Re-imagining Mobility: From (In)visibility to Multiple Processes of Making Present

Abstract

(In)visibility is a central concept in debates on mobility and migration. It has been perceived as both resource and obstacle to transformative political practices. The aim of this article is to unpack how events tied to migration have been labelled simultaneously visible and invisible. This is not merely a contradiction but a sign of how knowledge about migration is produced in complex, multiple and contrasting ways. To assess these processes, however, scholars cannot rely on the language of (in)visibility as it comes short in articulating both the situatedness of processes of knowledge production and their multiplicity. This article proposes the language of ‘making present’ as an alternative, which enables us to track how different (in)visibilities have diverse political consequences. The conceptual contribution of the article is fleshed out by analysing two empirical cases: the construction of the Gateway to Europe and instances of migrant self-narration on the same site.

Introduction

In June 2008, civil society actors inaugurated the Gateway to Europe, an art installation placed on the shores of Lampedusa to commemorate death in the Mediterranean. As such, this artefact was meant to make visible the tragedy of border deaths. Actors involved described their intention as follows:

‘The monuments stands as a memorial for future generations of the inhuman tragedy of so many migrants deceased and dispersed in the Mediterranean, often without witnesses. A symbol which helps us to remember and invites us all [. . .] to reflect on the tragedy that is still unfolding every day under our eyes.’ ¹

In the small excerpt above, death in the Mediterranean is described in two contradictory ways. On the one hand, people drown ‘without witnesses’, on the other, this tragedy unfolds ‘under our eyes’. This article proposes to take this type of claim seriously to unpack what is at stake when migration, migrants and migrant struggles are described as visible or invisible, or in this case both. Processes of making or becoming (in)visible can have political consequences as they determine practically either political gains for people on the move or even the further proliferation of border violence, and as such they have been at the centre of political discussions on the topic as well as scholarly analysis.

In practice, activists lament the invisibility which prevents migrant, racialised and minority groups and individuals from accessing fully their socio-political rights. At the same time, invisibility has also become a resource to ‘escape’ detection by instruments of control both at the border and in the everyday and to avoid the risks of violence or forced mobility in the form of repatriation and deportation. The same ambiguity can be experienced in transit through borderlands, whether these be on land or at sea. On the one hand, being seen by activist and humanitarian actors can lead to aid and safety from the elements or the strain of the journey, on the other, being seen by border authorities can also mean the exposure to further violence, illegal pushbacks and the impossibility of reaching a desired destination. Empirically then, (in)visibility plays a crucial role in the politics of mobility, requiring careful and attentive analysis. In particular, it calls for attentiveness to the multiplicity of actors whose ‘eyes’ matter in the politics of mobility. In a context where detection can mean both safety and exposure to further violence, the importance of who sees quickly becomes predominant to the act of seeing in itself.

It is no wonder then that in scholarly literature on the subject, (in)visibility has featured as a complex and at times even ubiquitous conceptual tool. Mirroring the many ways in which it plays into the politics of migration, scholarly approaches have treated (in)visibility as both resource and hurdle to peoples’ desire to move. ² On the one hand, being counted in the polity can mean achieving political gains ³ and struggling to be recognised as political subjects in absence of formal status can be a transformative political practice. ⁴ On the other, the same processes can lead to co-option in exclusionary understandings of politics, ⁵ as well as to risks of capture and detention. The contention at the core of this article is that given the complexity inherent in forms of (in)visibility, its use as a conceptual tool hinders analysis instead of enhancing it, as it come short of articulating both the situatedness of processes of knowledge production and their multiplicity. ⁶

Firstly, claims to (in)visibility invite the question of ‘to whom’ are phenomena, people or places (in)visible? To refer to the quote above, who is it that is failing to stand witness to death in the Mediterranean? How is this unseeing practiced? The answers to these questions help situate vision in the context of its production. Without such answers, one cannot begin to understand how it becomes possible to say, in the same few sentences, that the same phenomena is also ‘under our eyes’. This is not merely a contradiction, but a sign of the multiplicity underlying this type of claim. Death in the Mediterranean can be visible from certain standpoints, as well as imperceptible from others. This discrepancy not only requires engagement with the multiplicity of ‘visions’ at play in the politics of mobility, but also with the consequences multiplicity has for the coherence of (in)visibility as a conceptual category.

Secondly and subsequently, invisibility is only fully coherent so long as one centres the act of ‘seeing’ or knowing on one body or even apparatus which acts as the reference point for vision. In other words, the duality of (in)visibility is only fully productive when in reference to one particular actor, or way of seeing, which implies both what it sees and what it does not. This does not represent how the ‘knowing’ of migration is practiced as multiple actors are always involved in rendering it into an issue present in public debate, whether these are state authorities, other professionals or even migrants and activists themselves. In this sense, seeing is always multiple and mobile people can only be invisible so long as vision is centred on one single ‘seer’, which very rarely overlaps with mobile people themselves. This in turn has consequences for how migration is enacted as a political issue not only in practitioners’ accounts but also in academic scholarship. Once vision is multiplied, to account for the many actors and tools which are at play in making migration visible, visibility and invisibility bleed into each other, as events can be simultaneously visible and invisible, and knowing and not knowing can become politically strategic tools, used for instance both to deny and attribute responsibility for violent border policies.

In light of these two issues, which underpin the awkwardness of working within the realms of visibility and invisibility, this article proposes the language of making present as an analytic to unpack those processes. Making present in this article refers to those processes which assemble migration as an object of knowledge by making it present, in the sense of making it tangible, audible or even visible. ⁷ The concept of making present has analytical implications. Firstly, making present displaces invisibility, by marking how engagements with migration are rendered in practice and thus made perceptible. Subsequently, the focus is not on whether one is made to be seen or unseen, but how in being made present gaps emerge which then give rise to different, competing and even conflicting readings of particular phenomena. Methodologically, instead, the need to grapple with these questions leads to an investment in materials and traces as they are immersed in practices of making present. The focus on materials and things serves to drive analysis by hanging on to tangible traces which can be perceived even as the stories of migration they tell are rife with the erasures and silences practiced through them.

