Aitana's reading notes

Borders and ghosts: migratory hauntings in contemporary visual cultures - Nermin Saybasili

Visual Culture designates an entire arena of visual representations which circulate in the field of vision establishing visibilities (and policing invisibilities), stereotypes, pose relations, the ability to know and to verify: in fact they establish the very realm of the "known" (Rogoff 200:20). What I am interested in, therefore, is what is beyond the "known" and beyond the predictable.

This image reflects on an "imagined world" [...] " the lines between the realistic and the fictional landscapes are blurred [...]

Border officials use this light against the "illegal" crossing of "immigrants". [...] In the advanced technological surveillance systems on European borders, the desire to make everything visible is also an imperative to make things legible and governable. [...]

Visibility ins a complex system of permission and prohibition, of presence and absence. [...]

[Lugagges] serve as compartments in which an immigrant carries his or her wishes, expectations, dreads and desires as well his or her anxieties or fears. [...]

Modern surveillance systems are based on the British philosopher, Jeremy Bentham's panopticon (Bentham 1843), which he invented in 1786 as the perfect prison, and which Michael Foucault saw as the major mechanism for the disciplining of society [...] each person in his or her cell or cage is alone, completely isolated and constantly visible under full lighting. She/he s the object of information, but never a subject of communication. [...] "visibility is a trap" (Foucault 1991 [1977]:200). [...]

"In a state of solitude, infantile superstitions, ghosts and specters, recur to the imagination" (cited by Mirzoeff 2022:241: Semple 1993:132)[...]

[...] people crossing borders [...] operate as "ghosts" mainly because "illegal" border-crossing is all about visibility and invisibility; about dissappearance as coming into presence. [...]

The image is a powerful reminder that materialist science cannot account for the textures of everyday experience of people crossing borders. "Ghost images" of the "illegal" immigrants empty all the realities an immigrant would firmly be tied to.[...]

Thus, we end up with an image that looks like a scene from a horror film. This image blind us.[...] It is spectral [...] and unable to refer to any life values or qualities. [...]

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