See Jonathan Darling's most recent Society & Space contributions: Another Letter from the Home Office: Reading the Material Politics of Asylum and Becoming Bare Life: Asylum, Hospitality, and the Politics of Encampment

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rawing from recent discussions of materiality and the politics of ‘new materialism’, I have recently sought to examine the material politics of asylum through focusing on the role that letters might play in both governing asylum seekers, and in exceeding the governmental intentions of their authors (Darling 2014a). I argue that we might consider asylum not as a process or a legal status, but as a material-discursive collective that takes shape differently across different spaces. The materials that constitute asylum – the forms, letters, certificates, bodies and belongings – take meaning and make meaning as they are enrolled in, and become part of, new spaces, discourses and practices. The importance of such a claim is to suggest that the perceptual frameworks that govern how we come to see and understand asylum, are constituted through the interaction of materials, discourses and spaces, without assuming a necessary primacy for any aspect of this triad. The governance of the citizen/non-citizen relation is accomplished as much through the banal employment of materials of distinction, such as legal documents, files, letters and forms, as it is through the discourses and categorisations that are maintained by those materials.

One consequence of taking seriously the material-discursive entanglements of asylum, is that such an approach demands a reconsideration of how a ‘critical politics of asylum’ might be imagined (Gill, 2010). If materials and discourses are co-constituted, shaped and reshaped by their contextual interactions, this means that the materials of asylum are sites of political re-appropriation as they cannot be separated from the discursive framings they help to constitute. If the way we perceive, name and categorise asylum as a political ‘issue’ or ‘problem’ is the result of a particular perceptual framework based on the nation-state, a desire for ‘managed’ mobility and a highly conditional humanitarianism, then it is sustained not simply through discourses of belonging and citizenship, but also through the material and affective investments that surround such discourses. Challenging these perceptual framings is far from easy as recent work on migrant activism, social movements and insurgent citizenship has highlighted (Bagelman, 2013; Darling, 2014b; Gill et al. 2014). One area of possibility highlighted in recent years has been that of artistic interventions that seek to either present alternative narratives on the surveillant state (Amoore and Hall, 2010), or that employ the materials of the border in new and critical ways (Squire, 2013; Weber, 2012). In this commentary, I want to reflect on one recent artistic project based in Manchester, UK, as a means to highlight some of the possibilities presented by taking seriously the material constitution of asylum.

One Thing

A residence permit, a battered handkerchief, a single silver table knife, a UK travel document, a copy of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a wallet and a key ring from Geneva, three fading passport sized images of family members. All displayed against a backdrop of deep blue, racing green, beige, grey and pink. Assembled together these objects represent the culmination of a four month art project named One Thing, a project which attempts to start conversations about asylum through the stories, memories and commonalities that are attached to material possessions. My own involvement with this project came through being asked to write some of the contextual information that formed the backdrop of the exhibition. The two artists, Emily Hayes and Anna White, approached a number of asylum activists and I to discuss the realities of the UK asylum system and to offer a view on how a community based arts project could engage with these issues. Alongside the exhibition, a podcast was produced which connects these discussions to the stories of those asylum seekers experiencing at first hand the marginality of the asylum determination process.

The One Thing project opened as part of Refugee Week 2014, and was based on a long-standing engagement by Emily and Anna with a number of Manchester based organisations, namely, the Boaz Trust, the Medaille Trust, the North City Library and the Rainbow Haven drop-in centre and support service. It is their work with the latter of these organisations that I want to focus on here. Rainbow Haven is a community drop-in centre for asylum seekers and refugees that offers information, advice and advocacy. In this context, One Thing set out to provide an opportunity for asylum seekers to explore commonalities with others through their material possessions. A series of workshops were run in the centre based around two main activities. Firstly, participants were asked to bring along belongings that were important to them. At each workshop, individuals were invited to share the stories associated with each object and were invited to photograph their objects against a coloured background. Participants could choose the colour they wanted to display their object on. Once each workshop participant had photographed their objects, discussion began as to which images and which objects would be used to form the exhibition. Each participant could choose only one object for the exhibition.

Once this choice was made, participants were invited to embroider onto fabric the stories behind their chosen object. For some this constituted sentences of explanation and memory, for others it meant short statements or single words expressing the emotions attached to prized possessions. Embroidery was utilised here to both offer a point of practical activity and engagement for those participating in the project, and to shape the aesthetics of the exhibition itself. Whitework embroidery was employed which involves stitching a pattern or text onto a fabric of the same colour as the thread used, most often white or cream. This had the effect of producing a series of panels that encourage the viewer to engage closely as the contours of the text blend into the fabric. The muted nature of these panels and their stories stood in contrast to the colourful backdrop to the photographs displayed alongside them. The intention here was to catch the eye of the viewer through the colours and aesthetics of these objects and to then employ the softer contours of the whitework to demand a closer engagement with the stories these objects communicate.

