The fourth of Boston University’s Sawyer Seminars on Border Externalization Regimes took place on April 25th, 2023, as part of the BU Center on Forced Displacement’s two-day annual conference. Following the themes of the previous evening’s conversation with Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, as well as morning sessions on the intersection of art and activism in refugee literature and on the role of research institutions and centers in furthering our collective understanding of forced displacement, the seminar looked at border cultures as spaces of resistance, activism, art, and hope. While continuing policies and practices of border externalization have produced incredible suffering, the liminal spaces produced at and by our shifting borders have also been startlingly generative, inspiring resolute resistance, indefatigable activism, and bold art. Building on the March 2023 Sawyer Seminar session in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas on “Art and Protest,” this session sought to highlight the diverse ways in which art has been mobilized towards activist ends at our borders.
The first presentation, “Delineating a Site of Exception: Art and Infrastructure at the Border Wall” by Ila Sheren (Washington University in St. Louis), examined a cluster of recent artworks along the US-Mexico border that have sought to disclose and satirize both the violence and frequent absurdity of border infrastructures. André de Quadros’s (Boston University) presentation, “Hidden Words, Singing Stories: Artistic Narratives from the Souther Border,” detailed the speaker’s long engagement with asylum seekers and migrants on a set of projects at the intersection of art, activism, and education via workshops in which he helps newcomers to the United States’ to grasp and express their personal narratives of displacement, movement, cruelty, and fortitude through a variety of artistic media. The third presentation, “Theatre on the Move: A Pavilion of Exchange and Hospitality” by Marina Sartori, an independent architect and designer, talked through a recent collaborative project funded by a grant from the government of Styria in Austria, in which she designed a modular, moveable performance space for a traveling participatory theatre run by new arrivals to Europe. This was followed by Ismail Khalidi’s (independent playwright and Boston University) talk “Kanafani Would’ve Been a Rapper: Cultural Resistance and the Radical Palestinian Imagination,” in which he examined the vibrant and resolute political imagination of Palestinian writer, playwright, activist, and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani, and the importance of evaluating activism by the lights of its imaginative vision rather than merely by its results. Finally, cellist Leo Eguchi (Boston College, MIT Symphony Orchestra) performed a stirring and haunting composition from his recent UNACCOMPANIED project by the Afghan composer and refugee Milad Yousufi.
Following the individual presentations, the speakers returned for a roundtable Q&A session in which they further illuminated their own projects and practices at the intersection of art and activism, and discussed the ways in which such work can help us think toward imagined but realizable futures marked by very different border regimes, and the importance of beginning the work of imagining, drawing, sculpting, writing, and creating such worlds now.
Recording: