Caminata Nocturna
Two Channel Video Installation
A/V 22 minutes.
Karl Ingar
Røys’ Caminata Nocturna documents
both the flight and pursuit of illegal economic migrants across the Mexico-U.S
border. Or at least that’s what it initially appears to document. In actuality, the video depicts a facsimile of
such events, a tourist sideshow put on by the inhabitants of the town of
Alberto 2000 kilometers from the border. This adventure holiday allows mainly
Mexican tourists to experience and enjoy-since tourism is always about an
attempt at happiness- something like an illegal border crossing into the United
States. The simulation of migrating hopes and fears in Alberto began July 2004 as part of the Parque EcoAlberto, a
holiday ‘eco-park’ established with financing from the Mexican State.
The dual
screens of Caminata Nocturna present sharply edited fragments of bodies running
or pushing stealthily forward, police trucks screeching down roads and the
barked bureaucratic speech of border lockdown amidst a night bisected by the converging
torch light tunnels of flight and pursuit. One screen is panic and the other screen is
pursuit. And finally, there’s an abrupt bringing together, dual images of a
circle of cop cars and running bodies abruptly immobilized, kneeling and lying
on the ground as police regulate and question them. Then, the chase in the
video begins again with a more elongated but no less frantic temporality, as it
must every evening on the U.S-Mexico border in a repetition of desperate
economic migration and disciplinary praxis.
Caminata Nocturna ends with Røys slowly approaching and eventually
standing in front of a parked police truck that endlessly repeats the
automatized statements of the law against economic migrants. An image of
deadlock, stasis, entropy and fright that suggests a certain impotence of
politically engaged artistic practices against the forces of capitalism.
However, if art cannot be an emancipatory politics it can be transitive to such,
opening up and investigating a problematic such as economic migration in a way
that at least makes it visible as a problem of capitalism. That Røys
redoubles this tourist simulation as a video installation productively
problematises the role of politically engaged art; a tension emerges between
distance and proximity, engagement and representation that’s always present but
often unacknowledged in such work. In underlining it’s own status as representation, Caminata Nocturna insists that art is never commensurable with it’s
object and through this gap is capable of raising questions beyond the immediately grotesque phenomena of an illegal
migration play camp.
An initial question is how
to cut through the doubling and redoubling of performative migratory misery and
state control that the video presents us with. What place does Caminata
Nocturna attempt to show? The video reiterates the name of the tourist trek
and the term Caminata Nocturna is suggestive in this act. ‘Caminata’ means a
walk or hike and ‘Nocturna’ is the same as nocturnal, it’s sibling in English,
as in to be of the night. The night in Caminata
Nocturna has an accentuated physicality to it and if completely abstracted
from it’s socio-economic and political content, the video could be viewed as a
formal exercise in the iterations of darkness and attempts to precariously
illuminate actions within it. Caminata
Nocturna plays with darkness and light constantly, with the pretend figures
of ‘migrants’ and ‘police’ sliding in and out of vision, a sudden burst of
surveillance infrared revealing a line of walkers in the desert, with figures
otherwise threatened with a submersion in darkness. This relative, always
slightly compromised, opacity to vision might be seen as analogous to the
necessarily clandestine forms illegal economic migration takes.[N] And it also
suggests another relatively opaque operation: in much political ‘debate’ a
structural necessity for capitalism is hysterically repackaged as a crime while
an unlicensed labor market is created that also benefits capital.
