Trigger

What’s at Stake When Watching Ai’s Human Flow?

The life jacketisation of illegalised mobility

Like so many other contemporary documentaries – from award-winning films, such as Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare^{Fuocoammare, directed by Gianfranco Rosi (2016; Italy: Stemal Entertainment).} and Gabrielle Brady’s Island of the Hungry Ghosts,^{Gabrielle Brady, Island of the Hungry Ghosts, directed by Gabrielle Brady (2018; Australia: Third Films).} to some of our own work – Human Flow is part of a flourishing visual economy grafted onto the illegalisation of certain forms of human mobility. As artists, we unavoidably play a role in, capitalise on and bear responsibility for this visual economy. Its most iconic and lucrative topos is undoubtedly the Mediterranean Sea. On a daily basis, European citizens consume night shots of wet people helplessly reaching for their white saviours, top shots of rickety, overloaded dinghies and side views of dead children washed ashore. As anthropologist Ruben Andersson wrote:

The images...depicting a ‘sea of humanity’ without a past…fix the notion of the clandestine migrant as a helpless, nameless body, sinking into the dark waters. In rescuing this drowning body a virtuous circle is born, where the tasks of patrolling, caring for, and informing on clan- destine migration blur into one another. The production, distribution and appropriation of images – in short, the visual economy of clandestine migration – mirrors and even facilitates this mixing of roles ...^{Ruben Andersson, Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 193–194.}

Over the past few years, Ai has created an expanding body of work on the so-called refugee crisis, re-enacting iconic media pictures and fashioning sculptures out of objets trouvés: a contested re-enactment of a picture of the dead body of Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler who washed up on a beach near the Turkish town of Bodrum in 2015; floating lotus flowers made of life jackets scouted on the beaches of Lesbos; a 60-metre inflatable raft made of the same manufactured rubber as the vessels that carry people across the Mediterranean. Rather than appropriating these objects and destabilising the relationship between signifier and signified, Ai literally inserts pieces of reality into these artworks, granting them an aura of authenticity and buttressing his status of artivist. During the shooting of The Miracle of Almería,^{The Miracle of Almería, directed by Moon Blaisse (2021; Belgium: Cassette for Timescapes).} a three-part TV series about the intertwining of industrial agriculture and international labour mobility in the Spanish province of Almería, filmmakers Moon Blaisse and Bellinck discussed a series of artivist artworks with two of the actors. Both actors had migrated from Mali to Almería. The images included a picture of Ai’s covering of the columns of a Berlin concert hall with 14,000 life jackets. Suddenly, one of the actors half-jokingly cried out: ‘Mais ça c’est mon gilet de sauvetage! Qu’est-ce qu’il foute avec mon gilet? Il faut qu’on lui demande de retourner mon gilet! [But that’s my life jacket! What on Earth is he doing with my life jacket? We need to ask him to return my life jacket!].’

Unsurprisingly, Human Flow also opens and closes with images of the Mediterranean, beginning with a sequence of well-composed, meditative shots of unfathomably blue water and dinghies passing by. Then it cuts to an image of Ai crouching in the verge, filming. Then to a chaotic, handheld shot of a rescue mission. Then to Ai sporting the archetypical aid worker’s yellow Day-Glo vest as he supports an exhausted, trembling young man wrapped in an equally archetypical golden emergency blanket. In one of the very first lines of the movie, we hear the man thanking Ai, who touches his cheek and replies: ‘You are a good man.’ The reproduction and circulation of aquatic emergency and rescue images, which we once heard sociologist Emmanuelle Hellio describe as ‘the life-jacketisation of migration’, goes hand in hand with a whole series of water metaphors that have lodged themselves in common parlance. As such, the title of Ai’s documentary – Human Flow – perfectly connects with the U.S. embassy’s leaked cables detailing the ‘waves of migration’ arriving in Greece,^{The Guardian, ‘US Embassy Cables: Greece Tackles Migration and Asylum Issues’, The Guardian (United Kingdom), 11 January 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/wo... 238229.} with the European Commission’s desire to ‘channel’ and ‘stem’ ‘irregular flows’^{European Commission, ‘Irregular Migration via the Central Mediterranean: From Emergency Responses to Systemic Solutions’, European Political Strategy Centre, 2017 February 2. https://ec.europa.eu/epsc/publications/strategic-notes/irregular-migration-central-mediterranean_en} and the BBC’s ‘stream’ of people ‘flooding’ trains in Italy.^{Bethany Bell, ‘Migrants Flood Trains in Desperate Bid to Leave Italy’, BBC News
(United Kingdom), 20 June 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33204681} As sociologist Marc Bernardot pointed out, these aquatic metaphors dehumanise people by portraying individuals as an ever-moving and undifferentiated mass, an elementary force of nature in need of hydraulic control.^{Marc Bernardot, ‘Petit traité de navigation dans la métaphore migratoire.” Multitudes, no. 64 (2016): 63–70.}

