Resist

Some notes by Marc Auge from the exhibition ‘Native Land Stop Eject’ in Paris.
http://fondation.cartier.com/

‘For climatic reasons, for economic reasons, because of decolonisation, and because of tourism, people are moving.  That leads to problems in terms of borders and the construction of walls. There are walls everywhere - between Mexico and America, Cuetta in Morocco, Israel and Palestine ... and across cities.  Even in Padua, Italy, there is fencing to isolate the Gypsy neighbourhood. They are outfitted with complex systems that include ditches, trenches, barbed wire, electric wiring, electronic fences, concrete walls, around-the-clock security agents and surveillance vehicles that patrol the area beyond the walls ...
These people are connected because they are fleeing poverty, famine, tyranny, the violence of nature or of history.  For those that risk their lives at times by throwing themselves into the sea, it is all or nothing, it is ‘run for your life’.  They are cutting off all ties with home, even if their aim is to eventually help those they leave behind.  They are taking off on an insane and desperate flight. The ragged army of survivors, encumbered by the corpses thrown up by the sea, lands on the shores of exile: a strange paradise that will soon, for most of them, take on the form of an internment camp.  The other world, the world they want to get into and that constantly eludes them, is never attained.  It remains a mirage, even for those who manage to slip through clandestinely. Nothing is more tragic than the fate of these people who are trapped between 2 negations - the negation of their origins and the negation of the present - and yet doomed to hope, or rather, to keep on trying, in order to escape total meaninglessness ...
We know that the walls aren’t all the same, and the reasons people are trying to cross them are not the same. We see all these misfortunes, all these disasters disconnected on TV, in the press.  What is interesting is that if we connected these things, we would see that the world is actually the exact opposite of what is sold to us.  It is the antithesis of what it claims to be.  It is about the perception of reality - discontinuity, restriction and opposition are the key words for a global situation that is officially portrayed as one of community, freedom and exchange ...
The only way to counter the power of images is via the power of other images.  Not ‘political’ images in the narrow sense of the term. Not images that support a cause, who say who is right or wrong.  But images that bring together and sum up different facets of our world.  Our world is a world in which, in spite of walls, 2 worlds come together: spectacularly when we lock up those seeking to go from one to the other, and more subtly when we banish them to the outskirts of the city, when we give them aid, or toss them a bit of food from a helicopter.  The situation can no longer be defined by First / Third world.  There is some First in the Third and some Third in the First.
This is the big paradox of our times - humanity has never been so divided by so many inequalities, and yet so aware of its unity.  From one end of the earth to the other, what makes historically different situations seem similar and familiar is the eternal opposition between those who hide and those who seek them out, between those who want to cross over and those who are bent on stopping them, and between those who want to move around and those who confine them’.