It’s worth emphasizing that the night in Caminata
Nocturna isn’t simply a metaphor. The depiction of it carries a particular
affective charge-dread, hysteria and confusion-and the camera presents this
from within as the artist is embedded in the travails of both ‘migrants’ and
‘police’. Watching
the dual screens the spectator is definitively suspended in a confusing space
without co-ordinates, a confusion mirrored by the nervous panic-motion of the camera. This
site, suspended between chaotic images of economic and state violence, heavily
mediated but of seemingly real time import mirrors a more general condition
within contemporary capitalism. Locating
the viewer at this point of confusion-between the simulated fear and aggression
of the dual screens- mirrors the difficulty within contemporary culture and
politics to cognitively map the contours of the spectacular, image laden capitalist
present. [i]
Embedding the spectator
between the dual screens and actively embracing the difficulties of
representing a facet of capitalist economics-such as illegal migration-ensues
that Røys foregrounds this question in the work. However, Caminata Nocturna doesn’t just attempt to offer a simple representation. The video re-presents the tourist trek as
ambiguously real and it’s only towards the end that doubts as to its veracity
as an actual case of chase and capture begin to surface. In this way Røys cuts
up the night that economic migration and state control constitute and
constructs out of it a fictional topography. In this Caminata Nocturna works as a map or diagram that folds back
into itself an outside composed of both the capitalist image-world and vital,
all too real, questions of political sovereignty, economic exploitation and
subjectivity. In as much as
the video is about the trials of economic migration within global
capitalism-labour necessarily following the flows of capital at the risk of
severe penalties-it is also about the very dissimulation into experiential
facsimile and images played out in Caminata
Nocturna.
The
elements of this topography can be mapped point by point as a disruption of
what Ranciere has termed the ‘distribution of the sensible’, the way that the
world and people are divided up by a ‘police order’ that allocates, includes
and excludes according to class, race, gender, etc. ‘Police’ in this sense
should be understood as not just the immediately repressive apparatus that
bears that name but discourses, ways of acting and forms of structuring
perception that ensure certain parts of the social order are visible or
invisible. The map that Caminata Nocturna
traces is centered upon the dual facing screens with the spectator in the border
between them. This border is the central horizontal axis upon the map the video
forms. The division of the screens is
redolent of the US-Mexico border, much of which is bisected by a fence that at
certain crossing points is composed of doubled and tripled metal walls,
surveillance cameras and ground sensors. But, just as the border itself remains
permeable, the fortified sections giving way to stretches of barbed wire or the
desolate expanse of the desert, the screens division is less a sign of the
distinctness of subjects, experience and phenomena within the contemporary
capitalist spectacle than of their crossing over or threshold quality.
The distribution of the sensible as it applies to illegal economic
migration is quite simple: a binary split between migrants and legitimate
citizens maintained by the ‘police order’, a particular structuring of
(in)visibility. Migrant workers are everywhere but nowhere to be seen until the
mask of illegality is inscribed upon them by the ‘police order’. The
border/threshold at the center of Caminata Nocturna both by its nature
and in the way Røys re-presents it upsets this neat distinction. To elaborate
upon this it’s necessary to place Caminata Nocturna within a wider
visual economy.
For instance, viewing a promotional video for the Parque EcoAlberto it’s striking how nocturnal
images of simulated pursuit and expulsion are surrounded by and segue into the
other attractions of a holiday. [ii]The
footage of the tourist ‘Caminata’ is sandwiched between images of swimming
pools, comfortable hostel beds, wilderness sport and kayaking down the river.
The images of balaclava-clad men shouting, flashing police lights, frantic
night pursuit and bodies pressed in (pretend) subjection to the ground or with
hands clasped behind their heads, don’t so much incongruously erupt into the
screen as drift past, submerged into the soundtrack of identikit techno like an
uncomfortable guest at a party. However, in accounts of the Caminata local
participants sincerely emphasize that it exists to highlight the plight of
migrants and the difficulties of a border crossing many of them have actually
endured. It’s tempting to see in the Caminata a relatively collective,
performative act of memory for the suffering of the border crossing and an
actively enacted memorial to the unknown migrant. As one of the participants
says in a documentary upon it, the aim is to ‘Raise consciousness about the
suffering of the migrant’. [iii]
And the snatches of scripted casual racism the ‘cops’ utter in Caminata Nocturna suggest this is not
without it’s own, probably well earned, critical acuity towards the malign
combination of racist politics and economics present in the management of
illegal migration. Just as war memorials are ambiguously situated between
ornate mourning and celebration, the Caminata itself is suspended between
well-meaning intentions and the tourist industry.
