[-empyre-] Alter-mapping, alter-passage, and altering-art

Tue Feb 16 02:52:40 AEDT 2016

Hi all,

thanks a lot for the invitation. This is my first time here and it is a
great pleasure to be part of this conversation.

I'll introduce myself in terms of 'where I come from', highlighting some
considerations that might be relevant for the discussion. I am, like Ana,
from Uruguay, a country that – before being a country – was inhabited by
semi-nomadic people (the Charrúa people).
Then the territory was under the 'Corona Española' empire, until Uruguayan
'independence' around 1825. The new country was then populated mainly by
immigrants, and Charrúa people were (almost all) killed. As many other
Uruguayans, I am the granddaughter of a Spanish immigrant who crossed the
ocean escaping from poverty and a reality of wars and conflicts.
I am now living in London, with an MA scholarship. I don't consider myself
an immigrant though, I have no plans to stay in the North, and I did not
come here looking for a better present or a better future.

I would like to mention the experience lived in 'my country' in relation to
the actual 'immigrant crises'. Uruguay hosted, in 2014, 42 Syrian refugees
(not a big number, but not that bad for a 3 million people country). One
year later, the refugees declared they wanted to leave, protesting in front
of the president's offices, saying that their salaries were too low and
that they would rather go back to Syria or Lebanon than staying there (
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uruguay-refugees-idUSKCN0R72C720150907).
Uruguayan people felt betrayed, most of us manage to live with a very
similar amount of money, or sometimes less –Uruguay is not that 'boutique
country' that some people like to think, after all. Last week's discussion
brought up this idea about classes and immigration, and this might be an
interesting example to analyse. What are the actual reasons to decide to be
an immigrant? If a relatively peaceful and 'welcoming' country like Uruguay
is not enough for a refugee to stay, then, how should we read this? How
should the economic aspects be considered in this case?

