mean in africa i mean millions and millions of people adrift [Music] so to the crisis here comes also it's often a humanitarian crisis right it's also to make it a situation that is surprising to us and now we have to act on this situation as if there was no weapons you know brought to this country there was no war that was somehow helped to uh enroll and and what have you so it is i i'd like to move away from this thinking of crisis to provide to make space to think about the situation differently to to look into um relations that have been cut and relations that have been established as i said about the kind of ongoing extractions that are going on the kind of environmental problems that are produced by companies such as shell making life impossible uh polluting water for people going with dutch companies going to tunisia growing the best tomatoes ever taking the water away from uh farmers local farmers so they can't farm anymore so of course you take the boats that's better this is the way of making a living for your family so i mean there's it's it is actually the moment you dig into it it is so clear sometimes very causal on the relations of often not that cause obviously but uh i hope this is a bit happening here thank you yeah it's it's a question for clarification actually because if if in saying it's not a crisis it's a chronic situation um i i would think that the way you now explain it you say you would say it's not a crisis it's actually an ongoing system this is an ongoing system of extraction and exploitation and that that produces this uh this migration so what situation is but this is because i'm into social complexity theory so if i think something is a system then i think okay i know how to i know how to conceptualize it then because the system is something that is ongoing and it has a tendency to reproduce itself all the time in different forms and a crisis is something that disrupts a system right so what you're saying is this is not a disruption of anything right for europe maybe temporarily but definitely not for the people at stake thank you so much it was very powerful i would be happy to to go back to your first third introductory point on forensic as a way to pay attention because actually you talked a lot about art so i'm interested to know so who is listening who is paying attention to you as a as a researcher and a scholar and who is paying attention to morsin as an artist and how you have collaborated and how this collaboration can also help you to have more people paying attention so how concretely so who is listening to mussin because apparently the the conference you mentioned was him as an expert on bottles was not him as an artist which is quite different so he was still somehow an expert for shell-like people let's say like that so who is paying attention what his strategy to be listening to to have his heard uh his voice heard and beyond his voice having the destiny of these migrants hurt too and and how do you frame your own collaboration beyond writing a book so how does it render each of you more powerful somehow um so i think in [Music] as i said in the beginning and also maybe it is changing a little bit in zarzis as well because many things have happened in the last decade uh so first from being this weird guy and interesting interesting you know these bottles because everybody my mother ah that's more than i know the bottles you know other than that you didn't know i think he has become he there's many school kids that would come to the museum and would come to the yard to look at uh at his work and he would introduce sometimes within in ecology the other times in migration issues or in archaeology i mean he's he's mind-blowing what he knows there and he has all sorts of stuff around that he can talk about so locally more and more people are becoming interested and also in our collaboration i must say i also try to help out you know think of strategies or pay for the bus for children to come and these kind of things um internationally because zarzis became somehow known the the the the fish fisherman um a couple of years ago one um the head of the zarzis fisher man and ecological organization was imprisoned in italy because he was accused of smuggling and of helping smugglers helping migrants to get to italy so this became also a moment of visibility again they have been protesting against uh neo-nazis that were uh um in in the sea a couple of years ago so they became visible and mustang is also in close collaboration with the fisherman because he's interested in ecological questions and our local fishermen are also interested in that because they're seeing the devastating situation that is happening in the med in that area so this is a way another way i mean as i work on race and forensics and talk to my forensic friends and uh you know advise the ministry of justice on issues that deal with hardcore forensic i'm also working on on this issue so i also try to intervene in the policy area like what can we do how can we mobilize now with the cemetery in tunisia um i try to make this also an international thing like trying to have an international companies to help with equipment you know it's very expensive to have a morgue and to have a place where you can do this kind of studying the the bodies and and rescuing the the zampos and all these things so that is one aspect of that work and together with mustang i think it's a journey how we how we work together so it's this the conversation have started we became friends almost instantly because we really there's a click and and now with the book i'm contemplating when to bring he's not here for reason but i'm contemplating how to bring him to the netherlands and to see how we can do something uh together there but what the future will bring is really is really open how how we can develop that i don't have um a set framework for that but it's on different this is what i want to say we do different kinds of things he does different kinds of things and i do different kinds of things and yeah there's no one single way of going about it before i pass on the word may i just read a question from someone who's sent us one so this question says could you elaborate on the broader theoretical or methodological implications of the concept of paying attention and its potential for the practice of anthropology or even for social science at large yes thank you for this question i think this is important this is also to let you know that while um we tend to think of ourselves as social scientists as you know we're very critical we're very smart vis-a-vis the natural sciences you know they don't know not they don't know what they're doing and they don't understand you know they of course they're good at what they do but they don't see the implications and i like actually you know having been also in the lab myself and all these things to take these fields seriously and it is actually this is what i learned from forensics i mean forensics is really a meticulous kind of work it's a tedious kind of work it is work about materiality you have to do with the the the um the spore the traces that you find there you have to think of ways you have to think back and forward what has happened in the past and how can i figure something about it for the future in a courtroom so that you have to so you work with materiality and you work with temporalities and you work with different kinds of scenarios there is it seems like a very linear practice and it is of course and it has to be orderly and this protocol that standardized at the same time