When mobility is a marker of class. Precarised lives, deadly borders, bodies without papers or rights. Migratory movements as the central theme in contemporary works.
The countless crises in the 20th and 21st centuries have contributed to feeding a society of risk, characterised by labour flexibility, the weakening of the middle class and increased social exclusion. Among these conditions, the dynamics of migration show us how mobility, as well as immobility, have taken on a role as markers of social stratification.
Little by little, artists’ journeys were transformed into highly precarious states, surrounded by a cloud of “bohemian artistry” that the artists themselves nurtured.
In the second half of the 20th century, migratory journeys demonstrate more clearly the inner and outer situation in increasingly radicalised political works, though the 21st century is the one that reveals the reality of migration and exile. Works that cruelly reflect the migratory movements are taking centre stage, placing the theme as central in the problems addressed, opening the space to colonial reflections and broader exclusions.
More than ten million people in the world are not recognised as citizens of any country. What do writer Gioconda Belli, a Kosovar Roma, a Kurdish woman from Syria and a Sahrawi person have in common? They are all, or have been at some point, stateless. That is, they are not recognised as citizens of any country, which means they lose the rights conferred by nationality. Yet they did not arrive at this situation in the same way, nor will they leave it with the same ease. Because class exists even when it comes to being a victim of state oppression.
In the wealthy and colonialist countries of the West, we do not question how we acquire our nationality. We are born and we have it. A stateless person has difficulty working legally and has no access to education or healthcare. The Rohingya population of western Myanmar — a Muslim community in a majority Buddhist country — represents the largest stateless group in the world, with a female majority. Twenty-five countries in the world do not allow women to pass nationality on to their children on equal terms with men. In fact, this is one of the main causes of childhood statelessness.
Many Sahrawis, when the Sahara was recognised as a Spanish province, acquired Spanish nationality, but later lost it due to the abandonment by the Spanish government, becoming stateless.
The foundational stories of many cultures recount migrations that preceded the formation of the people to whom the tales pertain. Exodus, i.e. the Jewish people escaping Egypt, is considered the foundational event of the Israeli people. Yet we have to take into account that the starting point for exodus is oppression. Thus, understanding the element of migration as a foundational pillar of a people, even if it is in fact the case, does not seem as real as the mythical imagination would have us believe. The Jewish people were not Egyptians oppressed by Egyptians, but rather foreigners who laboured under the Egyptian empire. Although several generations had already settled down there, they continued to be foreigners. The laws that prohibit the mistreatment of foreigners arose due to their unfortunately widespread and evident mistreatment. The lingering memory of their identity as foreigners and their experience mark the barriers that a foreigner will have in order to exercise their rights and to reach the social and political decision-making spaces.
Furthermore, the experience of exile profoundly marks the lives of the displaced, and their bonds with the place transforms into an ongoing personal and social conflict, both in terms of identity and survival.
The Grand Tour was a widespread custom between the 17th century and the early 19th century which consisted of a journey through Europe taken by young upper-class Europeans interested in culture and art, with Italy as a key destination. Initially, travellers took the trip in carriages, particularly the so-called Berline coupé. This idea of “European” cultural education spread across space and time. In fact, many 19th and 20th century Spanish and Catalan artists considered it an important milestone in their career, to the point that, even in the darkest eras of Franco’s Spain, many travelling artists preferred to present themselves as grands touristes refusing to acknowledge their status as immigrants or exiles.
Never have so many people died by drowning at sea as they attempted to reach Spanish territory as in those first five months of 2024: 33 every day or 5,054 between January and May, among them 50 children. This tragedy highlights the failure of the immigration control policies aimed at the Global South. Far from halting the movement, the policies provoke even higher levels of mortality. It is worth noting that the European Community increasingly restricts the entry of “undesirable” immigration. All these people came to live a dignified life, to work and to get an education. Despite that, the increasingly xenophobic European “bunker” sees no limits in its decisions.
Many times, travel also represents the possibility of traversing an imaginary space where precisely no borders exist. In this case, literature itself can become a way of travelling; in fact, one can “travel the world through reading”. However, it is completely impossible to “migrate through reading”. Exile and migration, through the displacement of the body, create a loss of the place of origin, as they entail a difficult process of uprooting the person that can leave a scar.
Throughout the history of art, the experience of travel has always been an important topic in educational and professional paths, as a motif for artistic inspiration or as an escape or exile. At the end of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth, many artists travelled to Paris, London, or other European locales. In precious few cases did they speak about or express in their works the difficult situation in which they lived or the political situation of their country, apart from a scarce few who underscored their political commitment, while many of them maintained a melancholic tone.
