


Against the backdrop of the media practices of the ‘summer of migration’ in 2015, this article asks if and how cell phone videos recorded by migrants and refugees and circulated via social media channels have not only the capability to change and extend modes of representation. It analyses harraga videos — short cell phone clips of the clandestine passage across the Mediterranean, uploaded on YouTube — by focusing on the act of capture. With reference to Helen Grace and Rey Chow, the essay argues that despite the relative invisibility of the videos, they are not just simple documents, but rather constitute the present of the harraga, and thereby form (local) publics. In this light, they can be understood as a political (media) practice, which intervenes in the visibilities and visualizations of the necropolitical European border regime.



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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
‘Actions of the Eyes of the Fleeing’? Reflections on the In/Visibility of Harraga Videos
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2017-03-01
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2017-03-01
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Cinéma & Cie
Maja Figge
2017/03/01
University for the Arts, Berlin
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‘Actions of the Eyes of the Fleeing’? Reflections on the In/Visibility of Harraga Videos
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17
‘Actions of the Eyes of the Fleeing’?
Reflections on the In/Visibility of Harraga Videos
Maja Figge, University for the Arts, Berlin




Abstract

     Against the backdrop of the media practices of the ‘summer of migration’ in
     2015, this article asks if and how cell phone videos recorded by migrants and
     refugees and circulated via social media channels have not only the capability to
     change and extend modes of representation. It analyses harraga videos — short
     cell phone clips of the clandestine passage across the Mediterranean, uploaded
     on YouTube — by focusing on the act of capture. With reference to Helen Grace
     and Rey Chow, the essay argues that despite the relative invisibility of the videos,
     they are not just simple documents, but rather constitute the present of the
     harraga, and thereby form (local) publics. In this light, they can be understood as
     a political (media) practice, which intervenes in the visibilities and visualizations
     of the necropolitical European border regime.

   Images ‘format’ migration.1 The European border regime and the discursive
construction of mobility produces a net of constantly repeated and circulated
images, in which migration is configured as a humanitarian crisis and as danger
to the integrity of Europe.2 Neither Europe’s external (and internal) borders nor
the migrants themselves appear to be perceptible outside of these mediatized
discourses. Rather, media and the representations they produce, as well as the
data they generate have to be understood as constitutive for the appearance of
the refugee or the migrant at the European border.

        The techniques of visualization at the borders function not only as policing
    instances for control and regulation of a prior body of migration, but they play a
    crucial role in locating, fixating and bringing ‘migration as attraction’ of otherness as
    yet to be negotiated factor on a social display.3


1
  See Brigitta Kuster, ‘Die Grenze Filmen’, in Turbulente Ränder. Neue Perspektiven auf Migration
an den Grenzen Europas, ed. by TRANSIT MIGRATION Forschungsgruppe (Bielefeld: transcript
Verlag, 2007), pp. 193–207 (p. 193) (my translation). See also Nanna Heidenreich, ‘Editorial’, in
Frauen und Film, 67 (special issue Migration, 2016), 5–10 (p. 6).
2
  See Heidrun Friese, Grenzen der Gastfreundschaft. Bootsflüchtlinge von Lampedusa und die
Europäische Frage (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2014), p. 184.
3
  Kuster, p. 193 (my translation).

                                                    Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 28, Spring 2017
                                            Maja Figge