We don’t want to diminish the tremendous suffering of those who make the passage overseas in any way, but we can’t help but wonder who stands to benefit from the overexploitation of such sea emergency imagery, especially when we consider that illegalised travellers arriving in Italy between March 2016 and January 2017 said they saw more than double the amount of deaths in Libya and the Sahara Desert^{Tara Brian, T. 2017. ‘The Middle East and North Africa’, in Fatal Journeys Volume 3 Part 1: Improving Data on Missing Migrants, ed. by Julia Black, Frank Laczko and Ann Singleton (Switzerland: International Organization for Migration, 2017), 1–20.} or that the majority of people illegalized in Europe have never been on a dinghy but are actually visa overstayers.^{Ruben Andersson,Illegality, Inc. Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe, 2014.} To what extent does the life-jacketisation of illegalised mobility, which portrays people as passive objects of humanitarian care, underpin the humanitarian rationale and rhetoric of the European Union’s im/mobility regime, which is tasked with that ‘hydraulic control’? It’s certainly worth taking a closer look at the online communications of Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency. Despite its role in mass surveillance, border enforcement and return operations, Frontex’ visual communication readily makes use of aquatic emergency stereotypes, making their Flickr account at times virtually indistinguishable from that of a search and rescue NGO or a Pulitzer-winning humanitarian photojournalist.

Activism as a visual trope

From the opening aquatic rescue scene onwards, Ai assumes a plethora of roles. He plays the aid worker dragging shipwrecked people ashore. He plays the volunteer grilling sausages on a makeshift barbecue in a camp. He plays the therapist running for a basket into which a woman can vomit while he caresses her hair, telling her ‘It’s OK.’ He plays the empathetic foreign correspondent interviewing numerous specialists from United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and readjusting the lapel microphone on their clothing. He plays the world-renowned artist talking to a group of young Palestinian women, one of whom is holding a $60 art publication entitled Andy Warhol & Ai Weiwei. But above all, he plays the activist getting his head shaved in a camp. His haircut seems to symbolise his engagement, his activism, his companionship. By shaving his head, he puts himself on par with the camp’s inhabitants, with whom he’s often said to identify because of his own history of dissidence, imprisonment and exile. As he states in the film’s press notes: ‘I see those people coming down to the boats as my family. They could be my children, could be my parents, could be my brothers. I don’t see myself as any different from them.’ Throughout the film, Ai constantly aligns himself with the illegalised people he puts on the screen by visually positioning himself next to them. He participates in their agony by being filmed himself while he’s filming them with his smartphone, just like young people filming a concert in order to participate in the event. He’s filmed while holding a piece of paper that reads ‘#Ai Weiwei stands with refugees’. The audience needs to be convinced that Ai is committed, that he really cares for people in exile, that he shares their anxiety and misery and that his film will make a difference.

This mechanism of identification is carried to an extreme during a scene in which he trades his passport for that of the Syrian Abdullah Mahmoud. After trading some jokes about swapping nationalities, Mahmoud says, ‘If you want to take my tent... ‘ Ai replies, ‘Then you have to take my studio in Berlin. I have a studio in Berlin.’ Then the symbolic reversal of positions is over. We see them swapping their passports again as Ai adds, ‘I respect the passport, and I respect you.’ Quite unintentionally, the scene lays bare one of the most painful discrepancies of the film: the power differentials that exist between Ai and the people whose humanity he wants to portray. While Ai and his film crew travelled to more than twenty countries, the film’s subjects are stuck in front of fences, in camps and in battered tents. With good intentions, he appropriates their misery, but there’s no critical reflection on the different position he holds as an internationally celebrated artist with seemingly unlimited access to funding for his high-production film. As cultural critic T.J. Demos wrote,

the filmmaker’s position functions as a blind spot that remains largely unexamined, [as] Ai’s appearances throughout the film evidence another kind of human flow that receives no comment: that of the privileged tourist or artistic nomad, a figure who has the means to travel with relative ease, owing to elevated economic and cultural status and the right kind of passport. In other words, the film’s condition of possibility owes to the very expanding inequality – as between tourist and asylum seeker – that is symptomatic of the causes of migration in the first place.

