english text 190 Villaplana in Valencia, which gave rise to a series of film showings and discussions of problems of immigration and representation. The work group, mostly Maghrebi immigrants, focused the debate on the Spanish context and denounced the situation of having to perform unpaid work as a precondition for obtaining a residence permit (legality). When the filming of the video was finished it was distributed and there were showings and debates in education institutions, civic centres and art institutions. The video combines archive images with testimony and reports from the media, presenting a cacophony of migrant voices denouncing the racism and xenophobia in this country.8 This critical focus on emigration becomes a political focus in the work of the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann, whose consideration of borders, mobility, technology and gender reflects on the global economy, but from a local micro-perspective. Her video Europlex, 2003, made in collaboration with the anthropologist Angela Sanders, concentrates on work activities performed in the area around the Spanish border with Morocco in Ceuta. The smuggling carried out by women on this route taken by domestic employees every day and the work of women in transnational areas in north Africa for the European market are analysed as practices around, about and within borders. This interest in the politics of mobility and immigration continues in a later work called Sahara Chronicle, 2006–2009. It is an installation of 12 videos shown or projected on monitors together with a wall-size picture taken from a satellite showing the human routes in the south of Libya, with a text superimposed on it. The videos document the current Sub-Saharan exodus towards Europe, which has generated a prolific network of exchanges and information systems and a social system between the migrants and the local populations. Sahara Chronicle shows the intersections of migratory transit in the Libyan desert, the border between Morocco and Algeria, Mauritania, Niger and Western Sahara, and the clandestine movement between Senegal and the Canary Islands. The videos have no voice-over narration and they allow meaning to emerge from the interstices between the images.9 Biemann’s work is one of the few examples of international artists who have taken an interest in the problems of the Strait of Gibraltar. Moroccan artists have also not made many contributions, because the subject of immigration, the border and the Strait is an issue explored mostly by Spanish artists. Nevertheless, some of the work done by Moroccan artists is of great interest, especially the series of photographs of the Strait taken by Yto Barrada, the installations created by Mounir Fatmi and the videos made by Bouchra Khalili. The second of these artists, Mounir Fatmi, has made two works about emigration: Sacs Mortuaires / Body Bags, 1999, in which he presents some black coffins as an explicit metaphor about the implicit dangers involved in crossing the Strait illegally, and D’où vient le vent (From Where the Wind Comes), 2002, about the immigrant communities that inhabit the outskirts of European cities (migration and urban areas is a recurrent theme in a new generation of French artists of Maghrebi origin, such as Zineb Sedira, Zineddine Bessai, Mohamed Bourouissa or Massimissa Salmani). Khalili, a Moroccan artist who lives in Berlin, made a two-channel video installation called Straight Stories, 2006, in which there is an alternation of two border areas, one real and the other imaginary, formed by the sea; Part 1 concentrates on the Strait, while Anya is set in the region of the Bosporus. The first video presents four accounts given by people living between two continents (Europe and Africa); the first one is given by Magdalena, an Argentine emigrant who lives in Vejer de la Frontera (Cádiz); the second speaker is Franco, a Spanish-Italian man living in Morocco; the third is Rachid, a Moroccan who works in the south of Spain; and the fourth is Issam, a Moroccan who has never left his country. Their voices are accompanied by pictures of the coast, the crossing of the Strait, boats and shores, linking together stories full of wishes, longings, failures and also prejudices. Khalili’s interest in the problems of migration appears again in the installation The Mapping Journey Project, 2008–2011, which consists of 8 video projections and 8 silkscreen prints with the title The Constellations. She asked each of 8 illegal immigrants to draw the itinerary of their clandestine journey towards Europe; the drawings that they made mark out the secret maps of migration, a kind of alternative cartography of the Mediterranean. This “invisibility” of the migrant is also the theme of Rogelio López Cuenca’s video Calor humano (Human Warmth), 2008. It was made for an exhibition with the same name at the MUSAC in 2008 and it takes its title from an article by Justo Navarro published in the Andalusian edition of the newspaper El País on 30 May 1999. The author of the article pointed out that the surveillance industry has perfected itself to the point of developing thermal cameras that detect human warmth at a distance. As a result, the small boats that previously were not picked up on radar have now become sources that reveal body temperatures. Human warmth ceases to be conceived in terms of embraces and affection and becomes a means for detecting “illegal” immigrants, now described as “irregular” migrants. Set against a black background and accompanied by the sound of the sea, the video shows various numbers related to a vocabulary of terms that are now familiar on borders (intercepted, immigrants, arrested, drowned, illegal, minors, corpses, dead, etc.). It ends with a numerical value: 36.5 degrees Celsius, the normal temperature of a living human body. The metaphor of Europe as an area with an impregnable boundary is often associated with terms such as attack, assault or invasion. This warlike dimension can also be found in Sergio Belinchón’s video installa
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