    During the short ‘summer of migration’ in 20154 the display of migration
as attraction of otherness was raised to another level: the vast distribution of
media images — whether press coverage or images distributed by NGOs or
‘first hand’ accounts recorded with mobile phones by the refugees — made the
‘crisis of the European border regime’5 perceptible. As a result, it intervened in
the modes of representation of migration. In addition to the ‘TV migrant’ who
‘appears at the geographical border to “Fortress Europe” as a body, which is put
on display as male, over-visualized, captured by the apparatus of repression, as
passive object of caritative treatment, who is a victim of his own uncontrolled
and fatal endeavor’,6 the recordings capturing the border crossings from Turkey
to Greece, the ‘March of Hope’7 along the so called ‘Balkan route’, or the arrival
in Vienna and Munich, made the refugees also visible as agents of the social and
political movement that is migration. However, as soon as the summer was over
and the EU-Turkey Refugee agreement had been passed, the migration routes
changed from the Eastern Aegean back to the far more dangerous Western
passage from Northern Africa to Lampedusa. With them the rhetoric and the
images in the media changed too: putting forth representations of refugees as
victims — and criminals; again, they were seen as crossing the border illegally
and thus becoming clandestini — illegalized.8
    Against this backdrop, it is important to ask how the digital (social) media
practices such as ‘citizen journalism’ in the context of the Arab revolutions
or more generally ‘shadow media’ which Patricia Spyer has defined as ‘the
tangential, mobile infrastructure of a counter-discourse to conventional national
and international broadcasting’9 change and extend the modes of representation.
In this essay, I focus on cell phone videos recorded and circulated by migrants
and refugees and ask whether these practices can be understood in terms of
what Tom Holert has called ‘actions of the eyes of the fleeing’.10 In his critique


4
   Bernd Kasparek and Marc Speer, ‘Of Hope: Hungary and the long summer of migration’, in
bordermonitoring.eu politiken, praktiken, ereignisse an den grenzen europas, 9 September 2015,
<http://bordermonitoring.eu/ungarn/2015/09/of-hope-en/> [accessed 15 December 2016].
5
   Vassilis S. Tsianos and Bernd Kasparek, ‘Zur Krise des europäischen Grenzregimes: eine
regimetheoretische Annäherung’, Widersprüche, 138 (December 2015), 8–22. Tsianos and
Kasparek (p. 9) write: ‘Here, it has to be said clearly that it is less a refugee crisis then a crisis
of Schengen, a crisis of the European institutions as well as a crisis of the European project in
general. For it has to be stated that neither the current intensity of migration nor the now obviously
appearing disturbances in the fabric of the European Union have been foreshadowed for a long
time. It is a crisis with announcement, in which Europe fails.’
6
   Kuster, p. 193 (my translation). The flipside of victimization is criminalization: not only the
illegalization of the border crossing, but likewise the demonizing images of the danger of
‘threatening flows of refugees’ or ‘dark masses’ produce the migrants as criminals.
7
  Kasparek and Speer.
8
  But also discursively the figure of the refugee can quickly turn into the ‘bogus’ or the ‘could-be-
terrorist’. Sara Ahmed, ‘Affective Economies’, Social Text, 22.2 (Summer 2004), 117–39.
9
  Patricia Spyer, quoted in Helen Grace: ‘Monuments and the Face of Time: Distortions of Scale
and Asynchrony in Postcolonial Hong Kong’, Postcolonial Studies, 10.4 (2007), 467–83 (p. 472).
10
   Tom Holert, Regieren im Bildraum (Berlin: b_books Verlag, 2008), p. 207 (my translation).

22
                               ‘Actions of the Eyes of the Fleeing’?


of ‘visual humanitarianism’, Holert takes up Giorgio Agamben’s call for
a reconsideration of the figure of the refugee in view of the ‘imploring eyes’
marketed by humanitarian organizations:

         The refugee must be considered for what he is: nothing less than a limit concept
     that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation-state, from
     the birth-nation to the man-citizen link, and that thereby makes it possible to clear
     the way for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service of a politics in which
     bare life is no longer separated and excepted, either in the state order or in the figure
     of human rights.11

   For Holert, ‘[o]nly, if the “refugee” is understood as “limit concept”, fleeing
from the categories of nation states and human rights’,12 the renewal of categories
becomes possible. His main concerns are the consequences this renewal of
categories could have for the order of images:

         The image of the ‘imploring eyes’ would be replaced by the actions of the eyes of
     the fleeing. Instead of considering suffering as universal, the images would become
     instruments of a political practice with focus on the flight from the image evoking
     empathy and serving as biopolitical regulative. The symbolism of the refugee, as
     produced by the humanitarian order, would vanish in favour of a deterriatorializing-
     deterritorialized visible.13

   Holert himself is wary of his hypothesis in terms of its separation of the figure
of the refugee from the human rights discourse. Nonetheless, I want to think
about his evocation of the ‘actions of eyes of the fleeing’ by looking at images
produced by migrants themselves, which seem to challenge the visibility of the
European border regime by the very act of capturing. In order to do so I will focus
on the practices of harragas — those who burn (their papers) — in their filming
of the passage across the Mediterranean with their cell phones and disseminating
these videos via upload on YouTube or other social media channels. Rather than
analyzing clips in detail in terms of image, narration or motif,14 I am interested in
the acts of capturing and uploading the passage as a form of public appearance


11
   Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998), p. 134.
12
   Holert, p. 207 (my translation).
13
   Ibidem.
14
   For a formal analysis of the Harraga clips, see Heidrun Friese, ‘Y’al babour, y’a mon amour. Raï-
Rap und undokumentierte Mobilität’, in Deutscher Gangsta-Rap. Sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche
Beiträge zu einem Pop-Phänomen, ed. by Marc Dietrich and Martin Seeliger (Bielefeld: transcript
Verlag, 2012), pp. 231–84 (pp. 261–68). For a discussion of the Harraga phenomenon see also Réda
Bensmaia, ‘La vraie vie est ailleurs: The Harragas phenomenon in African novels and films’, keynote
lecture held at the conference ‘North Africa at the Crossroads: Culture, Identities, and the Politics
of Change’, Institute for African Studies, Carlton University, Ottawa, 4–5 April, 2012, online video
recording: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDjhgwXNv2U> [accessed 15 December 2016]

                                                                                                  23
                                           Maja Figge


in which the present (reality) is enacted and performed.15 How do these practices
intervene in the border regime and its modes of visualization, visibility and
disappearance?


Harragas

   Harga in arabic means ‘to burn’, and describes the passage across the
Mediterranean from Northern Africa to Europe.16 Harragas are the ones —
mostly young Maghrebian men — who burn with the desire for change and who
burn their traces — mostly their papers — and get into small boats to follow
their claims for dignity and freedom.17 The anthropologist Heidrun Friese reads
the burning of the papers as a ‘sign of dissent’, a cancellation of consensus, a
‘vote with the feet’: a ‘daily plebiscite against the political, social and economic
situation in the Maghreb countries’.18 By leaving their homes and getting into the
boats, ‘the harragas give proof to the dimension of the social imaginary and the
individual claim for happiness and a good life, dignity, recognition, participation
and justice, claims, which also moved, justified politically and constituted the
Tunisian revolution.’19
   Fire also marks the beginning of the revolution in Tunisia, in the form of the
spark which set off the series of political events called the Arab Spring. On 17
December 2010, the street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire with
gasoline after he was evicted by the police. He died only a few days later from
the burn injuries. Between 17 December 2010 and 12 March 2013, 160 young
Tunisians ended their lives the same way. ‘Better burn, than be humiliated’:20
this is how the young harragas Friese Tunisia and on Lampedusa explain the
motivations behind this praxis. I would suggest, then, that the practices of the
harragas are linked to that of self-immolation. Instead of setting themselves
on fire, the harragas burn their papers and risk their lives to escape the ‘social
death they face in their home countries. By entering the boats and crossing