Nowhere does Ai address this notion of privilege and inequality. Yet, it’s the maintaining of these privileges and inequalities that lies at the core of Western mobility management. It’s precisely this privilege that connects Ai to the policymakers he interviews, to Human Flow’s opening-night audience at the Venice International Film Festival and to us.

The question of agency

Ai’s activistic hyper-agency starkly contrasts with the lack of agency experienced by both his objectified subjects and his viewers. Human Flow creates a worldview that confirms the existent image production of dominant media in which people whose mobility is illegalised are nameless and powerless victims who follow the rules and demands of static geopolitical forces that remain largely unidentified. Although the film seemingly makes use of its genre’s authoritarian strategies, including voices of authority, facts and figures and headlines from respected newspapers, there’s no insight into the real causes of the humanitarian crisis it portrays. Such documentaries do not challenge the existing paradigm but perpetuate a common-sense framing of reality. Likewise, other than a superficial complaint about global warming, Human Flow offers no real lead into the specific conditions and structural geopolitical powers that have led to this so-called 'refugee crisis', the gargantuan scale of which is constantly stressed. There is a crisis. It’s a static given without any possibility of change.

This numbing stasis most notably infects the way people’s onscreen identities are constructed and communicated. Whereas the classic and expository voices of authority – experts such as doctors, aid workers, policymakers and even an astronaut and Jordanian princess – are always credited by given name, surname and job description, the film’s illegalised travellers have no names or job descriptions. Only in the final credits do their names appear, all together, as one faceless mass of interviewees. Thus, they remain anonymous, homogenised victims of unclear geopolitical forces. Whenever they speak, they’re granted only a couple of brief sentences. At times, their words aren’t even translated but merely subtitled with ‘speaking in Arabic’. Whenever the experts address the illegalised travellers’ conditions, they use the words ‘them’ and ‘they’, never specific names and never implying any agency. The result is that the people in the film can only be thought of as executors of a static worldview.

This lack of subject agency coincides with an induced lack of viewer agency; the latter can’t but consume the static worldview on display. Of course, the overwhelming vastness of the suffering at hand – the causes of which are outsourced to geopolitical power games and incomprehensible evil – makes us feel sympathy but not agency. It invokes a self-deceptive kind of pity that distracts us from our own role in the structural violence that the visual economy of international im/mobility professes to denounce. Essayist Susan Sontag most eloquently described this myopia: ‘So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.’^{Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 102.}

Recalibrating the distribution of the sensible

Human Flow is part of a mass market of liberal humanitarian documentaries consumed on different platforms. According to filmmaker, writer and visual artist Hito Steyerl, these mainstream documentaries often criticise unfair power structures on the content level but fail to do so with regard to form and power differentials. As such, they underscore a large-scale epistemological enterprise that is closely linked to the projects of global capitalism and Western colonialism.^{Hito Steyerl, ‘Documentary Uncertainty’, in Re-visiones, no. 1 (2011). http://www.re-visiones.net/spip.php% 3Farticle37.html.} But, as Demos stressed, rather than simply dismiss Human Flow as merely the most recent in a long line of liberal humanitarian portrayals that, in playing to its viewers’ emotions and empathy, do little to address the massive challenges of the situation, we should ask how we can work toward progress otherwise.^{Demos, ‘Migrant World’.}

In our own respective practices, we want to (and must) ask how we can critically question the power structures inherent in documentary making. How can we, in our own work, steer clear of market-driven, taxidermic formatting? How do we deal with our own inevitable blind spots and positions of power? How do we remain aware of how we’re incessantly mobilised as the agents of the very violence we aspire to denounce? How can we, as artist and theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay called it, ‘unlearn the imperialism’^{Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London, Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2019).} inherent to documentarism as part of a historical apparatus of control that equally includes taxidermy, anthropology, biology, archaeology, museum and archival practices? How can we undermine the documentary’s ensuing authoritative claim to knowledge and truth? How can we share authorship and embrace multiple forms of embodied, often unacknowledged expertise? How can we recalibrate what philosopher Jacques Rancière called ‘the distribution of the sensible’^{Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique (Paris, France: La Fabrique Éditions, 2000).} the implicit set of rules that determines what can or can’t be perceived, seen, heard, said, thought, made or done? Interestingly, Rancière stressed the importance of ‘dissensus’ over ‘resistance’:

I would rather talk about dissensus than resistance. Dissensus is a modification of the coordinates of the sensible, a spectacle or a tonality that replaces another...That’s one way of keeping one’s distance from the shopworn affect of indignation and instead exploring the political resources of a more discrete affect – curiosity.^{Fluvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, ‘Art of the Possible: In Conversation with Jacques Rancière’, Artforum 45, no. 7 (2007): 256–269.}

