english text 191 tion Avalancha (Avalanche), 2008, inspired by a true event that occurred when an avalanche of immigrants overran the border, resulting in the death of many of them. The video shows a night scene with a number of people crouching in the darkness, waiting for the precise moment to climb over a fence. The artist does not identify the border or where the assailants come from, which could be anywhere in the world, but the effect of strangeness that I mentioned earlier appears when we see that the assailants are white. Belinchón makes the image into a negative, turning what we believe to be black into white. Equally critical, but with a more astringent humour, are Los Torreznos, a group that in their video Ejercicios para cruzar fronteras (Exercises for Crossing Borders), 2006, presents another kind of crossing: migrating in order to have an afternoon snack. The two members of the group, acting the part of sailors, migrants and smugglers, perform a series of actions in a setting with a boat, a harbour and a freezing countryside. Each situation is followed by an identification of the location and a number together with intertitles with phrases that give impressions about planning, movements and problems connected with crossing borders. The actions are specific and silent, cold and inexpressive, eliminating any kind of dramatic tension. Unlike Romantic heroes, Los Torreznos use synergies in their pathetic comedy, and their feet are their main form of transport as they make their way to their neighbours in another country to have an afternoon snack. These “exercises” speak to us about the right to cross borders, and so does The Right of Passage, 2013. This video is the third collaboration of the Australian artist Zanny Begg with the Austrian filmmaker Oliver Ressler in a series of works concerning economics, democracy, world order, forms of resistance and social alternatives. The video is constructed around interviews with three European theorists (Ariella Azoulay, Antonio Negri and Sandro Mezzadra) and five immigrants (Katim Sene, Lucía Egaña, Will Sands, Daniela Ortiz, César Zúñiga) who are “resident” in Barcelona. The issues that are raised have to do with the concepts of citizenship, globalisation, the nation-state, precariousness and resistance. The interviews took place at night and they alternate with pictures of airports, bus stations and ports, together with pages of passports animated by the ghostly presence of immigrants who reject a depoliticised invisibility and repudiate the normalisation of the European Union’s xenophobic policies. The title is an allusion to personal “rites of passage”, which in this case become “rights of passage” that proclaim freedom of movement as one of the fundamental rights of people. Epilogue Today, 29 November 2015, I was drinking a coffee and reading a newspaper in the comfort of my home in Madrid, many kilometres from the drama of emigration, when a headline brought me back to the scene of the crime: “Doris Salcedo revives the victims of the Strait”.10 The article provided information about a project that the Colombian artist is preparing for the Museo Reina Sofía, to be exhibited in 2017, in which she pays tribute to the people who have died in their attempt to reach Europe by sea. The installation, called Palimpsesto (Palimpsest), will consist in filling the 1,100 square metres of the floor of the Palacio de Cristal (Madrid) with sand on which, by means of a complex hydraulic system, the names of hundreds of people who have drowned will be written with water. The visitor will be able to walk over the sand on raised ramps, thus dispelling the anonymity of the dead and revealing forgotten identities. Doris Salcedo’s work is characterised by sculptures made up of fragments of pieces of furniture in which the hollows and empty spaces allude to the theme of absence and the ghostly presence of those who have suffered institutional violence. Her masterpiece is undoubtedly the installation Shibboleth, shown at the Tate Modern (London), in which she created a crack that ran the length of the Turbine Hall. A prophetic crack that acted as a metaphor to show us “the edge of a wound” that does not heal, that suppurates and becomes gangrenous. Despite the distance between the artist’s studio in Bogotá and the Strait of Gibraltar, the Palimpsesto project will also make an exploration of the spectral nature of a violence that is not explicit but that is evoked. This physical distance reminds me of a distance in time, and specifically of the talk that I attended on 20 June 2014, Border fractalisation beyond metropolis. Mapping topographies and emerging border practices, given by Sebastián Cobarrubias and Maribel Casas as part of the activities arranged in the exhibition Colonia Apócrifa: Imágenes de la colonialidad en España, 2014.11 They both have doctorates awarded by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and they are specialists on migration policies, social movements and the political economics of globalisation. In their current research they are studying the externalisation of the European Union’s southern border, focusing on the case of Spain and its relationships with Morocco and the countries of West Africa. Since the promulgation of the policy of the “Global Approach to Migration” in 2005, the activities of border “management” and “security” have shifted to territories far from the conventional boundaries. What in official terms is known as the “External Dimension” of Europe’s border policy is really a process of stretching borders, a kind of border “fractalisation”. Thus the Mediterranean has ceased to be the natural boundary, which has shifted to the south of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan, which means that our tourists can rest in peace and safety because they are well “protected”. In their talk, Cobarrubias and Casas showed a whole series of militant maps and also cartographies made by social movements which point to borders and their transformations as the starting point for an understanding of the present reality. Among all the pictures there was one that particularly caught my attention:
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