Looking forward to some exchange during the week

Love

Pau

2016-02-15 12:38 GMT+00:00 Ricardo Dominguez <rrdominguez at ucsd.edu>:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hola Tod at s,
>
> Yes, it is important to consider the ways that nomadic flows have always
> been feared and also consider necessary for
> whatever empire happen to be establishing border controls. These nomadic
> flow have also always established multiple
> forms of agency and imperceptible routes under, over, slant, and
> other-wise gestures that disable and re-enable
> this flows. Militant researchers have followed immigrants and refugees who
> use the detention centers, Facebook, twitter, word of mouth
> to establish counter-selves, counter-economies, and counter-routes that
> flow outside of the normative patterns of "rights and representation" that
> states offer as border-lures and limits-even after reaching the centers of
> empire.
>
> Here is a potential transborder mapping gesture that might be considered
> as taking back gesture:
>
> http://bordermonitoring.eu/
>
> Also, alternative-communication networks that are more over-ground-than
> under-ground:
>
> http://www.refugeeradionetwork.net/
>
> And yes, I do believe that art can illuminate and open alter-passages, as
> in the poetry that Amy Sara Carroll wrote for
> the Transborder Immigrant Tool-that the right wing in the U.S. stated
> "dissolved the U.S. border."
>
> Abrazos,
> Ricardo
>
>
>
>
>
> On 2/14/16 12:31 PM, Irina Contreras wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
>
> Ana, your comment on the last thread also reminded me of the ways that
> surveillance can be taken back in a sense...
>
> Certainly within the sense of the way that Trans Immigrant Border Tool was
> brought up but I am also wondering about some of the things brought up
> around "criminality" and the way that it is used to justify encampments,
> policies, policing etc seems relevant. For example, even thinking about the
> ways things can be used/taken back also made me think of discussions around
> El Chapo and the tunnel system recently used for him to escape.
>
> Coming back around to some comments you made earlier too Christina around
> the importance of narratives/storytelling as a part of this dialogue. I
> have to admit I wrestle a bit with the poetry aspect of the project so I
> would love to hear more about how you see it.
>
> On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 11:24 AM, Christina McPhee < <naxsmash at mac.com>
> naxsmash at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Yes, yes, Ricardo!  The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been a huge
>> inspiration to me— by indirect modes through the network and personally in
>> conversation with your colleague and mutual friend Brett Stalbaum.
>>
>> With the double negative line of thought (anti-anti-utopianism) in mind,
>> our works could slipstream through- elude and elide through what appear to
>> be ’the new normal’ or  ‘ordinary’ times— ‘ . A gorgeous example of poetry
>> (AS)
>> literally tool for survival :
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *Climb or walk in the morning. Rest midday beneath creosote bush or
>> mesquite, insulating yourself from the superheated  ground. Remember-even
>> the sidewinder hovercrafts, the bulk of its body above the scalding sand as
>> it leaves its trademark J-shaped tracks across the desert dunes.*
>>
>> from The *Transborder Immigrant Tool* book  "The Desert Survival Series/
>> La Serie De Sobrevivencia Del Desierto.”
>>
>>
>> <http://jacket2.org/commentary/water-poetry-and-transborder-immigrant-tool>
>> http://jacket2.org/commentary/water-poetry-and-transborder-immigrant-tool
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Feb 12, 2016, at 2:16 PM, Ricardo Dominguez <rrdominguez at ucsd.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Hola Tod at s y Christina,
>>
>> The question of aesthetics routing around the either/or, and/both, and
>> perhaps a neither/nor sensibilities, are extremely important in
>> thinking otherwise-of allowing an anti-anti-utopianism to have breath and
>> voice-in the uncanny valley of borders across the arcs of the world.
>> Borders have become sites of geo-trauma sties that continue to echo deeply
>> in the somatic architecture of bodies at the deepest levels over the last
>> few centuries, from slave-economies to the Irish to Jews to braceros-it is
>> seems to be a past-forward culture of the most negative kind. And the
>> question of foregrounding the way that a critical aesthetics, of a
>> non-relational-relationality that is not us or them, can give us an
>> alter-affects is for me extremely important and the art gesture you have
>> linked us to Christina has to be done. (And our own gestures as Electronic
>> Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g lab have attempted to connect to these
>> practices directly and indirectly:
>>
>> *The Transborder Immigrant Tool/La herramienta transfronteriza para
>> inmigrantes: http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=744
>> <http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=744> ). *Abrazos, Ricardo
>>
>> On 2/11/16 4:50 PM, Christina McPhee wrote:
>>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Speaking of movement violence and femicide strongly brings to mind the artist and writer Etel Adnan’s sublime novel (1973), “Sitt Marie Rose.” Set during the Lebanese Civil War and based on a true story, Sitt Marie Rose follows the movements and ultimate execution of a person whose affiliations across enemy lines conflicts with her filiations (family, brothers, sisters, religious identification).  Marie Rose refuses to give up teaching Palestinian children in a refugee camp
>> across enemy lines from her home base in Christian Lebanon.
>>
