Out of Bounds

This article looks at the works of several artists who examine in their films the emergence of new sociocultural spaces born from immigration that cannot be configured—limited—by traditional geopolitical borders.1 Instead, these spaces are drafted by the experiences and stories of the people who are migrating to and from them. Because such spaces shift constantly, dynamics of adaptation and transformation are an integral part of their definitions. Cultural productions that reflect on this situation are located at the nexus of this dynamic and harbor important messages for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the displacement of populations—forced or voluntary—will increase dramatically in the decades to come, whether triggered by economic crisis, climatic catastrophes, or wars. The crisis created by the increasing displacement of populations, trespassing over national borders, results in part of a phenomenon often described as the global North–South divide. In African countries such as Mali or Niger, which suffer from extreme climactic conditions and poverty, immigrants hoping for better lives for themselves and to support the families they leave behind brave the dangers of sea crossing from the West African coast, pay exorbitant prices to smugglers who promise to bring them safely to Paris, London, Rome, or Berlin, where they endure precarious life conditions.2 Since the 1950s, reflections about postcolonial and postmigrant identities, themes examining immigration, the tension between the homeland and Europe, as well as problematic politics of development instituted in Africa by the former colonial powers, have been examined in films by well-known directors such as Muhammad Abderrahman Tazi from Morocco, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina from Algeria, Ousmane Sembene and Djibril Diop Mambety from Senegal, or Souleymane Cisse from Mali. A younger generation of African filmmakers continue to bring these issues in film and video, as for example the recent film La Pirogue by Moussa Toure presented at the Cannes film festival in 2012, which told of the ordeal of thirty men on board a small fisherman boat trying to reach the Canary Islands.3 The emergence of new cultural spaces and their relation to immigration have become central themes in the current discourses of the contemporary social and cultural arena. Several exhibitions have focused on these themes. “Continental Drifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa,” was an exhibition curated by Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts at the Fowler Museum in spring of 2009 that addressed themes of memory, exile, and the experience of dislocation between the African continent and Europe in works by Yto Barrada, Berni Searle, Alfredo Jaar, Claudia Cristovao, and Georgia Papageorge. Similar themes and issues were explored in “Intense Proximite” at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in spring 2012, or in “Lines of Control,” at the Herbert H. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, also 2012, or in the recent programs of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Most recently, in spring 2014 the New Museum in New York presented “Here and Elsewhere,” an extensive exhibition featuring the work of contemporary artists from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, expanding on the notion of plural identities and the political and social issues (including immigration) that define contemporary societies of the Arab world. Here I investigate the works of Katia Kameli, Zineb Sedira, Mounir Fatmi, Mohamed Bourouissa, Yto Barrada, and Lamia Joreige4 who—by birth, choice, and throughout their lives— navigate in the interstitial spaces that emerged from patterns of immigration. Some of these artists were born in France to immigrant parents, others in Algeria or Morocco, countries whose long, entangled histories with the French colonial power have