15
   Rey Chow, ‘Postcolonial Visibilities: Questions inspired by Deleuze’s method’, in Entanglements,
or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), pp.
151–68 (p. 167). An earlier version was published in Deleuze and the Postcolonial, ed. by Simone
Bignall and Paul Patton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 6–77.
16
   Nanna Heidenreich, V/Erkennungsdienste, das Kino und die Perspektive der Migration (Bielefeld:
transcript Verlag, 2015), pp. 12–13.
17
   Friese, Grenzen der Gastfreundschaft, p. 15. During the 2011 North African revolutions, the
numbers of harragas on Lampedusa increased: after the fall of the Libyan Regime more than 60.000
harragas arrived, fleeing from the NATO airstrikes. When in September 2011 the refugees set
the camp on fire, demanding to be brought to the mainland, the state of emergency was officially
declared in October 2011. Lampedusa turned into an Open-Air-TV-Studio, which broadcasted the
images of the state of emergency on the island around the world. Friese, p. 18.
18
   Ivi, p. 204 (my translation).
19
   Ibidem (my translation).
20
   Ivi, p. 203 (my translation).

24
                               ‘Actions of the Eyes of the Fleeing’?


the Mediterranean Sea, they not only exercise their right to mobility, but they
also violate the border and thus the European immigration law. Thus the
harragas not only a constitute a form of biopolitical control and regulation,
‘one that does not have to sentence a life, or a set of lives, to death in order to
let them die’, but as Judith Butler argues, after Achille Mbembe,21 they can also
be understood as ‘necropolitical’.22 Under such conditions ‘the lines between
resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are
blurred.’23 Harga, then comes into view as a form of protest against ‘the status
of living dead’24 — be it in the countries of origin or within the frame of the
European migration regime.
   But how can we understand the digital capturing of the harga? Within the
last ten to fifteen years, an expansive corpus of different forms and formats has
emerged documenting or fictionalizing the passage across the Mediterranean.
These films range from feature films, such as (among others) Harragas (Merzak
Allouache, 2009) and Harraga Blues (Moussa Haddad, 2013), to documentaries
such as Tanger, le rêve des brûleurs (Leila Kitani, 2002) or Barcelone ou la mort
(Idrissa Guiro, 2007)25 through news reports and music videos to the kind of films
that which I focus on in this essay: short videos, recorded with mobile devices
by the harragas themselves, uploaded and disseminated on YouTube or other
social media platforms. On YouTube however, when typing in ‘harraga’ one also
finds countless compilations of different forms of (news) footage (photographs,
maps, TV features, caricatures, etc.), as well as a multitude of commercial and
non-commercial news programmes reporting about failed crossings, ship wrecks
and deaths, sea rescues, personal appeals that warn against the passages, music
videos, excerpts or full documentaries, trailers and complete movies such as the
ones mentioned above. The cell phone videos that capture the passage constitute
only a small part of this sprawling image production and distribution of this
movement of migration.26 The short clips stand out because as records of the
supposedly successful passage — possibly uploaded after the event27 — they add
an alternative narrative to the stories of shipwrecks, rescue and death.




21
   Achille Mbembe: ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15.1 (2003), 11–40 (p. 40).
22
   Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2013), p. 167. Athena Athanasiou explains: ‘As a global modality of power that subjects
populations to conditions that ascribe them the status of living dead, “necropolitics” determines
who can be wasted and who cannot; it distinguishes those who are disposable from those who are
not; and it does so in both spectacular and quotidian ways, insistently and insinuatingly.’ (Butler
and Athanasiou, p. 20).
23
   Mbembe, p. 40.
24
   Ibidem, [emphasis in the original].
25
    See also the crime novel by Spanish author Antonio Lozano, Harraga (Barcelona: Zoele
Ediciones, 2002).
26
   See Heidenreich, p. 316.
27
   Whether they manage to enter the European Union or not remains uncertain.

