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In recent decades, the advent of digital borders has substantially altered migration dynamics. Territorial control through increasingly sophisticated technological devices, such as biometric identification, automated detection of human movement, and object recognition, goes hand in hand with symbolic bordering, amplified ad infinitum by the media and supported by fake and aggressive narratives in which social, cultural, and religious differences are represented as supposedly incompatible with “Western values”. That reality, the increasing height of physical, virtual, and symbolic walls, means that organizations and initiatives in solidarity with migrants face ever greater challenges.
At the core of the research behind this exhibit and of the Solroutes project is the social fabric of solidarity. Is it possible to rethink the idea of solidarity beyond traditional and mainstream frameworks of analysis, halfway between humanitarianism, political action, and charity? Can we deprovincialize a concept which was mainly developed in the Global North and re-imagine it starting from cases and situations in the Global South, and the agencies and worldviews on non-western subjects? Can we reinterpret the production of solidarity as a process which is fundamentally enmeshed in the informal, underground economy of border transgression?
Our aim is to raise new questions about the heuristic dimension of solidarity, fostering a better understanding of the relational and political dynamics at work along contemporary migration routes. More broadly, the project and the exhibit will attempt to shed light on the production of solidarity as a fluid process which is always in the making from a materialistic perspective. This requires us to think about spurious contexts and practices which exceed conceptual binaries such as ‘smugglers’/‘facilitators’, ‘profit’/‘not-for-profit’, and even ‘donor’/‘recipient,’ by looking at invisible and informal interactions and relations, tactical alliances, infrastructures, mutual aid and cooperation between people on the move, solidarity activists, ordinary people, artists and researchers.
Arts on the move > debordering Europe will develop in parallel with the various action/research phases of the Solroutes project and will also be one of its main final outcomes. Its aim is to highlight the need to collectively build tools to address (and face) the challenges of the social bordering process which is underway in Europe. This will be achieved by activating various community and transnational creative dynamics related to people on the move and their everyday lives.
Based on a multi-sited narrative structure, the exhibition will blend professional works created by different artists that will be specifically commissioned by Solroutes with creative projects that will be defined during the process. These projects will emerge from collaborations generated during fieldwork by people on the move, solidarity activists, researchers, and artists.
The decentralized and mobile nature of the exhibition will foster a balance between potential contributions arising from different locations, such as the Maghreb and the Mashreq, the Balkans, West Africa, and Europe. It will also allow the project to develop in an open and inclusive manner, adapting to the artists’ work, the fieldwork carried out by the research teams, and the various alliances formed along the way.
Arts on the move > debordering Europe aims to be a progressive, hybrid, and choral exhibition in motion, which will be available both in digital and paper formats. Conceptually, the digital component of the exhibition emphasizes the importance and contradictions of the digital sphere. The paper component aims to create intimate and simple spaces that give greater prominence to the various parties involved in the project, and the opportunity to promote self-managed exhibition displays.