It is in this context that the Gateway to Europe becomes an interesting site to read through these lenses. The Gateway is an artefact through which a variety of practices of making present have been articulated, whether on the part of its creators or on the part of migrants themselves using it as a stage for self-narration. Zoning in on the materiality of the site makes it possible not only to trace these multiple engagements but also to point out how they emerge as different practices of making migration present. By making the material presence of the Gateway the centre of analysis, the relative (in)visibility of mobile people or migration itself can be articulated in terms of presence and of situated practices which yield a more nuanced analysis of how migration can be understood as both a humanitarian crisis and a post-colonial legacy, both new and ancient, both visible and invisible.

Displacing (In)visibility through Multiple Processes of Making Present

Becoming Political through Becoming Visible

This section reviews how the question of visibility and perceptibility emerges in scholarly literature on migration and political action, as authors seek to invest in or distance themselves from this concept, and discuss its inherent complexity. Across this wide variety of engagements, one issue remains constant: that of certain slippages around the question of ‘who sees’ or ‘who perceives’ migrant struggles, and what consequences does that have for accounting for how perceptibility comes to intervene in the politics of migration. Both approaches which privilege visibility or imperceptibility come short in articulating the situatedness of practices of perception which render migrant struggles and migration more in general a political phenomenon. Due to this issue, (in)visibility is abstracted to signify not an empirical condition, or the emergence of migration as a perceptible, tangible object of knowledge, but a political project and a type of political action. This slippage in turn makes it impossible to differentiate the complex ways in which (in)visibility plays into the politics of migration, and even approaches who try to bridge this divide are forced to acknowledge the complexity of (in)visibility without solving it. My suggestion is to focus not on (in)visibility as an outcome of forms of political action but as a process of knowledge production, and to explore its production through the language of practices of making present, to highlight how perceptibility is both materially situated and comprises both areas of clarity (visibility) and opacity (invisibility).

Visibility and perceptibility emerge more strongly in strands of scholarship which are concerned with political action on the part of migrants, both classical social movement analysis ⁸ and other strands of scholarship such as Critical Citizenship Studies. The latter in particular poses the question of how the political acts of migrants can be seen and recognised as fully politically meaningful in the absence of formal rights. ⁹ Running through many of these analyses is an intent to recognise emergent forms of political action which transform the boundaries of the political itself. As new subjects which do not enjoy rights of citizenship or of belonging express their will to be recognised, they not only act politically but also transform what being political ultimately means. Within these strands of literature the question of perceptibility emerges along with the question of ‘recognition’ ¹⁰ or ‘social recognisability’. ¹¹

Debating how the notion of being political needs to be reformulated to accommodate the political action of migrants and non-status residents, Peter Nyers ¹² for instance critically assesses how politics emerges not only through claim-making practices but also through their interference with constructions of the political community which are not only legal but also aesthetic. In his own words, politics resides ‘in the framing of the given, of what can be perceived and seen, heard and heeded’. ¹³ By drawing on Rancière’s work on politics and aesthetics and the concept of acts of citizenship, Nyers places the political importance of claims by non-status people on their articulation of a political subjectivity which ruptures given orders and makes one visible when one previously was miscounted. As non-status people make claims, they emerge as political subjects and destabilise the order which dispossesses them of recognition as fully political subjects. The focus on visibility, which he articulates through the empirical analysis of drawings made in detention, is opposed to a focus on audibility, which Nyers claims could potentially be problematic, as it places on subjects the burden of speaking in public or of knowing ‘what it means to make a claim that can be recognised as such’. ¹⁴ Becoming visible then remains at the core of what it means to articulate oneself as a political subject.

What becoming visible means in practice however is never quite specified. Where, how and to whom do need struggles to be visible is never analysed in as much detail as the emergence of the claims and subjects themselves. It is my contention that in order to speak of the emergence as visible of a subject who previously was miscounted, or seen as a part with no part, ¹⁵ one must take as epistemological starting point that of the order which is being transformed by this political act. Spatially as well as epistemologically, subjects must emerge within the bounds of the pre-established order to transform it, but more importantly in order for the categories of visible and invisible to fully be meaningful, the standpoint of the aesthetic order must be the benchmark against which they are measured. If the standpoint of the political community which produces people as lacking status were to be displaced, it is doubtful that their transition from invisible to visible would be as straightforward, or that their identification as one or the other would be possible.

The centrality of the current aesthetic order as an epistemological standpoint against which (in)visibility is measured remains also when the focus switches from visibility to more broadly ‘recognition’. As Engin Isin ¹⁶ succinctly states, acts of citizenship articulate ‘a speech that demands to be heard and a political subjectivity that demands to be recognised’. To whom do acts need to be audible or recognisable? Or at the very least, to whom do they seek to become so? It becomes increasingly obvious that discussions such as these demand a further look at the boundaries of visibility and the conditions of its production. Indeed, if the political import of these acts is the reframing of who is seen and who is heeded as discussed above, ¹⁷ and politics resides into these practices of framing, it follows that the epistemological practices which produce the boundary of the visible are inherently political. These practices however cannot be fully accounted for by analysing the singular moment of articulation of a particular claim, such as in the act of protest, rather they need to be unpacked as a process of knowledge production which is spatially and materially situated.

Who sees, who is seen and which tools are employed for this perceptibility to be produced are questions which often fall sideways of such scholarly discussions, although they are implicated in the understanding of politics at work here. Andrijasevic ¹⁸ in attempting to bridge the gap between feminist approaches to knowledge and an understanding of acts of citizenship as a method, fruitfully poses a challenge to this line of thinking which hints at this issue. By proposing that scholars working on acts put more emphasis on the inner struggles and contradictions which riddle the construction of new political subjects, Andrijasevic ¹⁹ pushes scholars to situate their process of knowledge production not within the epistemic standpoint to which struggles become visible, but within struggles themselves. This re-orients scholarship to look within marginalised subjects and accordingly would pose a challenge to (in)visibility as a conceptual tool, by displacing a given aesthetic order as the epistemic standpoint which yields the boundaries of perceptibility on which its coherence relies.

