ART-PRESENTATION:The Mapping Journey Project
Bouchra Khalili was born in Casablanca, she works with photography and prints, most of her pieces in the past few years have been videos, many of which experiment with different ways of narrating the journeys of illegal immigrants. The artist does not see these people as migrants, but as members of a political minority, whose journeys are acts of defiance.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MoMA Archive
“The Mapping Journey Project” is an installation comprising Bouchra’s Khalili complete set of 8 videos produced from 2008 to 2011. The videos detail the stories of eight individuals, forced by political and economic circumstances to travel illegally, whose journeys have taken them across the Mediterranean basin, from their original homes to their current places of residence. To find subjects for “The Mapping Journey Project”, the artist traveled to the arteries of trafficking and trade (Marseilles, Ramallah, Bari, Rome, Barcelona and Istanbul). She didn’t go searching for her subjects but rather waited for an occasion to meet them. Following an initial meeting, the artist invited each subject to narrate his or her journey and trace it in thick permanent marker on a geopolitical map of the region. The videos feature only the voices of the subjects and their hands sketching their trajectories across the map, while their faces remain unseen. Khalili would then spend hours talking to the person off-camera—asking them questions about their travels and allowing them to flesh out their narrative. “The narrators become the authors of their own narratives”. When they had developed their voice, she would give them the map and the marker and film their narrative in one shot. She’s quick to clarify that the videos are not interviews. She does not interrupt with questions and she does not edit after shooting the films. For some, the journey is not over. In one of the pieces, a woman traced her journey from Mogadishu, Somalia to Bari, Italy with a blue marker. Unlike most others, she made an arrow at each place she stopped. Her final arrow rested on Bari and pointed North. She explained that she wants to go to Norway or England. “Ultimately this is what ‘The Mapping Journey Project’ is about, how a human being is still able to resist though he/she is trapped in the nets of arbitrary power” she said in an interview. Each video is presented on an individual screen, in this way, a complex network of migration is narrated in the voices of its subjects, while refusing the forms of representation and visibility demanded by systems of surveillance, international border control, and the news media. Shown together, the videos function as an atlas for an alternative geopolitical map, defined by the precarious lives of stateless people.
Info: Curator: Stuart Comer, Assistant Curator: Giampaolo Bianconi, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, Duration: 9/4-28/8/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:30-17:30, Fri 10:30-20:00, www.moma.org
