Idrissa : Spanish Rule of Law Necropower and the Exhumed Migrant Body

Abstract

This commentary examines the 2018 Spanish documentary Idrissa: crónica de una muerte cualquiera (Idrissa: Chronicle of an Ordinary Death), directed by Xavier Artigas and Xapo Ortega, which investigates the circumstances surrounding the death of Idrissa Diallo, a twenty-one-year-old man from Guinea-Conakry who died while in the custody of the Spanish state at the Centro de internamiento de extranjeros (Center of Interment for Foreigners, CIE) in Barcelona on January 6, 2012. Drawing on Ariadna Estévez’s notion of the “rule of law necropower” and James Martel’s work on the power of the unburied body, the commentary argues that the documentary compels us to reflect on the ways in which the CIEs in Spain operate through the rule of law, not as an exception to it. By filming the materiality of the exhumed migrant body, the commentary proposes, the documentary itself becomes a form of resistance to necropolitical violence.