The feminist epistemic tradition brought to bear here calls for knowledge to be seen as always inherently situated and also inherently multiple and political. ²⁰ In light of this approach, the centrality of one epistemological standpoint is not problematic per se. Rather, it is assumed that all knowledge must be situated in particular locations, practices and among particular actors. However, because knowledge is always situated, the standpoint from which it is produced requires several qualifications which are missing from accounts which privilege a politics of visibility as well as from those which instead privilege a politics of imperceptibility, discussed shortly below. If analyses which privilege visibility or recognition fail to specify who sees as well as who recognises, while still centring sight somewhere, they risk reproducing particularly situated ways of seeing as unmarked universals against which the political viability of migrant struggles is measured.

The challenge here is not simply, as discussed by Andrijasevic, ²¹ to centre the process of knowledge production elsewhere but also to account for the multiplicity of standpoints which produce both visibility and invisibility in the politics of migration. It is because many actors are invested in making dynamics (in)visible that claims such as the one at the opening of this article can be made. Shipwrecks in the Mediterranean are both visible and invisible depending on who is looking. Media push stories which make tragedy hyper-visible while obscuring the nuance of migratory journeys; ²² state authorities plead ignorance of calls of distress and decline their responsibility to assist; ²³ activist and migrants strive to make violence visible in order to act upon it or claim justice. ²⁴ Across this patchwork, migration across the sea is alternatively (in)visibile, not because it is either one or the other, but because it is constructed across different actors’ standpoints and their practices of knowing. Before going deeper into how to tackle this multiplicity, however, let us turn to approaches who eschew visibility in favour of imperceptibility to assess how similar patterns and gaps emerge in their treating of the complexity of (in)visibility.

Becoming Imperceptible: From the Refusal of Representation to Empirical Complexity

The language of citizenship and representative politics has long been recognised as potentially restrictive as well as exclusionary for what concerns the politics of migration, and this is true both for scholars who work outside this tradition, ²⁵ within it ²⁶ or at its intersections with other approaches. ²⁷ The issue identified with the language of citizenship is that by fostering integration in pre-established modes of representation, it poses the risk of stripping away the emancipatory potential of struggle ²⁸ and merely moving the boundary of exclusion elsewhere, leaving the violent core of practices of national belonging untouched. ²⁹ Scholars have posed thinking in terms of ‘escape’, ³⁰ ‘lines of flight’ ³¹ or appropriation ³² as alternatives. These are forms of political action which do not rely on claim-making, or becoming visible, but rather rest on the refusal of subjectification, and the courting of ‘imperceptibility’.

Imperceptibility rests on the refusal to perform politics in the guise of identifiable collective subjects, which could be ‘counted’ or in any case represented in a collective. ³³ Becoming imperceptible is understood as a process of becoming which makes it impossible for subjects to be captured and rendered productive in the order of rights and representation, which would render them fixed and therefore no more politically transformative. In this sense, imperceptibility is not the material or practical attempt not to be detected by forms of control (although it might include it) but it is a deeper refusal to be integrated into particular orders and identification practices, including that of collective political subjectivation to articulate right claims. ³⁴ Clearly, the articulation of a politics of the imperceptible stands at the opposite end of the political continuum from the affirmation of a new political subject through acts. Yet, the issue of centring vision reproduces itself. To whom must migrants refuse identification? From which practices of counting and assessing must they escape? What determines epistemologically what is visible and what is imperceptible remains underspecified.

This problem of lack of specification of this approach has justly come under criticism by other sympathetic strands of literature. ³⁵ The main critiques moved to it relate to its lack of engagement both with the situatedness and material specificity of politics and resistance through borderlands and the technological and embodied ways in which control is deployed. ³⁶ As an answer to this, Stephan Scheel ³⁷ has introduced the concept of appropriation which not only seeks to address these gaps, but also to strike a balance between seeking ‘imperceptibility’ and resisting practices of control which make subjects detectable, while still participating in them. When migrants are exposed to apparatuses of control which are supposed to manage or constrain their mobility, such as biometric visa regimes, they can at times use those very mechanisms to their advantage by subverting them.

These practices of subversion, which Scheel calls appropriation, work through the appearance of compliance even as the system is being tricked. ³⁸ In this sense, migrants do not refuse to participate in the apparatus which seeks to identify and ‘objectify’ them, they instead actively reshape the system by twisting it to their own ends. Here, imperceptibility then is less cause for refusal or escape and more a question of toeing a careful line between revealing oneself while also hiding one’s own practices of appropriation. In this sense, appropriation neither is an act seeking recognition by a public ³⁹ nor is a practice which can disentangle itself from apparatuses of control within which it resides. To turn this complexity in the language of perceptibility, migrants’ appropriations are neither fully visible nor invisible to apparatuses of control, but rest within them creating both points of visibility and areas of opacity.

Scheel ⁴⁰ is not alone in complicating the boundaries between seeing and being seen. In a similar vein, also Martina Tazzioli has argued for the recognition of the complex political role that imperceptibility plays in the politics of migration. ⁴¹ Tazzioli argues emphatically both against privileging a politics of visibility and equating imperceptibility immediately with insurgency, subversion or escape. On the one hand, a politics of becoming visible privileges punctual ruptures articulated for instance in the form of protest which only represent a small part of how migrants struggle for mobility. On the other, while recognising that escaping detection can be understood as a strategic tool for migrants’ desire to move, it can also be a tool of control, through forced displacement and invisibilisation. In light of this tension, Tazzioli suggests to look beyond a visible/invisible binary and instead assess how both are deployed strategically in struggles for movement. ⁴²