>> "How can one resist without deploying the language of opposition, struggle, and enmity that forms the conceptual arsenal of war? How can one form a collective “we” of resistance without creating an opposite “them”? To what extent does literature resist the very discourse of war that distinguishes between friend and enemy camps? Beyond the mere refusal of war, Sitt Marie Rose points to ways of conceiving conflict otherwise, not as a struggle of arms but as a contest for speech. The novel gestures toward a forum where the political can emerge other than in the warring binaries of friendship and enmity—a trap it eludes, I will argue, via narrative representation, “ writes Olivia C. Harrison in an essay on the novel (Resistances of Literature: Strategies of Narrative Affiliation in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, Post-Colonial Text, vol 5, no. 1 2009)
>>
>> This is why I am continuing to bring up examples of migration-trauma literature and story telling as a thread in this discussion. Its political power is not to be underestimated.
>>
>>
>> Christina
>>
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitt_Marie_Rose
>> http://christinamcphee.net
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Ricardo notes, "As I like to say to my students: "Do we fear the walking dead, because they are dead or because they are walking?" We fear those that move differently”.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Feb 11, 2016, at 3:41 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com> <muratnn at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Ricardo,
>>
>> Does kinopolitics concern itself only with human flows, what about the flow of jobs across state lines where the workers stay static? Both are political/economic migrations where the concept of nation states is weakened. But do, or don't, these different migrations have different ethical consequences?
>>
>> Ciao,
>> Murat
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 10:14 AM, Ricardo Dominguez <rrdominguez at ucsd.edu> <rrdominguez at ucsd.edu> wrote:
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Hola Tod at s,
>>
>> The question of blocking human flows and the expanding human flows, of escape routes and fencing in becomes  (a question of kinopolitics). Kinopolitics is the theory and analysis of social motion: the politics of movement. Instead of understanding societies as
>> static systems, we look at regimes of movement both perceptible and imperceptible. Social motions that can be framed as flows, junctions,
>> and circulations-floods, flux, and vector. Immigrants and refugees are figures of movement, nomadic, that no-longer bound to rights and representation of static states-the figure who walks and unmakes the aesthetics and romance of the nation or the union. As I like to say to my students: "Do we fear the walking dead, because they are dead or because they are walking?" We fear those that move differently".
>>
>> This creates the constant need to stop, block, detain, or eliminate sectors of these walking communities.
>>
>> One of the outcomes is that containment zones like Juarez, Mexico, or spaces along political Equator, or Free Trade Zones, and Pipeline cultures is the segmentation of people as disposable or available for disposable. And more often than not women are the first to be the targets: http://www.texasobserver.org/femicide-in-juarez-is-not-a-myth/ and also worth reading is the book the Femicide Machine:https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/Borders/TheFemicideMachine.pdf
>>
>> Two text that have found helpful kinopolitics are:
>>
>> Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century:https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/Borders/Escape.pdf
>>
>> and The Figure of the Migrant https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/Borders/TheMigrant.pdf
>>
>> Abrazos,
>> Ricardo
>>
>>
>>
>> On 2/10/16 7:27 PM, Irina Contreras wrote:
>>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>>
>> Johannes,
>>
>> I appreciate the request to think about sexual violence as it pertains to the encampments. For myself, I think of sexual and gender based violences as direct results of colonial regime. Following people like Nicole Guidotti, I think of the way she speaks of utterances as a way to discuss how scholars "gloss over" certain facts pertaining to sexualized/gendered/racialized/classed information when producing text. That's obviously done within so many kinds of work, research, activism and scholarly texts.
>>
>> At the same time, I am intrigued ( I think that's the word I will use for the moment) at how we are literally surfing all over the globe at the moment in the conversation. This seems much to do with the topic at hand, right? Talking about borders and immigration etc is certainly not a tight container by all means. Not that we want it to be....
>>
>> Lastly, I just wanted to add in regards to the number of companies mentioned, it seems important to mention the various pipelines being constructed. I think Genie and Dow Jones both have a role in that. Which to further play connect the dots also made me think of Christina's mention of the Cherokee peoples and while a different group but a number of the pipelines throughout Canada mirroring the sexual assaults and femicide throughout these lands. So I guess again in thinking about the limits or lack of limits to thinking about borders i.e. when people are forcibly created into being borderless is where I am left...
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 2:17 PM, Babak Fakhamzadeh <babak.fakhamzadeh at gmail.com> <babak.fakhamzadeh at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> As far as I'm aware, there are no private drivers/actors in the Syria
