Migration Narratives

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Workshop (1) in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Goethe-Institut Seoul, Gwangju Biennale, Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, 29.-31.01.2018 Seoul In „Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon“ by Khalo Matabane, Keniloe (South Africa 2005), a young poet strikes up a conversation with Fatima, a woman who fled from Somalia. He wants to make her the subject of his new book, but she disappears. He looks for her all over Johannesburg, resulting in a number of conversations on and with migration. These conversations reveal the numerous narratives with which migration is being told, or cannot be told, and ultimately, that refusal is a political strategy too. Migration not only entails but requires storytelling: the border passage always demands the „right“ story to be told. What can be heard by whom along the routes of migration is not always the same, and the law (and the border regimes) render many stories illegible – or illegitimate. But the film also points to storytelling as a migratory strategy: a means to account for, to share, and thus a form of recognition official history often withholds. Migratory storytelling also raises the question of the difference between transmission and tradition, as described by the Egyptian-French psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun. And maybe most crucial: the narratives of migration, or migration as a narration, reveal to us that migration is not a given subject. What we mean when we speak about and of migration is often dictated by policy making, by border regimes and by the state. And yet: the attempts to regulate migration, or to even name someone a migrant, or a movement as migration, is always already secondary, a response, often the attempt to contain that which will always exceed all attempts at being controlled. With the second workshop as a kind of walkahead footnote in mind – the art of migration – this workshop wants to allow for thinking migration in all directions. Locating it not only where it is already addressed, figuring out what knowledge circulates with and on migration, and what possibilities can lie within the perspectives of migration.

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