english text 188 criticism, reflection and denunciation. They all reflect on concepts such as internal colonialism, sovereignty and immigration by means of a critical reading of the Ley de Extranjería (Aliens Law). In democracy, as opposed to dictatorships or absolute monarchies, sovereignty resides in the civil population. However, far from being participative, our present democracy has become a power system distanced from its citizens. Social citizenship is the status that is conceded to the rightful members of a community, i.e., all the civil, political, social and cultural rights, and others derived from them, that a society attributes to its citizens. This status or right includes an exclusive, differential element, because it presents a privilege not enjoyed by someone who is not a member of the group. This is one of the paradoxes of the concept of citizenship, which represents integration and equality but also involves inequality because it defines the migrant as a third-class citizen or even as someone not subject to the law. The artist Daniela Ortiz is aware of this, and in her installation Estado Nación. Parte 2 (Nation State. Part 2), 2014, presented in the exhibition Un saber realmente útil at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), she showed a Manual para superar el test de integración en la sociedad española (Manual for Passing the Integration in Spanish Society Test), the test itself, and an Ejercicio de pronunciación (Pronunciation Exercise). Although this documentation is aseptic, it is, nevertheless, a criticism of the mechanisms of state control and segregation of migration. The artist Núria Güell rebels against this citizenship that is equivalent to a castration of rights, and her work analyses the practice of the institutions that govern us and explores the limits of current legality. In Apátrida por voluntad propia. Sobre la prisión de lo posible (Stateless by Personal Choice. On the Prison of the Possible), 2015, Güell presents an installation in which she exhibits an application for surrender of nationality and a variety of other documentation. She says that “from the moment of our birth, unless some atypical situation occurs, we belong to a country: we are given a nationality and we remain confiscated by a state …. In contrast, a stateless person is someone whom no state recognises as having its nationality and whom no State considers to be covered by the application of its legislation”.3 Güell did not achieve her aim, because the nation-state called Spain rejected her application, but this project opens up the possibility of it being the individual who does not recognise the state as his or her legitimate sovereign. All the videos that I am going to analyse in this essay have characteristics connected with the concept of internal colonialism, especially in the case of immigrants, “those” citizens without rights who have been created by coloniality. The reality of migration is enormous, and the representation of it in art is beginning to become a common practice; in the last ten years, works of art about the contexts of Latin America, Eastern Europe or Asia have become current on the Spanish art scene. However, as the geopolitical framework of this exhibition is the Mediterranean, I wish to focus this essay on the area of the Strait of Gibraltar and the European, Maghrebi and Sub-Saharan communities that are predominant in them. Most of the cultural practices that are analysed here have been created and presented by taking an “art” setting as the place in which they are developed and as their place of reference, although there are also works developed by collectives or in collaboration with affected communities. They are all different “ways of making or doing” which participate in what Paloma Blanco wrote in the catalogue of the exhibition Ninguna persona es ilegal. 10 años de arte europeo y norteamericano como reacción de artistas y movimientos sociales a la situación de las corrientes migratorias (No person is illegal. Ten years of European and North American art as a reaction by artists and social movements to the situation of streams of migration), which she curated for La Casa Encendida in 2003; namely, “the ability of art to produce imagery: reworkings of memory, counterparts capable of playing with the images that the viewer produces and constructions of antagonistic identities and ‘doings’ … formation of subject positions, of new agencies and ‘arrangements’, of solid nodes of intervention upon ‘reality’.”4 Emigration (and exile) in Spain have occasionally been represented in the visual arts. We have few testimonies from the modern age, but despite this scarcity our material culture has preserved brilliant contributions such as nineteenth-century social painting, the photographs of the Spanish exile after the Civil War and the pictures of Spanish immigrants in the continents of Europe and America in the 1950s and 1960s. In the case of our most immediate reality, I fear that we find the closest reference in a pioneering work that is unique in its period. I am referring to the film Viaje a la explotación (Journey to Exploitation), 1974, a social and political documentary made by the Cooperativa de Cinema Alternatiu, one of the militant film groups active in the 1970s, together with the Colectivo de Cine Madrid (both of them forerunners of later groups in the 1980s, such as Video- Nou in Catalonia and the Black Audio Film Collective in England). This Catalan group made use of the intrinsic tools of the medium of film to perform a critical deconstruction of the mechanisms of control and repression in the last years of the Franco regime. Viaje a la explotación deals with the incipient phenomenon of Maghrebi emigration to Spain seen from various viewpoints, including testimony from the immigrants themselves, while an off-screen narration analyses aspects such as poverty, racism, speculation, abuse and illegality, inherent in the phenomenon of immigration and now highly topical. However, that film is a considerable rarity, because the interests of the “official” artists of the following generation, the “happy eighties”, were concerned with other, more personal settings, not at all political and very speculative. In the context of the visual arts, it is not
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