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2036-461X
16300
28
en
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
The Mapping Journey Project, by Bouchra Khalili
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
17
Reviews / Comptes rendus
2017-03-01
2021-09-06
2017-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Simona Arillotta
2017/03/01
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
2036-461X
28
en
The Mapping Journey Project, by Bouchra Khalili
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16300/17185
17
The Mapping Journey Project, by Bouchra Khalili
MoMA, 9 April – 10 October 2016, New York




   Between 2008 and 2011, the French Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili took a
trip through European cities that are considered the most important migrants’
‘transit’ centers. There, she meets the protagonists of The Mapping Journey
Project, a cartographic work in which the routes individuated by the panoptical
system for monitoring and militarizing the borders are counterposed to the human
routes, which are impossible to determine by means of loxodromics and grids.
   Exhibited at the MoMA as part of Citizens and Border, a series of discrete
projects at the museum that are related to works in the collection, Khalili’s work
offers a critical perspective on histories of migration, territory and displacement.
   Bouchra Khalili’s installation consists of eight videos, shown in the display
room on eight different screens. Each video starts by showing a map on which, a
few seconds later, appears a hand that begins drawing the route of the illegal trip
to Europe. The voiceover of the protagonist explains his/ her itinerary. Lines,
arrows, dots: the route is a sequence of stops and way backs, rejections, detentions
and mistreatments. It reminds the spectator of a global game of goose, where
every step back means starting all over again. Months or years of vicissitudes
before reaching one of those ‘crossing’ cities where Khalili meets and films
the protagonists of her stories. Those cities are places turned by the migration
flow’s containment and regulation policies into a limbo where there’s no chance
to leave, and where nobody wants to stay. The eight migrants speak English,
French, Arabic, Italian, and they talk about the violence suffered, someone even
mentions friends who lost their lives during these journeys. Khalili chooses to
keep their identity secret: the most recognizable trait of each person, which
would be the face, is counterposed to the refugees’ non-visibility in Khalili’s
work. We see no suffering bodies, nor iconographies of pain that are so often
shared through mainstream media. The map is the central element of the project,
whose deep reason is undermined by the creation of alternative mapping forms.
   The spatial organization, and its scientific dissection by means of cartographic
system, allowed an increasingly precise, geometric reproduction of the nations’
boundaries. The demarcation of the nations’ geographic profile through
increasingly defined borders leads to a huge puzzle effect, where each nation is
a tile, and part of a bigger picture — in this case, the entire surface of the earth.
The mapping of the national territory has as its consequence, what Benedict
                                              Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 28, Spring 2017
                                  Reviews/Comptes-rendus


Anderson defines as ‘logo-map’: referring to the use of the map for identifying
the colonies, and specifically to the practice of painting each colony according to
its imperial identity. Anderson highlights how this peculiar representation had as
its effect the identification of the national territory, and therefore citizens’ feeling
of belonging.1 Although Anderson refers above all to the importance that the
logo-map gave to the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, it is a fact that the nations’
defined and colorful shape continues molding the collective consciousness (the
Italian boot, for example). The map, like a patchwork and symbolic shape of the
hegemonic global order, is still an elemental learning tool used for geographical
recognition, and is used as such by Khalili in her work. The map becomes the
nation’s symbolic transposition, representing a geography determined in turn by
other documents: the borders become a distinction mark between the inside and
the outside, a binary logic which generates a feeling of community and belonging.
The idea of foreigner is produced by the juridical and documental regime.
   Protagonists’ crossing into different territories shows how the idea of borders
loses its references. If, on the one hand, we assist at the militarization and fortification
of national borders to guarantee their governmentality — as it happened in Hungary,
Serbia and in France, where in Calais they built a wall to prevent the passage to the
United Kingdom. Then, on the other hand, we can see how the border moves beyond
the national and continental limit. Borders are not institutional places anymore, but
they are something moving, constantly reshaped by military strategies: the Italian
border, for example, does not correspond with the Sicilian coasts, but with the
military patrol of the Canal of Sicily. Boundaries are embodied by the soldiers placed
at the Israeli checkpoints, in the red zones, or special security zones, for monitoring
the occupied territories,2 as video #3 shows: a Palestinian man draws on the map the
route he took to reach his girlfriend who was in the Israeli territory.
   Bouchra Khalili’s work represents a counter-map tracing migrants’ resistance
against control and containment policies which deny them any chance of free
movement. The invention of new roads, that do not exist on any maps, generates
an alternative geography: the one of human experiences and clandestine existence.
However, the closing of the borders, as well as their proliferation, involves a
continuous re-definition of the migrant routes, which become increasingly
dangerous. Migrants are repeatedly exposed to many risks: prison, torture, death.
To face one of the biggest humanitarian emergency of our time, the tragedy of
immigration, Khalili’s work suggests that the closure of the borders is not a safe
choice, at least not for the migrants. To guarantee the safe crossing, it is necessary
to open up humanitarian corridors. This is the only solution to avoid the death of
thousands of migrants during their journeys to a better life.

                   [Simona Arillotta, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan]


1
  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1983).
2
  See Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007).

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