Across a series of workshops, sixty images of individual objects were produced and the panels relaying the stories of each object were stitched together to form a white fabric structure. Viewers could then enter this structure to be surrounded by the stories and memories assembled by this array of materials. This was intentionally an immersive experience, with the structure being designed to accommodate only one or two viewers at any one time. The solitary nature of this space, surrounded by the muted text of the whitework, was intended as a space for contemplating the stories of migration, memory and belonging that these objects brought forth, away from the bustle of the gallery outside. The final exhibition comprised of this fabric structure sitting alongside a wall of images, together with an accompanying booklet of images, poems from participants about specific objects, and explanatory text about the asylum system. With each object photographed against a rectangle of colour the effect was to produce a mosaic of materials and colours.

Co-production and the role of the ‘artist’

In considering the role that the varied materials of asylum played in this artwork, we can focus on two stages within this creative endeavour, those of production and those of display. Taking the process of artistic co-production first, Hawkins (2011:472) argues for the need to ‘explore not only art as a ‘finished’ object, but also to think about art works as ensembles of practices, artefacts, performances and experiences’. If we take this view of the One Thing project we might consider how the practice of this artwork shaped and reworked the space and the relations of the Rainbow Haven drop-in centre. In discussing the impact of the workshops on this space, Emily and Anna highlight how staff at Rainbow Haven would comment on the change in atmosphere that surrounded their presence as artists within the drop-in centre. By providing both an activity to engage in and a common point of conversation, the practice of discussing belongings, taking photographs, arranging materials and embroidering stories provided a point of sociality in an environment usually dominated by extended periods of waiting to seek advice.

Critically, the focus on material possessions meant that individuals were able to engage with the project in a variety of ways and were not constrained by the need for specific skills or experience. As Askins and Pain (2011) note in their work with young people, engagement is centrally about activity and the enrolment of participants into a shared project in which a sense of co-production and co-ownership is fostered. Enabling participants to take their own photographs, to discuss the images chosen and to play a part in recording their stories all brought participants closer to the shared production of the final exhibition.

The effect of using this creative outlet as a means to offer respite from the routine of awaiting appointments and seeking advice through Rainbow Haven, was tied to the material focus of the project itself. For, in starting with objects and asking individuals to consider those things they hold dear, the project sought to destabilise the focus on migratory status and categorisation that all too often dictates their lives. As discussions of identity documents, passports, biometrics, residency permits and travel documents make clear, the filtering of migration and asylum status is an ever present facet of migrant precarity, such that even in spaces of migrant sociality the affective power of categories is still considerable (Darling, 2014a; Waite, 2012). By discussing objects, the project sought to start from a point of commonality that was not so easily mired in the differentiations of asylum status. This meant that discussions were bound together by connections across objects, from pictures of family members to familiar ornaments, and in this process those involved came to see themselves, and each other, as part of a larger project. Highlighting commonalities of family, memory and aspiration that were shared through these materials encouraged individuals to view each other as artists in common.

Mundane materials and (un)remarkable conditions

The second stage to consider is that of this artworks’ exhibition, aesthetics and display. Here again, material-discursive relations are key. Whilst starting with objects was important in the production of the artworks, this was also significant as a mode of communication to different audiences. In putting together the project, Emily and Anna discussed the aims of the work with Rainbow Haven and it was suggested that the artwork should seek to not only provide points of sociality within the Rainbow Haven group, but should also seek to connect with other Manchester residents too. They cited a disconnect between perceptions of asylum and its reality in the city that was hard to address, as residents only heard about asylum from one of two sources. Either they were presented with the ‘problem’ of asylum and its ‘abuse’ from a largely hostile national media or, and often simultaneously, were presented with a counter-narrative that focused on war, persecution and rights which was hard to engage with on an individual level. In this context, the starting point of representing material possessions and the stories that emerge through them was one way to draw other residents into larger questions about asylum and the ‘bigger picture’ concerns of rights and the realities of life in the UK for those seeking asylum.