in that work you have to do lots of tinkering with with material so it's the material is what you go by and and i like this so what it gives me is to be to stay true and close to the materialities and to listen to that as it were as mika said and at the same time to to think of materials as complex things it is it doesn't have a unified identity a singular identity but precisely because it can be connected to so many things a bottle that is a bottle of water that represents a particular anxiety about not having water that all of the sudden gives light and and tremendous light beautiful light you know it does this it is these things depending on what the relation is right it's relation to the body it feeds you it's important it's relation to the sun it becomes something else so this kind of complexities of matter i think is important in uh in this work and um and the temporality aspects because i think we have to think of europe as a colonial power to put it very bluntly uh i mean i i it it is horrendous what is happening uh in the so-called global south and uh these are not instances these are not incidents this is a structural matter and um if we want to think about the globe and our future together then we have to take that seriously that history that is also a present thank you so much for this presentation i'm really touched and and impressed and they don't realize that there is a very intense dialogue going on between anthropology and art but i would like to ask you two questions and they are also related to certain doubts and certain dangers that may appear here and the first question would be about what would you say i mean this is something that makes me a bit anxious and i'm not sure but if somebody is experienced in the field of contemporary art he may discover that there is certain tradition of certain continuity in paying attention into the materiality of the illegal migrants or refugees and they are you know works like uh brinkassures that were designed in order to help mexico migrants to cross the border to the u.s so they were specially produced in china and they were equipped with a map with a torch with a compass and it was something that later on entered galleria like tate modern and started to work as an object of art so it was somehow extracted from the real right from the real suffering from the real political uh context i remember well the work that was presented recently it was a kind of minotaur miniaturized construction of wired fences that were placed in the you know the spanish clubs in morocco and and also it was also something that was uh created in order to convey certain meaning but i still wonder this is not the first moment when i uh first time and i post this question myself uh what has happened when this way of paying contention which is related to kind of artistic installation because even when we cite this this work in in this original war that was produced by a friend that it somehow entered the gallery world and the interplay between these certain traditions you you may also even even taking in uh into account this this work that was you know produced by very famous richard long who who built a kind of circle from the wooden pieces and pieces brought to the beach by the waves from the sea and later on it was criticized by rashid arena pakistani a british artist also who did the same arctic circle it was in the north of the of the us in the alaska it was made with the empty bottles trying to pay attention to the problem with no unemployment drink alcoholism etc and the real situation of the of the indigenous people over there so not that not the problem is not the wooden pieces but so the first my question would be aren't you afraid that we can put this work into this larger role or continuation or frame of artistic work which is placing that in the place that we probably wouldn't like to to you know to to to see there because this is really the sense of destruction of the of the of the real life of the suffering and the second the second question would be about ethnography and ethnographic methods and do you believe that this object this study on materiality is enough and should it be somehow supplemented or complemented by by the by the stories by the by the real stories i mean uh the the the stories which are related for instance to this you know desperate motivation and the kind of uh increasing of the motivation that that i i already read your your your article on haraga so i realized realizable doesn't mean to to burn the the boulders but i also remember very very very beautiful article published in etna's journal which was about people trying to enter this spanish and class and to cross these wired fences so they were saying also that they are that they are motivated they they are creating kind of meetings and they feel that they can eat the fences that that was exactly what they say i mean they want that they are able to eat defenses so they were using the idiom bank and as i remember rising this bank this kind of vital force was the crucial point there so another to put it in other words i mean this is also the story about certain journey that is undertaken that it leads off very often across africa i mean that those people migrating to the coast of the mediterranean they also very often start their journey in western africa in central africa the first sea that they have to cross is actually the desert the sahara and they call this also the sea and this rising bank is very important so to my just to to finish this this this quite quite uh long story and question do you believe that we can that that we can use materiality without adding or complementing and bringing about a lot of the stories that are somehow hidden and attached to these pieces to this to this you know remains that you found yeah thank you thomas um try to think about how to be a little bit brief in my answers of course i think um it matters where art is to be found whether it is you know in found outside in a landscape or in a museum or in zarzis or in here in vienna or i've seen even a piece of art of mustang in a museum in tunis it didn't work at all so so of course arts can lose its um its quality or gain a novel quality the moment you transport it from a place to the other and i think i as much as i love art and artistic expressions i for the purpose of this work that we are doing um [Music] i really try to think with what mason is doing rather than take it as it is and to think and juxtapose it indeed with other stories and to think what what can it elicit how can it help us understand what is going on how can it help us convey a story a different kind of story i think what what we want to do is really tell a different kind of story beyond migration studies beyond refugee studies beyond uh navy and this brings me to your other point beyond a kind of human-centered approach either of european policy human-centeredness on the humanitarian or the uh border protection uh the our vulnerable border so to speak but to to de-center the human stories a little bit not to forget about them at all i mean of course they're important and of course we have to find also ways of um writing them up as anthropologists of course we are in the business of writing right so it's uh i think figuring out how does the story fits the um the normative question that i want to address the political intervention that i want to make um and the way to decenter human agency because you know uh subjectivity uh citizenship you know how can we think about relational citizenship how can we think about indeed even dead people