by Ayten Gundogdu
Border policies have made the journeys of migrants significantly treacherous, leading to hundreds of fatalities annually. These deaths are oftentimes tape-recorded as analytical quotes by worldwide companies: The” Missing Migrants Task of the International Organization of Migration, for instance, provides a quote of” 46, 000 casualties since 2000,” as it requires global action to deal with “an epidemic of criminal offense and victimization.” Such initiatives to produce a sense of outrage by the large magnitude of numbers leave much to be claimed regarding these fatalities. So do the constant newspaper article about “migrant watercraft crashes,” which are typically accompanied by photos of jammed or capsized boats, search and rescue teams, and carcass on the coast.
These all-too-familiar photos functioned as a starting point for contemporary musician Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen’s multimedia setup End of Desires As Larsen puts it, “Each day I saw images of perished travelers and I intended to react to this with my work.” Larsen’s project at first began in 2014, when he prepared 48 sculptures utilizing wire armature as an assistance structure for concrete canvas, a kind of textile that solidifies when subjected to water and is utilized especially in the building of shelters in catastrophe areas. These sculptures, stimulating the images of dead migrants wrapped in fabric or placed in body bags, were then set up under a boating and submerged in the sea off the coast of Pizzo Calabro in South Italy. The first plan was to allow them “gradually get an aging of sea microorganisms” and then exhibit them as “a sculptural constellation noted by the wear and tear of the sea,” as described on Larsen’s web site A powerful storm destroyed the raft, nevertheless, and spread the sculptures across the seabed and onto close-by coastlines On the same night that the tornado hit, a migrant boat capsized in the Sicilian Strait. The tornado, along with the information of the tipped over watercraft, brought about a re-envisioning of the project. Larsen employed scuba divers to situate and movie the spread sculptures. What arise from this effort is a multimedia installment included a five-channel video shot undersea, a structure of several of the sculptural continues to be, and a collection of portraits documenting the marks and cuts inflicted on the sculptures by the storm accident.
Larsen’s End of Dreams postures pushing questions regarding the deadly repercussions of restrictive border plans and the challenging task of celebrating the deaths of migrants who usually continue to be unidentified. Originating in an “mishap,” it likewise presses the audiences to face, and probably also resist, the usage and abuse of this term in media summaries of migrant deaths. “Crash,” after all, indicates a regrettable event that is unanticipated and unintended, leading to damages or injury. End of Desires elevates the troubling opportunity that what is typically cast as “mishap” may actually turn out to be a “crime.”
This last factor draws from a striking comment that Walter Benjamin makes in his well-known 1936 essay, “The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Recreation.” As Benjamin explains the critical makeover that digital photography goes through once its centerpiece shifts from the picture to the streets, he refers his readers to the pictures of deserted Paris that Eugene Atget took around 1900: “It has rather justly been claimed of him that he photographed them like scenes of criminal offense. The scene of a criminal activity, also, is deserted; it is photographed for the function of establishing evidence. With Atget, photos end up being conventional evidence for historical incidents, and obtain a hidden political significance.” [1] Regardless of the various designs of Atget and Larsen, Benjamin’s declaration could be useful in taking into consideration the essential treatment that End of Dreams makes in response to contemporary representations of movement specifically in the media. It is necessary to note in this regard that the concrete canvas sculptures, photographed with their marks and cuts in the portraits, are arranged in the multimedia setup in such a way not unlike bodies in a criminal offense scene. In some areas, each one develops into a corpus delicti , or “the body of the criminal activity,” to make use of a lawful term, figuratively serving as proof of an injury resulting from border plans that press migrants to ever extra harmful courses.
These canvas sculptures also have a creepy quality: If they are meant to look like caskets or body bags including the corps of travelers, it is likewise essential to keep in mind that they are vacant; there is absolutely nothing inside the cable armature. And as Thomas Laqueur places it in his publication, The Work of the Dead , “A purposely vacant burial place– a cenotaph– or an empty casket have power exactly because they lack what is widely expected.” [2]
With their remarkable emptiness, the sculptures in Larsen’s End of Dreams accentuate the “crashes” that enter into the production and unmaking of humans as individuals, or rights-bearing subjects. Because of Laqueur’s declaration, we could keep in mind that what is gone missing in these sculptures is not just corpus yet likewise “the person,” which is usually recognized metaphysically as an inherent quality that grants people with inalienable legal rights based in their integral dignity. This is a concept that has its origins in Christianity, particularly the arguments on the Trinity, which triggered the concept of “person”as “a private, intransmissible (incommunicable), logical essence.” [3] Also the secularized understandings of personhood have traces of this spiritual family tree as they remain to take personhood as an essential feature of human beings. However Larsen’s empty canvas sculptures challenge such a metaphysics of the human individual and indicate that personhood is not an important substance fundamental in all people but instead a synthetic and unintentional quality, a constructed effect of legal, political, social, and aesthetic practices. Removed of these marks of personhood, there is absolutely nothing to the human yet a hollow armature.
This possibility ends up being even more palpable in Larsen’s pictures of these sculptures, which relocate far from the standard focus of portrait photography: the human face To go back to Benjamin, photography exemplifies the historic makeover of the artwork in the age of its technological reproducibility, particularly the loss of an aura affixed to the irreproducible and irreplaceable selfhood of a work. However also this cutting edge tool still held onto some kind of cult value in its onset: “It is no accident that the picture was the prime focus of very early photography. The cult of remembrance of liked ones, absent or dead, supplies a last refuge for the cult value of the image. For the last time the aura rises from the very early photos in the short lived expression of a human face.” [4] Pictures of human face continue to inhabit a central location in civils rights photography, including those that fixate the styles of migration and displacement. By shifting away from the human countenance and its connected mood, Larsen’s “portrait series” of canvas sculptures mean a desacralized understanding of the human person, one that breaks with the concept that the human individual is that which brings its fundamental dignity within. There is probably still the idea of an irreplaceable distinctiveness– if we attend to the individual marks and cuts imprinted by the tornado and the water microorganisms that a few of the sculptures gotten throughout their life time in the seabed– yet a distinctiveness that is not intrinsically offered, rather one that has accumulated and set up with time, layer upon layer. And once one gets rid of those layers, there is just an upsetting void.
[1] Walter Benjamin, “The Masterpiece in the Age of Mechanical Recreation,” in Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt (New York City: Schocken Books, 1969, 217– 251, at 226
[2] Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton College Press, 2015, 18
[3] Adolf Trendelenburg, A Payment to the Background of words Individual , trans Carl H. Haessler (Chicago: The Open Court Posting, 1910, 21
[4] Benjamin, “The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Recreation,” 226