The attempt to bring invisibility and visibility together is born out of the empirical necessity to account for the variety of ways in which struggle for movements emerge. ⁴³ This tension is due to the tying of (in)visibility to forms of politics rather than as a concept which indicates how subjects and phenomena emerge as tangible and knowable. As authors are sceptical of particular forms of political action, whether these involve claim-making or alternative practices which try to by-pass political institutions, the political stakes of the concept emerge. In response, scholars have attempted to mediate between these positions, acknowledging both the problems inherent in claim-making and the centrality of pre-existing institutions and the often elusive promise of alternatives which never seem to bear tangible fruit. ⁴⁴ In these works, authors rightly attempt to complicate what (in)visibility means politically and to show how ‘visible’ political action can coexist or be entangled with the search for ‘imperceptibility’. ⁴⁵ However, because discussion of invisibility draws strongly on the approaches discussed above, while advocating a bridging between these positions, they never quite question the use of (in)visibility itself. Schwiertz for instance in discussing the relation between visible and invisible politics describes (in)visibility not as an empirical distinction but as short-hand for different types of political practices. While this correctly highlights the role that the concept has had in discussions about politics, especially in relation to subjectification and representation, this usage fails to investigate (in)visibility’s epistemic boundaries. ⁴⁶ The issue which then arises, even in attempts to mediate between claim-making and the refusal of representation, is that (in)visibility becomes a stand in for representative or non-representational approaches to becoming political and fails to say anything about perceptibility in itself. This hinders analysis of the emergence of particular subjects or events as perceptible, which is what makes all the difference to their political outcomes.

Tazzioli’s critique of imperceptibility for instance rests on the fact that it can be both something people on the move strive for, as they seek to avoid violence or measures of control, or it can be a hurdle to their emergence as a political force. In the latter case, it is not the outcome of a choice but rather the result of a condition of forced invisibility which makes their actions opaque, and likely to be ignored, even when present. ⁴⁷ Here my claim is that it is the process of production of (in)visibility which becomes crucial in determining what purpose it serves politically. Invisibility can be a choice to foster resistance, but it can also be the landmark of how power apparatuses works. In one case, where migrants seek to escape detection, they are making themselves invisible to apparatuses of control. In the latter case, it is apparatuses of control themselves which make migrants invisible, through violence or detention, to a wider spectrum of actors, whether this be sympathetic political activists, human rights watchdogs or even domestic publics. These processes may very well coexist and entwine with each other, but politically they have opposite results. Analytically then, this distinction should be upheld, by not conflating both of those into the realm of the invisible or the imperceptible. This conflation makes imperceptibility or (in)visibility conceptually confusing, as it focuses our attention on the outcome (in-visibility) rather than on the processes (material and epistemic) which produce it, hindering analysis of how those very processes have political consequences.

Making Present: Situating Multiple (In)visibilities

Thinking of (in)visibility as an outcome without detailing the process of its production remains problematic because of the multiplicity of (in)visibility. On the one hand, its use as a metaphor for emergence of subjectivities or the refusal of subjectification misses how certain (in)visibilities are entirely dependent on particular epistemological standpoints which are materially produced. On the other, it conflates outcomes which should be differentiated in light of how they are produced, but also in light of what they mean politically for people on the ground. To refer back to some examples laid out above, boats in distress who become visible to activist networks intent on search and rescue have an interest in doing so, because that visibility can make the difference between life and death and enable their mobility. The same boats might want to avoid becoming visible to border forces as they might risk incurring in further violence or pushbacks. It is not visibility itself that makes the difference between whether or not it becomes an obstacle or a resource for movement, it is the process of its production (who sees and how).

Tackling the multiple ways in which migration emerges cannot be done through the concept of (in)visibility no matter how much it is nuanced. This is due to two main problems. On the one hand, if visibility is taken to be a metaphorical category, the very metaphorical usage of the terms hinders analysis of the material and situated processes which yield (in)visibility itself. As discussed at length above, it is the situatedness and the material embeddedness of these processes that determine which ends they serve politically. Therefore to effectively analyse the political consequences of (in)visibility one must track how seeing or unseeing are practiced in material and situated ways. This leads to a second problem. If (in)visibility needs to be unpacked empirically and materially, it can no longer be used metaphorically but requires to be taken as the outcome of visual practices. This in turn limits the focus of analysis to the visual, discounting how the producing knowledge can address more or multiple senses at the same time as embodied practice.

This is why this article proposes to look at these processes as processes of making migration present. By processes of making present I mean those practices which, in various ways and through the action of a diverse range of actors, allow migration to emerge as an object of knowledge by either assembling data, enacting migratory movements through performance or even curating material traces of movement and shaping space to materialise particular imaginative geographies. As such, processes of making present do not include only practices of counting and surveillance, the data-ification of migration or the emergence of political claims by migrants themselves, rather they refer to a wider variety of practices which intervene in determining how migration can be known and acted upon. These include also acts of self-narration by migrants which are not accompanied by political claims, or efforts to commemorate death which produce particular types of erasures even as they strive to ‘make migration visible’.

The importance of this change in focus is to stay within an understanding of politics as based on framings of what can be seen, heard or heeded, to obliquely quote Nyer’s argument ⁴⁸ discussed above, by analysing how seemingly every day practices contribute to assembling migration and making it known. It is also an effort to avoid replicating particular understandings of what matters politically which reinforce statist territorial imaginaries by allowing attention to be drawn only to events which cause contention, which is then reported on by particular types of media. ⁴⁹ In doing so, the types of practices which ‘matter’ for understanding how migration is made present become manifold, and the ways in which migration emerges are similarly multiplied. This process of multiplication is not simply about there being many ways in which migration is made present, rather it is about recognising both their productive power and their coexistence. In this sense, multiplicity is about the coexistence in a single moment of various ‘orders’ or modes of ordering and understanding the present, ⁵⁰ which may interfere with each other, be in dialogue or connected, without ever becoming a systematic and coherent whole. ⁵¹

In such a way, each process of making present gives an account of migration which may vary in terms of its actors, its spatio-temporal moorings or the politics which are attached to it. The coexistence of these processes make it so that while they may relate to one another, they may neither be remade into a coherent whole nor their relation be exhausted by considering only points of conflict or disruption. Processes of making present neither completely transform particular pre-existing orders, nor can they stand entirely separate from them. Rather, they engage the same ambivalence which emerges when looking at the practices of appropriation discussed above. ⁵² The cases analysed below will show how even as various understandings of migration are produced and enacted through material traces and they overlap or coexist, neither one can be comfortably assumed under the other, nor do they stand one in open resistance to the other. Nevertheless, each process of making migration present has particular political consequences which give rise to alternative engagements with migration as a political issue.

