Notes about Home . . . in Minnesota
by Pamela Vázquez Torres
The dignity of a safe home shouldn’t be determined by color of skin or country of birth. The ongoing social movement in Minneapolis, now spread out nationally and internationally, is a reclamation of home. Opposed to corporate media coverage of events, reactions by local artists to the killing of George Floyd capture the other faces of the community’s stance and are proof of art’s important role as documentation and as a denounce mechanism. My work on this piece began a world ago. I was set to do research on the symbiotic relationship between art and migration, prompted by the exhibition, “When Home Won’t Let You Stay,” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) planned for February 23 to May 24, 2020.
The exhibition landed close to home in a multitude of ways. For the past four years, I had come to explore firsthand the experience of being an immigrant to the United States. To this was added my experience as an art historian, and the questions I had come to develop on the role that art institutions and organizations were working towards to address this social reality. A few months later, the world has come to face – at least for most generations around the globe – an unprecedented, collective sense of displacement and grief that has heightened the notion of home as an essential part of human life whilst recognizing its quality as a chimeric, a-located (without a place), lived experience.
The exhibition takes its name from a verse in the poem titled “Home” by Somalian-British poet Warsan Shire. In a 2015 interview Shire shared that she first drafted this poem after her experience in 2009 with a group of young refugees from Somalia, Eritrea, Congo and Sudan at the abandoned Somali Embassy in Rome; she wrote the poem “for them, for my family and for anyone who has experienced or lived around grief and trauma in that way.”[i] Somalian war refugees from the 1990s along with immigrants of Hispanic descent are the two main immigrant groups that contribute to the Minnesotan social fabric. The title’s line is introduced in the first part of the poem and reads as follows:
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
The exhibition is an acknowledgment of how migration has shaped the world from its most local repercussions to its place as a defining force of the global reality in the twenty-first century. Art is then part of the political conversation, as Cuban artivist Tania Bruguera, one of the artists showcased in the exhibition, would argue, a powerful resource when other mechanisms have failed, one that can lead to political effectiveness. “When Home Won’t Let You Stay” is a call for empathy. It is also an institutional stance by Mia on a complex topic that, at its most “local,” is to this day intrinsically rooted in the history of Minnesota and in the foundation of this country. Ruth Erickson and Eva Respini state that migration in the twenty-first century should be understood as the “default, rather than the exception.”[ii]
Having traveled from its inaugural exhibition at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA),[iii] “When Home Won’t Let You Stay” gathered work by twenty artists around the globe – from Colombia, Cuba, India, Iraq, Ireland, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, South Korea, the United States, and the United Kingdom – in a vast array of mediums that dug deeply into the notions of home, displacement, and artistic practice of the diaspora. The exhibition welcomed a constellation of events like artist talks and community discussions, and offered digital content woven into the curatorial work that included written pieces and audio media that portrayed the stance on the subject by participating artists themselves, as well as that of local artists and members. All these resources are available on the exhibition’s profile at Mia’s website.[iv]
Mumbai-based artist Reena Saint Kallat’s installation Woven Chronicle (2011-16) has become the recognizable cover for the exhibition, used in all printed and digital press, a work that through its monumentality as an audiovisual experience serves perfectly as an introduction to the understanding of the global. Other iconic works include Safe Passage (2016) by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei,[v] a colorful installation made with life jackets recovered from refugees in the coasts of Greece coming from Turkey and displayed in Mia’s main facades at its U.S. premiere. Or Tania Bruguera’s flag When Dignity Has No Nationality, that shows an image of the world with seamless boundaries as an argument for everyone’s universal right for dignity and inclusiveness regardless of citizenship or national territorial belonging.[vi] Also worth noting is the inclusion of the Minneapolis-based arts organization CarryOn Homes project that focuses on immigrant and refugee histories.[vii] CarryOn Homes is a public art project that was first presented as the recipient of Minneapolis’ Creative City Challenge[viii] in 2018 and was also included in the inaugural Boston exhibition.
The exhibition catalogue is dedicated to prominent Nigerian curator and theorist Okwui Enwezor, “whose incisive and committed work vastly enlarged the horizons of art, scholarship, and museums, and without whom this project is unimaginable.” Enwezor, who passed away in 2019, wrote extensively on postcolonialism and its inextricable bond with creativity, and was one of the most influential contemporary scholars that advocated for the inclusion of non-Western artistic practice into the narrative of contemporary art. Enwezor’s concept of “political constellation” referred to the understanding that globalization after imperialism fostered a matrix of complex geopolitical configurations that determined “all systems of production and relations of exchange” (Enwezor, 2003) and that inevitably configured distinct forms of subjectivity and creativity. Against the misconception of the myth of a consolidated contemporary art world, Okwui Enwezor argued for an understanding of contemporary art theory as a state of permanent transition that derived into mobile sites of discourse (Enwezor, 2003).