                                                                                                  25
                                              Maja Figge


Cell Phone Videos

   What do the harraga videos show? The clips, which are often only a few minutes
long, mostly present shaky and rather ephemeral images in low resolution,
featuring the sea, the boat, and its passengers. The first clip I saw opens with
a shot of the sea, the camera follows a dolphin accompanying the boat;28 the
images are dubbed with music. Other videos focus on the sunset or the rising
sun above the sea, or they (only) show the (mostly) young men in the boat. Very
often, in a circling movement the camera captures the faces of the young men
one after the other while they speak, shout, joke, sing or laugh into the camera.
Being recognizable as cell phone videos they communicate the relation to the
person recording, documenting.29
   Not only through the act of burning but also by filming on a large scale using
cell phones and then uploading the videos on YouTube or other social media
channels, the practices of the harragas are related to the Arabic revolutions. Like
the videos produced in the North African revolutions the videos are characterized
by their amateurishness.30 Due to the characteristics of the recording device
being ‘small, ubiquitous and not primarily constructed for filming and its
content can be made available online anytime’, the cell phone video becomes
a means of protest (or resistance).31 For Krautkrämer, as soon as the videos are
uploaded to the Internet and thereby circulated they become ‘reality-witnessing
documentations’,32 whether they subvert the censorship of state run media
institutions as in the Arab revolutions, or as in the case of the harragas answer to
the in/visibility of their ‘undocumented mobility’. This undocumented mobility
is constructed in the frame of visualizations of the European border regime in
which migration appears as a movement which needs to be controlled — the
countless images of boats, victims of ship wrecks, and the individuals rescued by
the coast guards in any format.33
   Krautkrämer discusses the ‘reality witnessing’ function of cell phone videos in
the wider context of recent cell phone documentaries; he argues that they can
be understood as attempts to ‘rescue’ the documents from the original context
(such as YouTube) in which their only status is that of the document. In his view
only when the material is worked with in the way that the question is no longer
only what we see but how, does it becomes discursive. This line of argument



28
   <http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5lzb0_harraga_videogames> [last accessed 25 November
2016].
29
   Florian Krautkrämer stresses the gesture of filming with a cell phone. Florian Krautkrämer, ‘Revolution
uploaded. Un/Sichtbares im Handy-Dokumentarfilm’, in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 10 (2014),
13–26 (p. 116).
30
   Ivi, p. 115.
31
   Ivi, p. 116.
32
   Ibidem.
33
   See Heidenreich, p. 17; Friese, Grenzen der Gastfreundschaft, p. 185.

26
                               ‘Actions of the Eyes of the Fleeing’?


entails that the cell phone videos not only stay mute but also invisible.34 Although
Krautkrämer — like the works he discusses, such as among others Rabih Mroué’s
Pixelated Revolution (2012) or Hito Steyerl’s Abstract (2012) — problematizes
the reframing of the ‘found footage’ material which he nevertheless does regard
as political, while at the same time reducing it to a mere document.35 But, how
can we understand the observed invisibility of the material — such as the harraga
clips — differently? I will take up some suggestions by Helen Grace and Rey
Chow in order to think about the in/visibility not only of the videos, but of the
harga itself.


Capture and In/Visibility

   The low resolution of the videos links them to other ‘poor images’36 on YouTube
and the circuits they create. Even more, the low resolution ‘look’, as Helen Grace
argues ‘allows us to say that the visual is problematized in this sphere, since every
subject is abstracted by the rate of compression, and every clip becomes a kind
of quotation, either by being sourced from previously existing material and re-
presented or, in the case of original material, simply by being uploaded into a
stream of pre-existing material.37 Nevertheless YouTube becomes an ‘archive of