Caminata Nocturna
re-presents the primary indistinction
of both the image world of capitalism-the border between educative images of
human rights import and an immersive banality-and the structure of a
contemporary political sovereignty wherein ‘human rights’ can be readily
suspended when they conflict with the control of labor. Rather than just a
somewhat grotesque novelty the depiction of the tourist-migrant in Caminata Nocturna suggests something
much more fundamental in this topography of the present. Bisecting the
border/threshold is a line composed of the figure of the legitimate citizen-this
time posing as a tourist- and the economic migrant. In re-presenting the
tourist as migrant Røys problematises the binary split between legitimacy and
illegitimacy that the ‘police order’ is formed around. The video underlines
how ambiguously situated any seemingly stable subject is, tourist/migrant being
not so much binary opposites as forms of life produced within the same model of
capitalist governmentality. That is, the video doesn’t only document the
vaguely discomforting image of tourists pretending to be migrants but
underlines how the tourist (as legal, consuming and when not on holiday
producing citizen) is always already potentially subject to similar strictures
as the illegal migrant within the wider bio-political management of life. While
Caminata Nocturna might easily be situated within artistic attempts to
bring to light human rights abuse Røys decision to document an uneasy moment
when the horrors associated with illegal migration are playfully formalized for
tourists makes explicit the contradictory valency of such rights in the
present. What this reveals is that whether as migrant worker or tourist, or
simply as worker/ consumer, the structural logics of state and capital
reproduce an undifferentiated subject-albeit always already striated by class,
race and gender- that can be put to work, rendered surplus or subjected to the
dictates of sovereignty and capitalist economy.
In making visible this aspect of capitalist governmentality Caminata Nocturna constructs a
counter-fiction to the truths of the ‘police order’. A more ambiguous gesture
than either simple denunciation or a populist embrace of performative
simulation as ‘activism’, Røys’ art practice uses the very falseness of the
tourist Caminata as a critical tool. Rather than attempt the impossible task of
representing the real of repressive migratory politics Røys twists an already
given facsimile into something more disruptive. There’s a certain risk attached
to this since this disruption-necessarily contained within the work and within
the gallery - always threatens to itself become a spectacular reflection. This
is avoided through the doubling of the equivocation between real/unreal, via
blankly representing the chase and capture in a rush of almost real time
images, hence both bringing to light and cutting through the primary indistinction
of the hyper-mediated spectacle the tourist experience is an element within.
Røys constructs a narrative of chase and capture in Caminata Nocturna that in presenting itself as cinema verite
documentary plays with it’s own status as the fiction of a fiction. Thus the
supposed truthfulness of the documentary, and by extension much media coverage,
is collapsed back into its status as being an assemblage of available
materials. More than this, a fiction such as Caminata Nocturna succeeds in reassembling these materials in a way
that allows different orders of (in)visibility to emerge.
Within this topographical fiction Røys’ usage of the
camera is subtly subversive. Surveillance, or being ‘caught’ as an image more
generally, is usually a way of quantifying, enumerating and setting in place
identity. In the video
bodies are tracked and broken up by the technology of the camera, glimpsed in
pockets of light, this body here being illegal, this one here being responsible
for policing the border. This recalls the ‘police’ function of the camera and
in this sense the camera is the ‘police’, while also recalling the representations of mass media and state
that fix a particular body as a statistic cued into economic flow charts of
illegal migration or crime data. But Caminata Nocturna also inverts the
abstraction of the image through it’s more intimate perspective from a head
held digital camera, constantly moving from ground to feet to
migrant/police/night, and also through the way the soundtrack of hurried
breathing and scuffling movement underlines both a panic and restores an agency
to the illegal movement of bodies. The camera in this case is used to work
against both its complicity in the apparatuses of control and to institute a
sense that economic migrants are not just passive data to be reconciled on a
spreadsheet. In this formal iteration of images Caminata Nocturna is a
counter-apparatus, opposing it’s own visual sensibility to more authoritarian
applications of the camera and the image.