>> conflict. That is, the Syrian, US, Saudi Arabian, Turkish, Iranian and
>> several Gulf states are the only ones paying to keep the conflict
>> going. So, if the Haliburtons, or hardware providers, would be taxed
>> in this context, all that would happen would, essentially, be each
>> state taxing themselves.
>>
>> Sure, Halliburton and its successors have made huge profits,
>> particularly in Iraq, but at a risk. Not so much for corporate
>> Halliburton, but for the individual employees. There is no way but to
>> have big risks come with big rewards, meaning that it's only
>> economically expected for the Haliburtons of this world to make lots
>> of money.
>>
>> I'm not defending either conflicts in Iraq or Syria from any angle.
>> I'm only pointing out that 'solving' the problem is not that
>> straightforward. Probably the main problem is not the Haliburtons or
>> pick your favourite oil companies of this world, who simply,
>> primarily, react to opportunity (see Cockburn's The Rise of the
>> Islamic State, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25407471-the-rise-of-islamic-state),
>> it's the political desire for influence and control.
>> In the 'west', 'the people' might be able to have some meaningful
>> influence on steering the course of their nations, in many other
>> countries, this is not the case, leaving warmongering autocrats to do
>> pretty much whatever they want, and for-profits to step in to the
>> voids they create.
>>
>> Hence, the conflict in Syria and its consequences.
>>
>> But, how did the Gulf countries manage to not take in any Syrian
>> refugees and get away with it?
>> --
>> Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamzadeh at gmail.com | http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com <http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/>
>>
>> Ask me for my PGP public key to send me encrypted email.
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 8:54 PM, Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com> <agora158 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>> Johannes it was not only me, the great majority of the Latinamerican refugees coming to Europe during the 70:s are today relatively integrated in Europe and many of them come back to South America and are today's ministers in different socialdemocrats governments.
>> I speak mostly of Chile and Uruguay.
>> My point is the clue to absorb refugees was to give them tools to be selfsufficient to teach them skills necessary to manage the challenges of a new life, languages, therapy for them surviving jail and torture, family reunification for them separated from their relatives needing support, a profession or a work.
>> The problem is the numbers today all the resources of wealthy welfare countries as Germany Norway Sweden Danmark Finland and France are strained to give huge amounts of refugees their bare needs it means shelter medical support and food it's not enough to grant the refugees a worthy life it's only a patch for their most immediate needs.
>> But countries as Greece or Hungary or Serbia are not able to deal with the huge waves of refugees pouring every day from warzones.
>> As I wrote in an ocassion here the only ones having huge profits from the wars are the manufacturers of weapons and the owners of parallel armies as Blackwater Haliburton Dupont and many others. A way to deal with the mounting cost of fleeing refugees should be apply big taxes to all companies dealing with weapons.
>> Let them pay the consequences of their unethical warmongery.
>> Ana
>>
>> Den 10 feb 2016 18:19 skrev "Johannes Birringer" <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>:
>>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>>
>> what is "kinopolitics"?
>>
>> just wondering as the term (referring to kino/cinema)? was not clear to me when I think Ricardo
>> first brought it up...
>> unless there is a link here to what, I think, P.Sloterdijk once wrote as a critique
>> "political kinetics”, kinetic movement of 20th century politics of speed and displacement,
>> war machines, etc
>> -  i think in 1989 he even spoke of a kinetic inferno, but I doubt that at the time he
>> could anticipate the current refugee migrations and displacements.
>>
>> thanks for your reply Isabelle, I need more time to reflect, as I think
>> my question was really how the "camp" has been used as a metaphor or
>> as a symbolic system by philosophers and that is not what we were
>> talking about, and my confusion came from a sense of the romantic resistance
>> I felt you proposed vis à vis governmental / central policy of containment (which is not in fact
>> quite true for Germany,  I surmise, where regional administrations and help organizations
>> in a distributed federal landscape need to take often their own initiatives for help?); Calais
>> and Grande-Synthe at Dunkerque may be dfferent in that respect, but i visited facilties in the
>> Saarland near a town where I grew up and managing help was done through a mix of
>> local institutions and mini-NGOs, and provisions for sleep, care, food were not
>> left to "Jungle" self administration and done cooperatively, I wonder actually what
>> forms of governance or camp community formation happen under the circumstances,
>> and how different the anticipations or hopes may be (and Ana, your case back then surely
>> sounds as if you had been very fortunate).
>>
>> I wonder whether there would be room here to also look at some of the incidents of
>> sexual violence, puportedly committed by immigrant asylum seekers staying in Germany
>> at the time of the criminal offenses (Cologne e.g.), and how such violence has been used
>> now against migrants by the instrumentalizing political wings and press.
>>
>>
>> regards
>> Johannes Birringer
>> dap-lab
>>
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