34
   Krautkrämer, pp. 123–24.
35
   My critique is not directed against the aesthetic potential of cell phone documentaries, but I
would like to point out an example in which the author of the found footage does not remain
anonymous but becomes one of the protagonists of the film. Havarie (Philip Scheffner, 2016) is
based on a 3:36 minutes long YouTube video made by Terry Diamond, a tourist from Northern
Ireland, being on a cruise in the Mediterranean. The clip shows in close distance an inflatable
dinghy in distress. In Havarie the found footage is stretched to 90 minutes — the time it took
for the coast guards to arrive. The soundtrack tells the stories of the people entangled in this
situation. The film is a critical reflexion of the image production of undocumented mobility and
puts the question of in/visibility at the centre: during the editing process, Scheffner realized that
he couldn’t stick to his concept of making an essay film due to the images of migration and flight
circulating at that time. Instead, he decided ‘by condensing sound and disassociating it from the
image to create a space of perception that allows the viewers to experience their own position
without ever losing sight of the subject at hand.’
(<https://www.berlinale.de/en/archiv/jahresarchive/2016/02_programm_2016/02_
Filmdatenblatt_2016_201605829.php#tab=video25> [accessed 15 December 2016].) Havarie is
a film about ‘visual contact’ in a relational space, but even more so it makes us think — about
the position from where we look and the political, economic, social conditions that determine it
(Avery F. Gordon, ‘Keeping Visual Contact: Philip Scheffner’s HAVARIE (2015)’, February 2016,
<http://havarie.pong-berlin.de/en/9/avery-f-gordon> [accessed 15 December 2016]). ‘I am not in
that boat’ says Scheffner in an interview. See Matthias Dell, Simon Rothöhler‚ ‘“Ich bin nicht in
dem Boot”. Interview mit Philip Scheffner’, in der Freitag, 6 (2016), 11 February 2016 <https://
www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/ich-bin-nicht-in-dem-boot> [accessed 15 December 2016].
36
   ‘The poor image thus constructs anonymous global networks just as it creates a shared history.
It builds alliances as it travels, provokes translation or mistranslation, and creates new publics and
debates.’ Hito Steyerl, ‘In defense of the poor image’, e-flux journal, 10 (2009), <http://www.e-
flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/> [accessed 25 November 2016].
37
   Grace, Postcolonial Studies, p. 470.

                                                                                                   27
                                           Maja Figge


the present’38 because it contains and publishes material which otherwise would
have been hidden, invisible ‘in unedited form’ — such as the harraga videos.
Grace argues that the importance of the visual is reduced because the act of
capture instead of the image is significant ‘as a register of affective engagement
in a moment of expressiveness having deep local significance, but which
subsequently fails to be communicative, beyond the instant of production, for
anyone other than those who have been involved.’39 Thus, what is important is
not so much video as document but the act of capture — the production of the
image. Its relative non-communicability suggests new relations between public
and private spaces.40 In her article Grace refers to local protest movements in
postcolonial Hong Kong, but it seems the situation described in the above quote
can also be applied to the (local) protest of the harragas at the European border.
  What are the consequences of foregrounding the act of capture? First, as I
have already argued, the production of the image communicates the presence of
the image-maker in a particular event. Second, it also records an ‘act of presence’
which is rather performative than a memorialization — mostly associated with
analogue photography seen as ‘a memorial act’, which ‘assumes the reality of the
moment recorded’.41

        Rather, it is the act of ‘capture’ which brings the present into existence, because
     ubiquitous imagemaking belongs to a world in which the real in itself is so thoroughly
     mediated that it does not exist without at the same time producing an image of itself
     and it is this image which secures the lived reality in which the image-maker is situated.
     This does not mean that the performative and the memorial are opposed; rather it
     indicates that memory is also secured via the image and, in its embodied form, is
     brought forth in action and performance.42

   Rey Chow takes up this thought in her essay on Postcolonial Visibilities (2012),
in which she argues for the productivity of Deleuze’s method of reading Foucault’s
works on visibility and confinement. Grace’s observations of the media practices
of a local political movement in Hong Kong serves her as an example to show
what a postcolonial thinking about visibilities beyond the notion that ‘visibility
is a trap’43 or the battle for the ‘commodified media frame’44 could entail. For


38
   Ibidem.
39
   Ibidem.
40
   Ibidem.
41
   Ivi, p. 473.
42
   Ibidem.
43
   Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979),
p. 200. However, in his reading of Foucault Deleuze concludes, ‘that nothing in Foucault is
really closed off’. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),
p. 43. Chow suggests that Deleuze’s method might be useful to reconceptualize the notion of
postcolonial visibilities which she then demonstrates by discussing Grace’s findings. See Rey Chow,
‘Postcolonial Visibilities. Questions inspired by Deleuze’s method’, pp. 151–168.
44
   Chow, p. 160.

