Landscapes as Narratives: Decolonising Ceuta’s Contemporary Border through Performative Filmmaking

Abstract

The inspiration for this work is based on the experimental film “Tout le monde aime le bord de la mer” [The colour of the sea] I set in the border town of Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in the north of Africa. The film depicts this territory of transit migrations as a racialised limbo. Drawing on field diaries written during the filming process, I examine here the leading role that landscape can play in the fabrication of narratives and the performative act of playing with the aesthetics of fiction to de-centre the production of white-male Western knowledge. In this paper I delve into the process of filmmaking by analysing three central aspects that can help conceptualise performative cinema as a decolonial methodology. Firstly, the crisis of representation based on a process of experimentation with fiction and visual grammar, which also facilitates the blurring of the divide between self and other; secondly, the creation of counter-spaces that facilitate processes of participation and self-fiction; and thirdly, the choice of non-representational landscapes to dislocate audiences from formal geographical references and normative imaginaries about political borders.