For Enwezor, the curator ought to commit to a critical stance that aspired to agency, departing from canonical thinking to a reflexive conception of museums as objects of historical thought, and in possession of a social life and political dimension (Enwezor, 2003). In Tania Bruguera’s contribution to the opening program, the artist posed the question of whether or not institutions could feel – whether or not institutions can keep up with the conversations of today. My general impression is that Mia has embraced the challenge of addressing relevant social concerns[ix] and leveling the institution’s visibility platform in favor of those who have been historically sidelined by the art world. In conversations on this that I’ve had with other community members in and out of local art circuits, they have confirmed a similar perception: Mia’s conscious and constant effort to widen and redefine their platform as societal changes demand has had an overall positive reception within the community. Other local institutions are yet to raise the bar and successfully address the challenge. A recent example is the case of a controversial acquisition by the Walker Art Center that brought the museum harsh scrutiny and criticism that ultimately led to the destruction of the artwork and the stepping down of their director.
We now see institutions and curators thinking more globally, and about the relationship between roots and routes— the convergence of these two things, of people who are rooted but also people who are uprooted, who are en route, who are going somewhere, and whether that somewhere represents a place of hospitality or hostility.
Okwui Enwezor in a 2019 interview with Eva Respini:
How do we define the bar we use to hold institutions accountable for their responsibility to rise to the occasion? Art spaces, as civic spaces, need to foster dialogue and critical thinking and can’t afford to skip being part of the conversations of the zeitgeist. To this day, global politics have continued to fail in establishing a system in place to deal with immigration beyond of the harmful “friend or foe[x]” (Okwui and Eva Respini, 2019) reductionism. Ultimately, we have been brought here through a tradition of xenophobia as a conductive thread.
In “America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States,” Erika Lee contests the popular argument that the United States is a country of immigrants and invertedly claims that in fact, it could be more rightly defined as a nation of xenophobia. Lee is the Director of the Immigrations History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, and according to her, xenophobia is an “American tradition” in its own right, going back to the nineteenth century. During the opening day program back in February, Lee reminded the audience that the relevant question is not whether immigration will be resolved soon (it won’t) or not, but rather a question of whether we will let xenophobia endure. As Lee has highlighted, we must continue to explore the reasons why people leave home and work on recognizing one in the other. Creativity offers us a language we can use to grasp a sense of the vast array of subjectivities that emerge from global migration, and how they coexist in the diaspora. Perhaps the forced confinement we are currently experiencing can help us reject the idea of home as a singular expression of ourselves, and in the words of Sara Ahmed recognize the “strangeness and movement within the home itself” (Ahmed in Erickson and Respini, 2019).[xi]
[i] “Home” by Warsan Shire. Facing History and Ourselves, https://www.facinghistory.org/standing-up-hatred-intolerance/warsan-shire-home
[ii] Erickson, Ruth and Respini, Eva. “Curators’ Introduction” in Erickson, Ruth, Respini, Eva, eds. “When Home Won’t Let You Stay”. Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Yale University Press, 2019.
[iii] “When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art”, Oct 23, 2019 – Jan 26, 2020: https://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/when-home-won%E2%80%99t-let-you-stay-migration-through-contemporary-art
[iv] Audio Experiences: Expanded Voices is available through Mia’s website at https://new.artsmia.org/when-home-wont-let-you-stay-art-and-migration/expanded-voices/
[v] Pes, Javier. “Ai WeiWei Wins a Legal Battle With Volkswagen Over and Ad That Featured His Refugee-Themed Art Installation Without Permission. artnet. Art and Law, July 17, 2019. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ai-weiwei-vw-refugees-1603096
[vi] Dignity Has No Nationality, 2017 by Tania Bruguera. http://creativetime.org/projects/pledgesofallegiance/tania-bruguera/
[vii] The project’s website reads: “45 of our immigrant and refugee friends in Minnesota have been invited to our studio with an object they carried along in the trips from their home countries to US. Here are our stories”
[viii] CarryOn Homes at The Commons, 2018: https://carryonhomes.com/projects/carryonhomesathecommons
[ix] “Mia presents exhibition of artwork created in response to the fatal shooting of Philando Castile”, Minneapolis Institute of Art, May 17, 2018, https://new.artsmia.org/press/mia-presents-exhibition-of-artwork-created-in-response-to-the-fatal-shooting-of-philando-castile/
[x] “Could there be a more enervating sense of cultural relationship in a globalizing world than the one sketched above, in which contact between peoples is grounded in some nativist understanding of friend and foe?”, Okwui Enwezor, “Tebbit’s Ghost”, re-published in the exhibition catalogue of When Home Won’t Let You Stay, 2019.
[xi] Erickson, Ruth and Respini, Eva. “Curators’ Introduction” in Erickson, Ruth, Respini, Eva, eds. “When Home Won’t Let You Stay”. Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Yale University Press, 2019.
BREAKING DOWN “OPEN BORDERS”
How the Trump Administration defines the concept and why that matters
by Sofia Silveira-Florek
“This is not about immigration. What is transpiring right now is purely about infectious disease and public health,” insisted Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection,[1] when debating reporters in early April.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus fear wave, even before the World Health Organization considered it a global threat, activists for Asian and Asian-American rights were pointing out that xenophobic attacks were happening throughout the United States against people perceived as “Chinese”[2] and, therefore, potential coronavirus transmitters.
Attacks against immigrant – or “immigrant-looking” – citizens before covid-19 “became” the massive systemic problem that it is show that migration and protection, or, at least, the sensation of protection, are always connected.
The history of diseases frequently accompanies xenophobia and attacks against immigrants. The 1892 cholera pandemic was at the center of disinformation campaigns against the United States receiving groups (caravans, even) of Eastern European Jewish migrants. The same happened with Chinese immigrants during the 1900 bubonic plague outbreak in San Francisco.[3] Along with the stigmatization of the LGBTQ population, the AIDS pandemic was accompanied by the labeling of Haitians as a special high-risk category for the disease[4] – a judgment based solely on nationality.
As covid-19 evolved from an epidemic into a pandemic, discussions about xenophobia and racism were left aside as the perception of it being “everyone’s problem” increased. Now, countries like Germany, Spain, Italy and New Zealand are reclaiming a resemblance of “normal life” as countries like Brazil, Russia and Turkey are only in the beginning of what looks like an uphill battle against anti-science governments, underfunded public health systems and overwhelming underreporting of covid-related deaths.
The United States, despite being the country with the most coronavirus cases in the world, seems to be narratively set apart from those “underdeveloped” nations despite its appalling covid statistics and highly incoherent governmental policy strategy to combat the virus. The same country that drowns exceptionally deep in conspiracy theories about the disease is also at the forefront of potentially producing vaccines with ample industrial infrastructure to distribute a cure around the world.
In September 2019, Donald Trump addressed the UN general council saying: “When you undermine border security, you are undermining human rights and human dignity. Many of the countries here today are coping with the challenges of uncontrolled migration. Each of you has the absolute right to protect your borders.”[5]
A few months later, in a changed world, it is important to return to the concept of xenophobia and its intimate ties to the sensation of protection. In a modernity defined by constant reminders of the threat imposed by infections, what does it mean to protect borders? And protect from whom or what?
In 1985, a twenty-nine-year-old Haitian social worker named Marcelle Fortune was refused as a tenant by a landlord who was afraid she could spread AIDS throughout the building (KRAUT, p. 8, 1994).
I started this text wanting to talk about Trump’s definition of open borders, but the current scenario changes the weight of the president’s words. If he already spoke of and to migrants as viruses – “you will not be released into our country” – now, in times of high-anxiety and economic insecurity, it is an obligation to stay vigilant about health concerns being “not about migration.” It always is.
When some of the most important players in the political landscape confine a complex reality into an in-group versus out-group mentality, protecting the nation immediately becomes a matter of closing borders.
That international affairs strategy is replicated by civilians, who see it as their right to protect themselves against an external, theoretically invisible, threat. The menace becomes visible once it gains a name, a face, an origin. As the United States and other nations across the globe grieve for the consequences of the pandemic and the many lives lost, it is important to remember Marcelle Fortune and so many others throughout history who became the face of a “faceless” enemy. As lives are lost and panic ensues, immigrants’ lives are impacted whether they contract the virus or not.
Open borders is a valuable concept for anti-immigration advocates because it is an empty idea, fluctuating as the scene changes. With a health-related twist, the idea of open borders for the Trump administration might change once again, now signifying countries who have not “stepped up against the covid threat” in a narrative that frames the current president as a hero who is only giving the nation its sacred patriotic right to fight for its territory.
Sources
Grmek, MD. ed. History of AIDS: Emergence and Origin of a Modern Pandemic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 1990.
Kraut AM. Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace.” New York: Basic Books; 1994.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/09/politics/southern-border-coronavirus/index.html
[2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide
[3] 59 Nordic J. Int’l L. 186 (1990) The Right to Freedom of Movement and the (Un)Lawfulness of AIDS/HIV Specific Travel Restrictions from a European Perspective. Available at: https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/nordic59&div=20&id=&page=
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/31/us/debate-grows-on-us-listing-of-haitians-in-aids-category.html