Hoping to strengthen the continuous search for dissensus in our own work, we wonder if we can draw inspiration from that of the historical vanguards of documentary film, photography and theatre. Even though documentary has traditionally been associated with certainty, truth and objectivity, it’s been equally anchored in uncertainty, dispute and contamination ever since its inception.^{Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg, eds, Documentary Across Disciplines (Cambridge, MA: Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the MIT Press, 2016).}

Documentary’s Disparate Origins

Reviewing Flaherty’s third film Moana in 1926, filmmaker and critic John Grierson was one of the first to label the emerging taxidermic genre as ‘documentary’, defining it as ‘a creative treatment of actuality’.^{John Grierson, ‘Flaherty’s Poetic Moana’, New York Sun (New York), 8 February 1926.} Significantly, Grierson borrowed the term from the French denomination for the exoticising colonial travelogue films of the time.^{Timothy Youker, Documentary Vanguards in Modern Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2018).} So from the outset, the genre was fraught with questions of ideology and representation and buttressed by its reliance on infrastructurally violent technologies that were – and still are – commonly perceived to be neutral. Consider, for instance, the built-in white-centring tendencies of photographic media, which use Caucasian skin as their standard reference for calibration so that people who don’t conform to this implicit norm are erased or filmed in a distorted way.^{Brian Winston, Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography, and Television (London: British Film Institute, 1996); Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, eds., Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media. (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003); An van. Dienderen, ‘On “Lili”. Questioning China Girls Through Practice-Based Research’, Critical Arts, Journal on South-North Cultural and Media Studies 31, no. 2 (2017): 72–86.}

However, documentary’s birth as an instrument of Western imperialism, which was grafted on what Azoulay described as the ‘institutionalization of neutrality’,^{Azoulay, Potential History, 42.} ran parallel to documentarist experiments of a wholly different nature. Around roughly the same time as Grierson published his review of Moana, theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht wrote an article cheering the radical experiments in ‘political theatre’ by director-producer Erwin Piscator, hailing ‘the creation of a great epic and documentary theatre, which will be suited to our period’.^{Anthony Squiers, An Introduction to the Social and Political Philosophy of Bertolt Brecht: Revolution and Aesthetics (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi, 2014), 59.} In the theatre, the documentary was heralded as an avant-gardist art form challenging bourgeois capitalist dramatic conventions. Heavily influenced by Dada and soviet agitprop, it was marked by experiments in mixed media, collective creation, photomontage and collage.

Despite the many differences in form, context and contents, we’ll attempt to describe a few salient features of the work of early documentary makers like Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), Maya Deren (1917–1961), Jean Epstein (1897–1953) and Erwin Piscator (1893–1966). While Flaherty was spearheading the taxidermic format, they were exercising other forms of reality negotiation through the creation and reappropriation of documents, transgressing the borders between fact and fiction, different artistic discipline and art and activism. We believe that a closer look at their endeavours and failures may inspire an altogether different reading of the documentary gesture’s disparate origins and its critical and transformative potential.

Showing Has to be Shown

Today, the idea still persists that images represent reality without any censorship or manipulation whatsoever. This proclivity can be termed ‘image positivism’, i.e., the positivist or naturalistic belief that what’s being represented accurately depicts what was experienced. Even within our own artistic projects, we’ve had heated debates with colleagues who insist that the camera never lies. As filmmaker and writer Trinh Minh-ha stated,

At the core of such a rationale dwells, untouched, the Cartesian division between subject and object that perpetuates a dualistic inside-versus-outside, mind-against-matter view of the world. Again, the emphasis is laid on the power of film to capture reality ‘out there’ for us ‘in here’. The moment of appropriation and of consumption is either simply ignored or carefully rendered invisible according to rules of good and bad documentary.^{Trinh Minh-ha, ‘Documentary Is/Not a Name’ October 52, no. 1 (1990): 76–98, 83.}