However, this possibly emancipatory usage of the camera is held in
tension with a sense that its ubiquity might also be deadening. The shots where
different figures are suddenly lit up and frozen by the flash of a photograph
point towards how difficult it is to avoid overt aestheticisation in artistic
documentation. Or for that matter the ubiquitous everyday snapshot that
captures a particular moment via digital technology and has long surpassed it’s
tourist origins. There’s a discomfort with this in Caminata Nocturna
that-by virtue of its form-reiterates how inescapable such mediation is in the
present while simultaneously transmitting an intense awareness that the image,
whether ‘artistic’ or ‘tourist’, threatens to subsume the bodily experience it
documents. This is most apparent in how Caminata Nocturna circles around
its own usage of the technology of self-mediation, the head mounted digital
camera standing in for the mobile phone camera and other forms of immediate
documentation. Often, the video seems to be asking whether this multiplication
of images does not in itself obscure more than it reveals. If the ‘police’ can
be a camera then so can the tourist, reflecting back to the self the images of
landscapes, laughter and on occasion atrocity.
Caminata
Nocturna makes explicit the link between a contemporary aesthetic of the
security state-uniformed control, kneeling ‘others’, efficient containment-and
entertainment. The images this aesthetic is based upon, whether relayed through
reality television cop shows and Hollywood, news media or Guanatamo Bay
referencing fashion shoots, are implicit to the Caminata. In a way the latter
is an archetype of what has been identified as ‘dark tourism’, the exhibiting
of sites of atrocity as museums or even performance. If tourism has always been
about selling a dream image of fulfillment in a place that is always a
non-place, as in not connected to everyday cares, then the Caminata is a
dystopian consummation of tourism as a performative punishment park. [iv]
Røys’ succeeds in mapping the wider ramifications of this becoming indistinct
of entertainment and dread as a component in a capitalist spectacle. Formally,
the fictional topography of Caminata Nocturna has a deceptive
simplicity: the border/ threshold as a horizontal line in the centre, a line of
the subjective figures of tourist/ migrant police vertically in the middle, all
diagonally transversed by a critical art practice constantly attempting to disrupt
a distribution of the sensible that threatens to absorb art as another form of
spectacle. Perhaps the most disturbing moment in Caminata Nocturna
occurs towards the end when smiling tourist-migrants are sound tracked on
another screen by other participants singing the Mexican national anthem while
holding the national flag. The songs lyrics hold forth a desire for national
unity forged in blood and conflict but the tragic quality that emerges is how
such national communities are complicit in maintaining border control. And
while Caminata Nocturna is very much concerned with the politics of the
image, it’s worth ending with the undoubted reality that underlies this map:
‘Oscar was not a man to hang around. Within days he’d joined
a party of migrants, led by a coyote, or paid guide, on a venture into the
Sonoran Desert. It was a three-day walk from the frontier to their pick-up
point. He was flayed below the knees by cacti and when his shoes came to pieces
– the shoes he’d been given in prison in Arizona – he walked the last day
barefoot over red rock, a coarse oxidised sandstone. In Tucson he discovered
that the soles of each foot had become a single blister, from ball to heel,
like a gel pack. He was deported again… ‘ [v]
(Text by John Cunningham, London)
Caminata Nocturna is produced with support from Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond Norway
[i]
Fredric Jameson argues for the need for a ‘cognitive mapping’ of the
unrepresentable totality of contemporary capitalism through art. See Jameson, Fredric, “Cognitive Mapping”. Nelson, C, Grossberg, L. (eds.). Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. University of Illinois
Press, 1990: 347-60
[ii]
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9YRjYvZx9w
[iii]
La Caminata, Director: Jamie Meltzer, 2009.
[iv]
Peter Watkins’ 1971 film Punishment Park is
a satire upon the security state wherein political radicals in the U.S are
pursued and disciplined by police and National Guard in the desert. It’s
indicative that what was once satire, shot in a mock documentary style, is now
available in a far milder form for an actual tourist to experience in the
‘Caminata’.
[v]
Jeremy Harding, ‘The Deaths Map: At the Mexican Border’, London Review of Books, Vol.23, No. 20, 2011.
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