The turn to processes of making present has clear analytical implications. On the one hand, focusing on practices of knowledge production allows to zero in more clearly on how the perceptibility of migration is produced, accounting for both areas of visibility and of invisibility. This change in emphasis also allows to differentiate between different situated practices and processes in a way which resists the conflation of different forms of (in)visibility into each other. On the other, making present allows to highlight how even processes, subjects and dynamics which are labelled invisible are in turn made visible, speakable and perceptible by the very process of research itself, as it is one of the many ways in which migration becomes ‘known’. In this sense, making present entirely displaces ‘invisibility’ as a category, as it is not properly the absence of vision, but rather the awareness of a lack, or the purposeful construction of opacity.

This is only one of the methodological implications of thinking in terms of making present. Because the focus is on how migration is made known, and how this process of knowing produces its own gaps and erasures, how is one to be able to identify both what processes of making present highlight and what they hide? My suggestion is to firstly focus on material sites and artefacts as linchpins through which to unravel how particular stories of migration are told and what consequences they have. The choice to focus on materials is due to the fact that material traces, however valued or devalued, are always somewhat tangible, whether these are material things or virtual documents, and thus can be followed and analysed even as the stories they tell are rife with silences. Material traces are never imperceptible, thus eschewing the methodological problem of working with something which is yet not known.

In light of this, the following sections of this article will focus on the Gateway to Europe discussing how the creation of this monument makes migration present in a very particular way. In virtue of being a physical, material landmark the Gateway not only makes migration known by commemorating the violence which recurs in the Mediterranean, but it also restructures the time-scape and geography in which migratory movements happen. A subsequent section will instead focus on examples of migrant self-narration which overlap with the site of the Gateway itself, even as they immerse it in a different geography and history of migration. In those practices of knowledge production, which include performances as well as maps and documentaries, migrants draw geographies and histories of migration which sit in contrast with those performed through the presence of the Gateway. The analysis of these two examples will rely on sources which include: media interviews with the creators of these projects, videos, documentaries, and also interviews carried out by the author with the civil society actors involved in the creation of these artistic engagements. These two eminently different processes of making migration present, i.e. the construction of the Gateway and instances of migrant self-narration, pose different opportunities and framings for thinking about migration as a political issue and they sit as multiple, and not necessarily conflicting, ways of assembling migration as an object of knowledge, which coexist but do not fully overlap on the island of Lampedusa.

The Gateway to Europe: A Border Open into Nothing

The Gateway to Europe was inaugurated on 28 June 2008, before the height of what has been now come to be understood as the ‘migration crisis’ or ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe. This artefact was born out of the collaboration of civil society actors moved by the urgency they felt to make the tragedy of migration visible and to prompt public reflection. As one of the people involved at the inception of this project put it in an interview with me, the Gateway was built so that ‘people could not say that they did not know, that they did not realise this was happening’. ⁵³ This monument was primarily understood to be an instrument of remembrance which was built so that human mobility in the Mediterranean and its cost could be made visible. The choice to mark these events with the intent to make them visible was aimed at contributing to Italian public discourse at the time, in an effort to shift the terms of the debate. ⁵⁴

In terms of becoming ‘visible’, the Gateway was eminently successful. It achieved a particular status as a landmark in the geography of Mediterranean mobility, featuring on news outlets’ coverage, becoming a site for yearly commemorations, activist festivals and even contestation of mobility. Yet its ‘visibility’ by itself says little about how migration is enacted and made present at this site, and which political considerations this process produces. It is only by highlighting how migration is made present through the Gateway by analysing the process of its construction that the epistemic work it performs and its contribution to the politics of mobility can be understood. As such, this section will look at how certain understanding of migration were materially inscribed in the Gateway and how the Gateway itself shapes the material and ideal borders which criss-cross Lampedusa.

The purpose of the Gateway, as mentioned earlier, is one of remembrance. The very act of remembering slots violence both elsewhere and in the past, ⁵⁵ further severing the connections between the observer and the deadly side of mobility which the Gateway is supposed to signal to its audience. This split already presages a stark separation between the subjects of violence and the subjects of remembering who do not overlap or even share the same spatio-temporal trajectory. In this sense, victims are far away both spatially and temporally, in a limbo that places them beyond saving, even as the tragedy of the Mediterranean is not in any way past. Similarly, the Alternativa Giovani Onlus, one of the civil society actors involved in the construction of the Gateway, describes the reasoning behind their support of the monument in the following way, which is worth quoting at length:

‘It is then a massacre without pity [migrant deaths in the crossing of the Mediterranean]. Migrants come from the South and the East of the world towards Italy. They come to care for our elderly, to mind our children, to clean our homes, to serve in our canteens, to wash our dishes, to pick up our litter, to ensure that our private businesses, agricultural farms, industrial plants, and public services continue to operate. [..] They come here to better themselves. [. . .] They come here to save us.’ ⁵⁶

Here the audience of the Gateway is kept entirely separate from that of the victims of shipwrecks. ‘They’ come from the South and the East, their identities intricately tied to what they can do for their European host. ‘They’ work to sustain ‘our’ economy, ‘they’ care for ‘our’ vulnerable. Their contribution to the welcoming modernity of Europe is unquestioned but their belonging seems almost impossible. The movement from East and South to Europe is a movement of betterment, it is a movement which signifies progress. The racialised and classed Other, who comes from afar, is a crucial but nameless figure on the stage of European modernity, both victim, saviour and irreplaceable sacrifice on which hinges the survival of ‘our’ society and ‘our’ way of life.