In many cases, the journey is transformed into a glamorous mask that obscures an eminently political work, whether from more activist endeavours to more community- and cultural-based works, such as the work of Apel·les Fenosa, which we will see in another section.
We can clearly see how a generation of creators from the Western world, who spent most of their life in the second half of the 20th century, was more conscientious of the topic of exile. The theme appears in numerous writings and artworks, both directly and indirectly.
In this second half of the century, we also encounter the figure of people who lose their surroundings, the references that give their life meaning, and their context. In these cases, there is no physical displacement, yet the feeling of exile is clearly present. This is what we call insilio, or internal exile: the same sensation of “feeling displaced”, strange or as a stranger, but in one’s own country. Many Spanish republicans who could not go into exile for various reasons in 1939 and who suffered the repression of the military dictatorship in Spain remained in internal exile, as described by Laura Lozano Marín referring to a group of female poets who bore witness to the Spanish Civil War and who lived in Spain during Franco’s dictatorship, with its mechanisms of repression, self-censorship, and invisibilisation.
Emotional effects translate into language, and those produced by exile we could call “wounds of language”.
Francesc Tosquelles, the great psychiatrist from Reus, referred to his way of speaking as a kind of catafranç, a sort of French with a strong sonic component from his native language. This stage of a-structural language, alien to communication and so characteristic of exile and the essential loss it entails, is present in the very structure of the story of every migrant. Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, in Langue à venir (2004), develop the effects of language in relation to sexual difference and questions of postcolonial social exclusion. Language in exile thus becomes a symptom, leaving a trace, just like the complex linguistic variations found in the literature of authors affected by migration and the terrible experiences of war, such as those of Paul Celan, Cixous herself, or Gloria Anzaldúa.
In this way, language emerges as a need for coherence and transmission in the speech of migrants and their bold struggle for individual survival, in relation to its inevitably identity-bearing character.
The “undesirables”. That was the name given to the Spanish refugees by the French authorities in 1939. The French ultra-right criminalised the republicans just as Syrians are criminalised today by calling them delinquents. “Liberty, equality and fraternity were not for us”, the Spanish exiles recall. The French government received them with hostility. Despite that, historians calculate that the Spanish exodus exceeded 500,000 people. They fled by foot, along the same road from Portbou that the Machado family travelled, or the road from La Jonquera, seeking refuge in France.
The English ship Stanbrook was another symbol of the Spanish exile. The Welsh captain Archibald Dickson set sail with 2,638 people heading towards Oran, evading the German aviation that bombarded Alicante and avoiding the Canarias, a heavy cruiser which aimed to sink it. The idea was to create a homo patiens, a term that Salvador Cayuela Sánchez used in his book Por la grandeza de la patria, in which the idiosyncratic subjectivity of Franco’s regime, perhaps related to the one forged by other totalitarian regimes, undoubtedly was key to sustaining the new Francoist state.
These intensely hostile situations were offset by spaces of acceptance transformed into essential islands of fresh air for a society destined to be one of resignation. It is exactly for this reason that spaces of dissent and acceptance are so important — those that free spirits tried to keep open, such as the home of Apel·les Fenosa and Nicole Florensa, the Escola d’Art de Tarragona and Sala Tres de Sabadell. You will find more information about each space in the image captions in this room.
An “exotic” gaze is the one that created a specific perspective of otherness, setting out the stereotypes of the “others” at a time in which Europe was expanding and establishing relationships based on dominance around the world. The appropriation of cultural goods arose due to a boastful colonising fever that made Europeans feel like the owner of everything in their paternalistic and sometimes criminal perspective.
Until relatively recently, no one even considered the dark side of the expedition that found the albino gorilla in Equatorial Guinea, or what effects Egyptomania had in Catalonia.
Art museums also possess countless works that are the products of spoils gained through purchases that were essentially looting, normally under highly unequal conditions. But what builds a truly significant imaginary are the works that represent women of “exotic beauty”, a product of the male imagination, as well as “primitive natives” which serve as the basis to justify colonialism, looting, or, in the most extreme cases, slavery and genocide.
In our time, countries like Germany have opened the door to the possibility of returning colonial art while many others, including Spain and Catalonia, are considering the topic. What is evident is that this colonial, authoritarian, and sexist imaginary is what western culture has built, and that a great deal of work and joint efforts will be required to revise and transform it.