Bouchra Khalili

MOROCCO/FRANCE, 1975

38

The Mapping Journey series consists of short videos by the artist Bouchra Khalili. Between 3 and 4:30 minutes is enough time to trace, with just a few pencil lines marking the surface of a map, the hundreds of kilometers traversed by several illegal immigrants in search of precarious employment. Without pretentions and in a direct manner, the artist displays her work, shot from a single vantage point in a documentary style. A close shot of a map slightly in relief, a close-up of a hand holding a marker and a masculine voiceover narrating without emotion the dangerous attempts to cross the Mediterranean and slip across borders, necessary steps for these men and women who, forced to leave their home country and to become outlaw nomads, meet their situation with an exemplary resignation and dignity. Just a few minutes and some lines of pencil to describe the terrible journey. Bouchra Khalili builds an accurate equilibrium between the spatial and temporal scales, allowing us to hear and to see these mapped journeys. This scale is also mental since it returns back to the moment of reminiscence when these men evoke, mixing Arabic and French, without pathos or judgment, the inacceptable circumstances that led to their forced exile. The hand that holds the pencil makes the map tremble. This hand dominates the image and, during these few minutes, visually shows the distance that separates, for example, Algeria from Italian and French cities, all the while maintaining, via the gesture and the narration, the illusion that destiny can be controlled. Therefore, the artist gives more than a topographical meaning to the journey—she purposely turns upside down and autonomizes the status of these men and women who, in their wanderings, try to leave the labyrinth that constitutes the finding of a land of opportunity, inevitably hostile when “immigration” is considered one of the worst problems in Western countries. It appears that, in the same moment, the hand that marks this itinerary is master of its own destiny, and the mapping journey becomes almost “planned”—a reminder of the double meaning of “mapping” contained in the title. Despite the horrors of these journeys where life hangs by a thread, it is with a formal refinement and extreme simplicity that Bouchra Khalili evokes this radical economical and cultural situation, giving us no possibility to escape. The exile here is a sine qua non political condition of our existence.

Text by Elvan Zabunyan Translated from the French by Salima Semmar