The construction of a Gateway, although open, without barriers, is nevertheless a clear line of demarcation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ rather than a point of contact or of exchange. In the imagery of the organisations which sponsored this monument then, the Gateway is not an interruption of the popular colonial discourses on migration, but rather the offspring of those very understanding of Self and Other, where ‘Europe’ cannot exist without the construction of its necessary, abject Other. ⁵⁷ The Other in this reading is not afforded the right to their own story, but can only participate in the predetermined trajectory of European modernity, which is not only a spatial direction (from South and East to North) but also a journey through time as people move from dispossession and poverty to prosperity. ⁵⁸

The creators of the Gateway defend the political and social role of the Gateway on the basis of its ‘authenticity’ in its representation of the struggle for a better future of mobile people. By virtue of being ‘authentic’ the Gateway then enacts migration as it truly is and in so doing, makes it present in a situated and contextual way. In such a way, migration is made present through the material features of the Gateway and through the way in which it structures the ideal space of the border. This yields a detailed understanding of what the monument allows us to see as well as to un-see, producing the boundaries of the avenues of political debate attached to it. In particular, the physical features of the monument and its location contribute to the representation of mobile people as an indistinct, both vulnerable and dangerous mass ⁵⁹ but also of the Mediterranean as an empty stretch of space which precedes the land border of Lampedusa.

The Gateway is a five metres tall and three metres wide open doorway, on whose surface are carved mundane objects such as bowls, hats, shoes, fish, human heads barely recognisable as such. At the very top of the Gateway a jumbled series of numbers has been carved, which commentators have taken to signify the impossibility of knowing the actual number of people who drowned in the waters of one of the most closely monitored seas. ⁶⁰ The simplicity of these representations was discussed by the artist in charge of the monument in an interview given in February 2018. On the one hand, the choice of location was supposed to be a nod towards the ‘shore where these people really land’, ⁶¹ as opposed to a monument which would reside in the town’s public square, rendering it meaningless to mobile people themselves. On the other, the choice of its decorations was supposed to represent simple objects which people on the move ‘maybe really leave behind’ ⁶² in their places of origin.

As such, the claims to the ‘authenticity’ of the representation inscribed in the Gateway travel on two parallel lines of argument, reshaping the geography of the European border as well as the figure of mobile people. Firstly, the Gateway is authentic because it is placed exactly where the border is and mobile people land on the shores of Lampedusa, opening a gap. This reflects an understanding of the border as a single line of demarcation which rests on the land border of the island. In turn, such an understanding redirects attention away from the broader border dynamics which make the Mediterranean such a dangerous borderland, ⁶³ and instead performs an ideal of openness and welcome which does not engage with the border as externalised, or with the complex ways in which the Mediterranean itself has been weaponised as a natural barrier. ⁶⁴ Moreover, the choice of an open doorway as to signal a gap on the border is interesting to consider. The ‘openness’ of the door is entirely deceptive. By affirming the openness of the Gateway and positing the border of Europe on the shore of Lampedusa, while imagining the Mediterranean as an empty and therefore free stretch of sea, the conditions which allow deaths in the Mediterranean to happen and continue, as a now normalised ‘tragedy’, are left unexplored. The historical and political legacies of exclusion and violence which sustain Europe’s border regime remain out of sight, as well as the externalisation of border enforcement which spans countries of departure as well as a complex system of surveillance and strategic ignorance at sea.

Secondly, the Gateway is authentic because its representation of mobility and mobile people is true to their essence, and shies away from all rhetoric. ⁶⁵ This ties an understanding of authentic migration to a representation of people as less than whole, represented by body parts as well as the objects they leave behind, inclusive of shoes, bowls and little else. Even the numbers, which portray the vastness of the violence of the border, are obscure and opaque as they cannot be fully read. The Gateway to Europe then becomes the linchpin where imaginaries migration and of Lampedusa come together. Human mobility here remains a movement from South or East which layers upon geographical markers also markers of development, modernity and ‘betterment’. It is a figure that is always visible but never specific, unless one is listing its manifold contributions to the prosperity of European modernity. In that case, the figure of the migrant is no longer powerless, but instead active, although it acts to serve and sustain a society to which ultimately it does not belong.

While the Gateway was intended to enhance the visibility of death in the Mediterranean and raise awareness of it as a particular entry point in a bid for political change, the search for visibility in itself, as an intentional political choice, does not reveal much about what imaginaries of mobility the Gateway itself enacts. It is only by looking at how mobility is made present by the actors invested in the construction of the Gateway and by the material features of the monument itself that one can glean any insight in how mobility is constructed as an object and then which political avenues can be opened up by such construction. In the case of the Gateway, the understanding of mobility as a spatial trajectory which maps onto a particular developmental project, as well as the representation of the border as open and placed on Lampedusa misses many opportunities to question crucial political dynamics. In its humanitarian stance to signal openness and welcome, the Gateway practices particular forms of erasure which both elide mobile people’s identities and the political dynamics of the Mediterranean borderscape. These erasures allow to posit the political question of mobility as one of human goodwill and managerial unpreparedness, forestalling engagement with neo-colonial policies of border externalisation, detention and deterrence.

Colonial Resonances of Transit: Who is the Stranger Now?

The Gateway to Europe enacts a vision of mobility and the Mediterranean that entirely depends on the situated knowledges of a selected few, who had the social and economic resources to imagine such a project and to put it in action. Those situated knowledges resonated strongly with the media portrayals of migration and were rooted in a solely European, Eurocentric, perspective. The Gateway, regardless, quickly became a key location in the geography of Lampedusa, featuring in many initiatives which problematised migration and the political responses it has engendered. These initiatives include commemorations by activists and migrants as well as the Lampedusa in Festival series of events, which brought political and artistic engagements with migration to the island for a film festival several years running.

As the Gateway became a stage for these initiatives, which strongly featured examples of migrant self-narration, it became entangled in how these enactments made migration present in ways which questioned or stood in tension with it. These practices of self-narration will be the focus of this section, highlighting how when the standpoint from which migration is made present changes, the meanings, spaces and even time-scapes attached to it change as well. Each of those practices of self-narration make migration present and enact its spatial and temporal markings in ways which contrast with those inscribed in the Gateway. If for the Gateway migration is a linear movement from poverty to modernity and from South to North, in these stories, migratory journeys have their roots in the forced mobility of the Transatlantic, and the entangled geographies of empire. If the Gateway puts Lampedusa at the centre of the European border, migrant narratives question the intelligibility of Lampedusa as a knowable space, as practices of control produce it as obscure and remote.

The reading of these practices of self-narration here is not merely meant to provide a counter-narrative to the Gateway to Europe, but to show how diverse, and even contrasting, modes of making migration present can coexist, entangle with one another, without either being in open conflict nor having their inherent tensions resolved. In order to make this argument this section will review three such examples of migrant self-narration: the interactive map ‘Return to Lampedusa’ by Mahamed Aman, the performance ‘Invisibili’ by Mohamed Ba and the short documentary ‘To Whom it May Concern’ by Zakaria Ali.

Hosted on the website of the Archive for Migrant Memories based in Rome, the map ‘Return to Lampedusa’ narrates some of the locations that marked the author’s stay in Lampedusa both as a migrant for years before and at the moment of his return on the island, as a ‘free man’. The Gateway to Europe features in this map as the back-drop of a commemoration Aman attended during his stay and the stage where Mohamed Ba performed his play, which will be discussed later in this section. However, the Gateway is but one of the many locations which have meaning for Aman’s mental map of Lampedusa. Almost belying the claims made above about the authenticity of the Gateway as the location where the border is breached and open, Aman’s memories of landing bring us to a lower elevation on the island, to the pier:

‘[Here is] where illegal migrants land [. . .]. At the end of the pier there were journalists at the top, filming. I had the feeling of finding myself during the times of slavery, when slaves arrived to the docks and all of the masters came to choose and see; in our century instead they come to see the illegal migrants and people who are different. I had the same feeling and I felt embarrassed’ ⁶⁶

The well-rehearsed scripts which gave birth to the Gateway to Europe as a gesture to welcome the strangers is here entirely reversed as the ‘stranger’ reaches out to meet ‘us’. However, who really is the stranger in this encounter? The stranger is sometimes Lampedusa itself, and the hoard of flashing cameras and journalists who greet the newly arrived migrants are perhaps another ‘spectacle of migration’, one however that does not invite reflection on migration as an opaque mass invading Europe but rather asks to remember mobility’s colonial past. The same resonance lives as well in Mohamed Ba’s solo play ‘Émigrés’, also often called ‘Invisibles’. This play, performed at the Gateway to Europe several times, evokes many different trajectories of movement, some autobiographical, some part of collective memory and history, such as the forced and intergenerational movement of slavery. The description of arrival of the slave ships resonates strongly with the parallel drawn above, describing in detail the process of display and purchase of people who would later travel forcibly to all corners of empire. ⁶⁷

The transatlantic geography of slavery, performed even on the very threshold of the Gateway, questions the very trajectory of modernity underpinning the marking of space which makes the Gateway to Europe such a powerful symbol. The movement of European colonisation was directed towards other continents and connected them together, giving rise to longer and more entangled trajectories of human movement not only thorough history but also in the present. This complex, multifaceted history which can be glimpsed by shifting the frames of reference through which mobility is made present belies any clear and easy separation spatially and temporally between modern Europe and the shores of Africa. Here then, migration is not a linear story which maps modernity onto space by making it into both a temporal linear trajectory and a movement from South and East to North. Rather, it is the product of encounter and of many journeys which criss-crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

This is not the only amendment to the geography of migration and Lampedusa as enacted by the Gateway brought to the fore by instances of migrant self-narration. While the Gateway proposes a straightforward reading of the border as a line which coincides with the shores of Lampedusa, migrants’ self-narrations of the island immediately stretch the geography of the border to encompass other locations. As these locations become part of their story of migration, they become alternatively visible or invisible, depending on the status of their viewer. Aman’s map for instance, is almost split in two, in a before and after his change of status from ‘illegal’ to ‘legal’. The Lampedusa he sees now as someone descending from a plane, with all the right papers, and all the right words in the right language, is not the same Lampedusa he saw as a new arrival, by boat, from the sea. Many places, highlighted on the map, are described according to this split. Some, such as a café in the city, were places he had only been able to see from afar or while being moved, others, such as the identification centre, he had only been able to see from inside, unable to realise until the moment of return how remote and separate its residents had been from the Lampedusa that locals or tourists experience. ⁶⁸

The removal of mobile bodies from the living space of the city and the island and their constant movement without explanation makes Lampedusa an unknown inhospitable place. Lampedusa, so obviously visible, so hyper-visible from the vantage point of the European observer becomes an unnamed land, where nothing is recognisable, but also where the relationality which makes place, the material connections which allow humans to know where they are completely truncated by the machine of emergency reception and detention. As migrants are moved from one place to another, and just as they are hidden from residents and locals, so the spaces and routines of the places where they find themselves become invisible to them. Similar experiences are also part of other autobiographical documentaries or short films on the subject of ‘return to Lampedusa’. Zakaria Mohamed Ali, in his documentary ‘To Whom it May Concern’, expresses an extremely similar sentiment.

In his retelling of his first and then second journey towards Lampedusa, Ali remembers not knowing what Lampedusa was, and especially not being able to recognise it from the sea, even though the name had become achingly familiar during the span of his journey. Only when he and his fellow travellers landed on the pier, they could finally discover where they had landed, by recognising the name Lampedusa on the side of a bus. ⁶⁹ Far from being recognisable, Lampedusa is a strangely remote place, familiar yet completely unknown, so much so as to be unrecognisable. These tensions do not only play with the geography of the border as placed on Lampedusa, rather they also highlight another trajectory at play here which concerns the visibility and the intelligibility of the black body as fully and autonomously human.