However well or badly hidden, however conscious or not, documentaries always comprise their makers’ positions towards the philosophical question of how they perceive reality and what paradigm of it they relate to. After all, the paradoxical starting point of any documentary gesture is that whenever one observes reality, it mutates or vanishes into thin air. Instead of pretending to ignore this given, it’s more interesting to relate it to the impossibility of accessing reality in an unmediated manner. Brecht was very much aware of this when he called his theatre ‘non-Aristotelean’, rejecting the ancient philosopher’s premise of an unproblematic relationship between reality and our observation and representation of it.^{Youker, Documentary Vanguards.} Highlighting the importance of complex seeing, Brecht wished to dismantle hegemonic forms of representation and stimulate the audience into critically analysing what was presented as reality through techniques of estrangement, the purging of the stage of all illusion, the juxtaposition of different representations of the same facts and the rendering visible of all theatrical machinery and artifice. According to Brecht, this requires a completely different style of acting: ‘the actors must invest what they have to show with a definite gestus of showing.’^{Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, edited by Steve Giles, Tom Kuhn and Marc Silberman (London, New Delhi, New York and Sidney: Bloomsbury, 2000), 439.} Or, as goes the title of a famous poem by Brecht, ‘Showing Has to be Shown’.

Documentary as a tool for social transformation

Likewise, in contrast with the aforementioned positivist rationale and the Cartesian dualism that Trinh highlighted are the writings of Epstein, a theorist and filmmaker. From the 1920s onwards, he ceaselessly stressed the need to cultivate what he called cinema’s ‘photogénie’, the medium’s inclination towards the indeterminate and the permanently moving and changing, contradicting all knowledge systems based on the establishment of stable rules.^{Erika Balsom, ‘One Hundred Years of Low Definition’, in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, edited by Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron, and Arild Fetveit (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 10, 73–89.} Brecht shared his insistence on movement and the perpetual possibility of change, emphasising that human nature isn’t fixed and humankind is changeable and able to change: ‘Briefly, the Aristotelian play is essentially static; its task is to show the world as it is. The learning-play is essentially dynamic; its task is to show the world as it changes (and also how it may be changed).’^{Brecht, Brecht, 297–298.} To him, this was the sine qua non of contemporary representation: ‘the present-day world can only be described to present-day people if it is described as changeable.’^{Brecht, Brecht, 727.} Such was the aim of his epic style, to ‘arrive at a point where spectators no longer see the persons on stage as unchangeable, closed off to influence, helplessly resigned to their fate.’^{Brecht, Brecht, 347.} In Brecht and Piscator’s mobilisations of theatre as a tool for social transformation, Grierson’s definition of documentary as a ‘creative treatment of actuality’ took on an almost surgical meaning. ‘Piscator saw the theatre as a parliament, the audience as a legislative body.’^{Brecht, Brecht, 330.} The epic theatre of Piscator and Brecht hoped to centre the questions of spectatorship, participation and handing over control of part of the production process, even to the point of aspiring to ‘remove the spectators and tolerate only practitioners.’^{Brecht, Brecht, 286.}

However, it’s debatable whether Piscator ultimately managed to reach the proletarian audience that he longed to involve in his parliament-theatre. Actress and director Judith Malina, who trained with Piscator, strikingly assessed the disconnect between his aspirations and their realisations:

My teacher, Erwin Piscator, used to imagine that. But he didn’t like it even if someone coughed during the performance. Ha! You know, he had one idea and another activity, and his practice didn’t quite live up to his ideal. Erwin Piscator believed in audience participation, but he had no idea what it really could be, because he was a little afraid of the audience.^{Annie Dorsen and Judith Malina, ‘Poetry is No Poverty, and No Poverty is Poetry’, in Not Just A Mirror: Looking for the Political Theatre Today, edited by Florian Malzacher (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2016), 80.}

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Souleymane, Sidi, Moon Blaisse, Michiel De Cleene, Emmanuelle Hellio, Max Pinckers, Esther Severi, Emile Van Binnebeke and Paul Carlucci for their generous and inspirational input. This article is part of the research project Simple as ABC: In Search of Speculative Documentary Gestures to Profanate Regimes of Im/Mobility, which was initiated by Thomas Bellinck in 2016 and will run until 2022. It’s also part of the research project China Girls and the Color Genie. A Multichronotopic Research, which ran from 2015 to 2019, and the following research project from 2020 onwards initiated by Dr An van Dienderen. Both research projects are affiliated with KASK & Conservatorium, School of Arts Ghent, and generously funded by the University College Ghent Research Fund.

More Info

Thomas Bellinck, Simple as ABC

https://www.thomasbellinck.com/simple-as-abc

An van. Dienderen, Letter Home

https://vimeo.com/221426457

An van. Dienderen, Lili

https://vimeo.com/136103027

Rosine Mbakam, An van. Dienderen, Eléonore Yaméogo, PRISM

http://www.anvandienderen.net/prism-2019/

Funding

This work was funded and supported by KASK & Conservatorium, School of Arts Ghent, and the University College Ghent Research Fund.