as you know provoking talking to us in certain ways that we can understand what citizenship is about so and in that sense i i find it important to divert our focus from humans and the stories and representations of what has happened to materialities in this in this particular problem that we are facing so also thank you ahmad for making us pay attention i think this is the most immediate result of your work and doesn't need any further explanations and that's that's the goal you achieve immediately by by doing this presentation i would want to go back to what charlini mentioned in your introduction in the beginning to your very interesting earlier research that was not did not come so much into your presentation now this also very interesting title of race face idea yeah i mean it's um it's it's very nice wording mika was also known for very nice wordings but this is also one so you have a certain tradition here for the race phase idea because it's so it so nicely depicts the idea of identifying somebody individually but also as the carrier of a let's say collectivity that is embodied in an individual and this brings me to shalini's earlier question i mean is it even needed to identify somebody individually i mean it could also be a very important goal of your research to identify for example where people come from i mean if you if you achieve that goal it's not even needed to say this is the individual xyz but it could be i mean people are coming from the north of nigeria why do they come from the north of nigeria or whatever i mean so i just would want to know if this i mean if this would not be a a very like tangible and immediate result of your research if without even even if you were able to identify somebody individually this might not even be needed but it would be a much more important message to find out where people are coming from and then might be asked why they are coming from that special region and maybe a second short question that relates to the forensic part that alessandra already also asked about um when you speak when you spoke about it you also two or three times you mentioned the word evidence and i mean this is a classical juridical term you collect evidence because you will have some investigation a court case obviously in this in this in the these many cases of the people drowning we we don't have anything like that nevertheless you're collecting evidence and my question would be i mean obviously you're addressing addressing this to the public to the public audience of wherever i mean in all the states and especially i guess for the europeans but once again also the collecting evidence as such once again could be a very important message absolutely also for example in order to just tell us how many people drown because i think we are not aware of it and it is forgotten i mean there's estimates and there's initiatives that take care of that and that tell us about it but i mean all what we are doing is just i mean it's it's very very foggy area and i think in that sense also you have a very immediate result of this work yeah thank you sometimes it is uh quite straightforward to find out where people came from if there are survivals so then they would tell you well we were all from mali or niger or nigeria but if there are no survivors it becomes really very difficult and it is actually that's that's where the problems start so if if you have no fingerprints if there are no proper documentations i mean often the case bodies are not really very very human-like the way you find them so um and by dna it doesn't go because we have a lack of dna material from africa obviously so we have quite big large databases we know a lot about european genetics but we know quite little from africa and this is where the problem starts and if you want to identify a person you have to compare to a population but it has to be the proper population if you compare them you can say wow fair chance that this person comes from that particular area in africa this is how it uh could start but we are not there yet so it is now really about collecting and there is the ambivalence you know what to do the surveillance on the one hand and doing something good on the other so to speak so um that is this is why i was enthusiastic about the dermatological the the fingerprints because that could be a way around this hugely expensive dna uh problem um now the fact is that more and more family members are actually looking for their relatives and specifically a large group is the syrian refugees uh because many of them are in europe and many of them have lost family members along the way it happened also to me that the dutch police came over and said well we have this family and they're daughter went missing she was with her father he lost her when the ship capsized and she might he thinks he's dead her mother thinks it was in august 2014 near the libyan tunisian border they probably watch the show i think i we even have pictures of this group of youngsters there so can we do something um so this is a real question that is with us that we will have to look into in jersey so you see this is done really about individuation rather than a collective um statement but we know that this boat there were only syrians on this boat that's left from libya to to europe [Music] yeah so it depends it depends and it's both equally complicated unless you have eyewitnesses or or document documents that can lead you and give you answers about where people came from now the evidence bit is is important so the the fact that bodies if they are found they have to be looked at by a medical professional is also to determine is this a crime or did somebody simply drown um so this is the moment where you have to make this uh this decision um now in in italy for example they are capable of doing more research for example to find out a person that arrived dead in a boat uh died because of their head hydration or because of uh intoxication because they're in the belly of the boat and lots of so there are different ways that people can die and it's also important to actually collect this evidence to know actually what crimes are happening such as the boat that i showed you here you know what kind of crime is this that and i think this is important politically not of course it's important to document this bureaucratically but also politically to know how did these people die and how are we implicated in this situation i think it clings it sounds a bit dramatic but i really mean what i say so actually i think we've um exhausted the set of questions here i don't see anything here on the chat at the moment um so and we've exhausted actually our time but i think this is a discussion we will continue we are going to be with us the whole month so there is uh still time for further conversation with you on a topic which you've got us all paying attention to not only the deaths of migrants on european shores but the kind of historical traces that we may want to think about and in much larger structural terms as uh maker pointed out down to the individualization of biographies through particular regions as ludgar was saying so i think you've you've opened up a whole set of really really interesting questions for us to pursue thank you very very much um for uh the presentation and thank you once again and to the flex foundation we owe you a deep debt of [Applause] [Music] gratitude you

Channel: IWMVienna

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Id: lnUgnwuc94U

Length: 83min 35sec (5015 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021