In the previous passages, it is Lampedusa which is invisible and unknowable by people on the move, but the unintelligibility of Lampedusa as a place depends also on the separation and management of mobile bodies as objects which need to be hidden from view and kept separate. This process which begins at the point of landing is a slow erosion of their personal individuality and history which continues as they are deprived not only of liberties but also of their personal belongings and their names. Ali puts it plainly in his documentary and in an interview preceding his journey back to Lampedusa. When he arrived at the detention centre he was only a number, code 29, his clothes were taken and it took him a long time to be able to express his refusal to have his certificates and diplomas taken away from him. As he approaches the detention centre as a refugee with full status, he can proudly say to any policemen who ask that ‘My name is Zakaria and I come from Somalia.’ ⁷⁰

Analysing the spatial removal of illegalised bodies from public space and their de-humanisation makes clear how the invisibility of mobile people is produced ⁷¹ by creating purposeful zones of opacity, together with the narratives inscribed in places and artefacts such as the Gateway to Europe. However, the production of invisibility in this sense is not the only way in which migration is made present. The eyes of mobile people never stop watching. Zakaria never truly becomes ‘29’. So while many actors are implicated in producing conditions of invisibility, those should not be taken as all-encompassing. In the multiplicity of processes through which migration is made present resides also the possibility of resistance, which not only means making things visible from a space of invisibility but also changing the frames through which they are made intelligible. That is how the instances of self-narration analysed in this section intervene in the politics of migration, by allowing to rethink how migration is made present as a tangible object of knowledge. In these practices, which include mapping as well as live performances or the production of documentaries, personal experiences of migration allow to reframe the spaces of migration (Lampedusa, the port, the Gateway itself) and its temporalities (not the linear temporality of migration but the history of empire).

These practices entwine with the existence of the Gateway even as they seem to question the ways in which the monument makes migration present in its own terms. Both processes of making present come with gaps, silences and points of opacity, whether these be the proliferation of borders and the representation of mobile people as a wretched mass, or the geography of Lampedusa. As such, they amount to always partial entry points into the multiple ways in which migration is made present by particular actors, in particular locations and at particular point in time. The spatial and social trajectories drawing Lampedusa in the long history and wide-ranging map of empire sit side by side with those tracing the progressive and precise history of European modernity, where the movement from South to North also coincides with a jump from the uncivilised past to the prosperous future. My attempt to read them against each other as they overlap over the same sites that reveals how differently they allow to think and speak about movement, how the spaces they construct differ and the terms of the social and political debates which they potentially spark shift as we move from one to the other.

The Visibility Complex: A Research Agenda

(In)visibility in debates concerned with migrant struggles is almost a ubiquitous concept. Sometimes it is used to refer to empirical situations of non-knowing, or ignorance, and sometimes it is used almost as a short-hand for particular political projects that assume a certain value or danger in being made (in)visible. The aim of this article is to take seriously and unpack how events tied to migration have been labelled simultaneously visible and invisible. The argument that this article has put forward is that to properly assess these processes scholars cannot rely on the language of (in)visibility as it comes short of articulating both the situatedness of processes of knowledge production and its multiplicity. The empirical examples laid out in this article help in substantiating this argument by showing how all of the cases analysed make some dynamics visible, while effacing others. They all produce very different geographical and social imaginations of migration that can limit and shape the terms of political debate. Not one of the visibilities produced in each of the cases analysed can stand in for the others, while they still coexist and overlap over the same sites. More importantly not one of the cases above could or should be defined as invisible, as the stories of mobility produced in each are equally contextual, owing much to the constellations of actors involved in their production and their own particular situatedness.

Crucially, these cases show how many different actors and processes are involved in producing the multiple (in)visibilities which shape political debates about migration and human movement more in general. This is why this article has put forward the concept of ‘processes of making present’ as an alternative language to that of (in)visibility. Since invisibility requires centring on one particular standpoint to which dynamics are visible or invisible, it is ill-equipped to tackle the multiplicity of visions at play in the politics of migration and their consequences. Indeed, all of the interventions analysed above pose different entry points in the politics of knowledge about movement in the Mediterranean. Not only because they reshape spatial imaginaries but also and more importantly because they transform certain situated knowledges in political stakes in the context of the debate about who gets to tell stories of human mobility and what the content of those stories should be. Dismissing any one of those as less politically salient or failing to qualify their modes of articulation and their content risks reproducing epistemic injustices which are already at play in the determination of the boundaries of public discourse.

In this sense, The Gateway to Europe frames movement as a unidirectional trajectory from East and South to North, from abjection to prosperity, and hides in the process the border politics which determine death in the Mediterranean, which render the sea not an open space but a complex tool of bordering. At the same time, instances of migrant self-narration draw contemporary human mobility in a longer history of colonial movement and encounters, both displacing the understanding of mobility as unidirectional and entirely subverting both the state’s attempt to invisibilise mobile people and the standpoint though which narratives of migration such as that enacted by the Gateway to Europe are produced. Each of these interventions shifts the frames of reference through which thinking of mobility becomes possible, and each of those presents different challenges and opportunities for imagining political alternatives. Thinking in terms of ‘making present’, in turn, allows to pay attention to the ways in which visibility and invisibility are produced contextually and often together, putting emphasis on not only what is being made (in)visible but also how in turn migration is made tangible. In other words, it could be said that in both the cases analysed above migration is made ‘visible’, however this statement does not allow to account for how differently migration emerges in those very contexts. This is the reason why, while (in)visibility has its place in discussions about the politics of migration, it must be studied in such a way as to highlight both the context of its production and the multiple engagements with migration to which it gives rise. As such, ‘making present’ as an analytic allows to trace these processes while centring their inherent multiplicity and complexity.