Beyond this, a focus on materiality is important for how it poses questions over the assumed normality of the practices of ordering and control that shape the lives of asylum seekers in the UK. As Amoore and Hall (2010) suggest, part of the value of artistic interventions can be in opening to critical inspection, governmental practices that are otherwise taken as banal. Art in this sense has the capacity to both illuminate, and to destabilise, perceptual routines and orders. In the case of One Thing, two prosaic materialities are brought to the attention of the viewer. Firstly, the relative lack of possessions and material effects that is characteristic of life as an asylum seeker in the UK. The stories attached to particular images in the exhibition highlight a series of objects, including a silver table knife and a battered handkerchief, as the only possessions individuals were able to bring with them on their journeys. As Conlon (2011) finds in examining the ‘fractured mosaic’ of everyday life for asylum seekers, material possessions are often rare and the ability to accumulate new possessions in the UK is constrained by both the minimal levels of asylum support provided and restrictions on what can be owned as a condition for such support. In this context, the stark presentation of single objects served to communicate something of the material lack that is associated with forced migration.

The second materiality that is brought to the attention of the viewer is the sheer banality of many of these objects. These are personal effects like so many others, family photographs, wallets, bracelets, ornaments and mobile phones. They illustrate the commonalities of possession, attachment and consumption that may transcend boundaries. Yet interspersed with such personal effects are a set of more bureaucratic materials, a residence permit, a passport, a temporary travel document, an identification card. These too become mundane through their association with the materials that surround them. Their presentation in a homogenous frame of colour aligns them with all the other objects displayed here. It is the relations between things that is of significance for, as Joerges (1999:414) argues, the agential capacity of objects “does not lie in themselves. It lies in their associations; it is the product of the way they are put together and distributed”. The capacity of these materials and documents to move individuals in particular ways – to joy, sorrow, fear or hope – is an effect of the associations they enact to frames of state authority and discourses of belonging and status. And, in the same way, the associations made in their presentation in One Thing, serves to critically question the banal authority of these material forms. As Askins and Pain (2011:813) note, exclusionary social relations and norms are often expressed and sustained through objects which become commonplace. The way such objects mediate relations of inequality and harm becomes routine as exclusionary orders of differentiation, othering and bordering are sustained and made unremarkable.

The materials of One Thing make manifest this banal relation between everyday possessions and the (un)remarkable material culture of governed mobility. Conditional residence permits, identity documents and temporary travel papers are expressions of the marginal positioning of asylum seekers within regimes of citizenship. Yet making such materials mundane, making them aesthetically pleasing even, serves to highlight how exceptional conditions and constraints may become commonplace for some.

The potentials of One Thing in its display and exhibition are those of opening questions over the normality of the asylum system and the assumptions of status and distinction it draws upon. Framing commonalities in terms of possessions serves to challenge the divisions that shape the presentation of asylum as a ‘problem’ to be managed. Whilst at the same time, making mundane the exceptional documents that sustain this architecture of division serves to encourage reflection on the conditional and surveillant nature of the asylum process. As with Amoore and Hall’s (2010) discussion of artistic interventions in the war on terror, the point is not to propose any alternative order or to sway opinion in any straightforward manner. Rather, many of the materials presented here are ambiguous, their stories are mundane and lie between categories of belonging, rejection, memory and aspiration. The point is to open conversations around asylum from a starting point that is not always-already one of suspicion and categorisation.

Aesthetic openings

Looking forward, it is worth considering how effective artworks such as this may be in opening discussions to new ways of seeing and thinking asylum. The One Thing project was by no means faultless in this effort. In attempting to engage as wide an audience as possible for the work, Emily and Anna set out to produce an aesthetically pleasing set of images that, whilst taken and chosen by the participants, were still directed by these two professionals. In part this is a concession to the expectations of art as an aesthetic practice and to the assumed demands of a future audience. Yet there is a risk that such materials become stripped of their discursive relations, of the stories that situate them and the governmental practices that shape their effects. The balance between context, explanation and ambiguity is essential to this form of situated artwork which poses questions of its viewer as much as its subject (Hawkins, 2011). However, what is significant here is that practices such as this, whilst small in scale and transitory in duration, seek to employ the materials that constitute contemporary asylum for the posing of critical questions. Whilst asylum as an issue continues to be depoliticised and dominated by an exclusionary framing of managerial governance, it is ever more important to think creatively about the micropolitics of perceptions and encounters, as much as the macropolitics of legislative change and radical alternatives. Articulating the questions that a residency permit, a family photograph and a frayed bracelet might pose may be just one place to start. 

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Emily Hayes and Anna White for taking the time to discuss their work with me, all errors remain my own. Images are by Anna White and One Thing Project Participants (2014), with permission. 

References

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