Jena Project
January 11th, 2007(un)Documented Disappearance
I would like to light up the sewage up Jena, metaphorically but also physically. By putting lights in the sewage canals, people will be attracted to look inside. They will be drawn to see what’s between the bars of the sewage covers. What they will discover is not only their own waste but a full size picture of a migrant/asylum seeker displaying his/her papers. The viewers like the police and border guard will be able to check the papers and explore the bureaucracy. Through examples in different sewage entrances they can learn about the variety of legal status of refugees and migrants in Jena and elsewhere. The installation will function like a museum of bureaucratic legal papers, which to some people mean the difference between life and death.
But the display will not last. Rain and snow, cigarette butts and chewing gum, and the rubbish of the city will erase these pictures and the display of different migrants showing their papers to the public from the city’s sewage will disappear, just like so many people who already have. But the papers, the evidence of the regime, that will be treated with protection, they will last and will stay in sewage as a memory of the people who have confronted only days before.
Backround info:
Light can be used to expose, to draw attention to the hidden, to the put a spotlight on problems that are dealt with in the dark. There is no light in the sewage system of cities. Society does not want to see its bodily wastes and the results of its consumption. We want dark tunnels to carry this away to places removed from visibility.
Our economic and political systems work in a similar ways, we want the unpleasantness, the problems, and the disasters that we create distanced from us, to places we don’t see, places which are, in the best case, thousand of miles away.
Nobody wants to live in the sewage; therefore, hundreds of thousand of people each year flee from the areas of the political and economic waste - both historical and contemporary – of the world system. Many of them don’t make it; they die, trying to reach a better life. The few that manage to “enter” the so-called Western world are subject to migration regimes that confine them into segregated, poverty-stricken neighborhoods or camps.
The European migration regime is both part of a global system and a trendsetter for intensified control and restrictive laws. But this policy is not simply aimed at keeping refugees and migrants out of Europe, but also makes it unbearable for those already living inside. Many are restricted in where they are allowed to live, have no freedom of movement, and have no legal way of working and making a livable wage.
From Brussels via Paris to Barcelona, from Athens via Hamburg, to Rome and Jena - nearly everywhere in Europe today we see forceful struggles and campaigns by migrants and refugees for their legalization, for their right to stay and their right to move freely. Jena has a strong history of migrant struggle that has been successful in improving the conditions. This could be a reason for the city to be proud. But the process of fighting for rights is long and in most cases still unsuccessful. Many migrants wait over ten years, living in restricted areas, restricted not only in their legal, but social, economic, and political rights only to be “refused” and end up being deported. Or, if they are lucky, they succeed to “hide” and live a life in “illegality”. Even “tolerated” refugees spend years trying to achieve work permits, permanent legal status or citizenship, at the mercy of ever changing regulations and migration policies. In Jena, as elsewhere in Germany and Europe, refugees from other parts of the world tend to live a segregated life in the shadows of society, removed from visibility, as if they were not here at all.
