Translating Migration: Art Installations against Dehumanizing Labelling Practices

Abstract

Migration is commonly described as a threat through images of invasion and flood in Western media. Migrants and asylum seekers tend to be the target of hate speech together with other vulnerable groups and minorities, such as disabled people, and definitions and labels have precise implications in terms of social justice and human rights. Migrant is an umbrella term used to refer to a variety of people who leave their countries of origin. Out-of-quota and dubliner are further labels, together with asylum seekers. Through an interdisciplinary approach, adopting a translation perspective on social justice, I would like to focus on the ways these labelling practices affect migrants’ and asylum seekers’ lives to the point of violating their rights. A clear example is represented by the English term dublined, translated as dublinati/dublinanti into Italian, and with no translation into German. It derives from the Dublin regulations, signed in 2013 and still valid, and indicates those people who want to apply for asylum in a given country but cannot do so because their fingerprints have been taken and registered in another EU country. Classifications of this kind, combined with further categorisations, such as “ordinary” or “vulnerable”, are applied throughout EU countries and languages to determine whether asylum seekers deserve, and are thus granted, asylum or not. They are informed by a dehumanizing view of migration and translate into “bordering practices” which prevent access to reception systems and welfare services. Resistant translation practices, a new language and art activism can contribute to reversing dehumanizing practices by putting displaced people’s identities at the centre. The Sicilian artist Antonio Foresta is the author of the installation Pace Nostra, a symbolic wave made of migrants’ clothes and Caltanissetta inhabitants’ bedsheets, with both an Italian and Arabic title, which translates migration, commonly perceived as “their” drama, into “our” drama, a common human experience, leading to a common goal: peace.