28
                              ‘Actions of the Eyes of the Fleeing’?


Chow, Grace’s observations are illuminating because they point to the fact that
with the digital devices and techniques capture now ‘emerges as the primary
action and event’ as it brings the present into existence. Chow stresses Grace’s
interest in the ‘ephemeral coextensiveness of the image and the present’ that is
brought forth by the act of capture because for her Grace’s observation displaces
the notion of visibility:

        Grace’s observations sidestep the large, systemic connotations of visibility-as-
     confinement that Foucault delineates. Instead, she inserts visibilities into the mundane
     motions and stoppages of the everyday, replete with the risk (and the certainty) that
     many of them will remain unnoticed and unseen in the dense strata of online material,
     except by those with a vested interest in local happenings.45

   The relative invisibility of the videos does not prevent them from becoming
possibly ‘news footage’46 or a local and particular public. Rather they have to be
understood as part of the ‘incessant flow’47 of images in which the distinction
between significant and insignificant moments is blurred. This state of ‘visibilities
in flux’48 seems to challenge not only the notion of visibility in terms of surveillance
and control but also the claims for visibility in the battles for the media frame.
In this line of thought, the harraga videos no longer simply are documents of the
harga, but acts of capture in which the notion of confinement and freedom is
blurred. The harragas themselves use their cell phones to record or rather track
their movements at the European borders — despite the media surveillance via
satellites and other observation devices. Thereby they constitute the present of
their passage; this present which in Chow’s reading of Grace is a ‘collective but
diffused assemblage of enunciation’49 and can only be perceived and recognized
when mediated and circulated.
   This understanding resonates with Judith Butler’s remarks on what it means
to appear in contemporary politics, because in order to appear, ‘the body must
enter the visual and audible field.’50 Butler links the bodily action in the street as
well as the bodily action of filming with the cell phone and analyses both as ‘ways
of exercising rights, and that jointly they bring a space of appearance into being
and secure its transposability.’51 For her, the ‘conjuncture of street and media
constitutes a very contemporary version of the public sphere.’52 In the case of the
harraga videos, I believe that in crossing the Mediterranean in small boats and


45
   Ivi, p. 167.
46
   Ibidem.
47
   Ibidem.
48
   Ibidem.
49
   Ibidem.
50
   Judith Butler, Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2015), p. 86.
51
   Ivi, p. 93.
52
   Ivi, p. 94.

                                                                                            29
                                        Maja Figge


capturing the passage with the cell phone they exercise their right to mobility as
well as their ‘right to have rights’.53 It is only by uploading that they constitute a
public — probably local and also limited in terms of views or clicks — bringing
the moving and speaking or singing bodies in the boats to appearance — against
the necropolitical European border regime.
   I started my essay by introducing Tom Holert’s considerations regarding
the reconceptualization of the figure of the refugee. Concerned with the
consequences of this categorical renewal for the order of images of migration,
he suggests that ‘[t]he image of the “imploring eyes” would be replaced by the
actions of the eyes of the fleeing. […] the images would become instruments of
a political practice with focus on the flight from the image evoking empathy and
serving as biopolitical regulative.’54 My argument is that the harraga videos are
not simply instruments of a political practice (or mere documents). Rather the
manifold acts of capturing and uploading constitute them as a political practice
which intervenes in the order of images of migration, by becoming parts of the
‘visibilities in flux’. Then, the ‘actions of the eyes of the fleeing’ might not be the
result of the categorical renewal but that thing that could set it in motion.




53
   Hannah Arendt, Imperialism: Part Two of The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] (New York:
Harcourt and Brace Jovanovich, 1968), p. 177.
54
   Holert, p. 207 (my translation).

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