Judith Quax's Immigration Clandestine: A Visual Essay

Nka•129 Journal of Contemporary African Art 128•Nka Judith Quax’s Immigration Clandestine F or more than two decades, tens of thousands of Africans, among other non-Western people , have been risking their lives trying to cross to Europe and North America, as well as to parts of the Arab Gulf, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, in search of employment and better economic opportunities than in home countries. Thousands of sub-Saharan African youths have perished trekking through the deserts of North African countries in transit to Europe. North African men and women have embarked on dangerous journeys on makeshift boats across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe . Those who have made it alive have encountered a new fortress of draconian laws in a continent that has devoted its energies and legislation to its “security” (read: curbing immigration). These policies carry immense consequences for migrants who, caught between a rock and a hard place, so to speak, must confront the specter of long-term incarceration , among other overwhelming vulnerabilities, as they become forced to live as illegal aliens. How do we then understand the underlying forces that prompt thousands of Africans to navigate such treacherous terrains, heedless of the frightening prospects that lie ahead? The root causes of this new wave of migrations lie in the manifold crises of the postcolonial nation-states in Africa. Compounding these crises are decades of dictatorial and corrupt regimes, internal civil wars, natural disasters of drought and desertification, and the negative impacts of neo-liberal globalization as inscribed in disastrous economic policies enforced by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment policies. Indeed, as the African American historian Robin Kelley has convincingly argued, “The making of the African diaspora was as much the product of ‘the West’ as it was of internal developments in Africa and the Americas . At the same time, racial capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism —the key forces responsible for creating the modern African diaspora —could not shape African culture (s) without altering Western culture.”1 Bringing this important theoretical perspective to bear on our analysis of the new African Salah M. Hassan A Visual Essay Judith Quax, Clothing 1, 2009. immigrants in North Africa, to which less attention has been given by the global media. For a decade or more, artists of diverse backgrounds have been working on this topic from different points of view and in various media, ranging from painting to film to new-media-based works, and from the documentary to the conceptual. Some of their work has been transmitted broadly via exhibitions and other public platforms such as the Internet. The precarious conditions of the new wave of African migrations provide a backdrop to the Dutch artist Judith Quax’s Immigration Clandestine (2008–), a series of recent photographic works featured in the following visual essay. Born in 1973, Quax is a young documentary photographer who lives and works in Amsterdam. After earning a doctoral degree in communications and sociology, she studied at the Photo Academy (Fotoacademie) in Amsterdam. Quax’s recent oeuvre focuses on this new wave of African migrations. It also tackles issues of negative representation of Islam and Muslims in the West and the global phenomenon of socalled illegal immigration. The project featured here has been presented in 2009 at IFA Galerie, Berlin and Galerie Atiss, Dakar. Prior to these venues, it was also exhibited at the Dak’Art Biennale in 2008. This body of work forms part of a long-term, ongoing series by the artist on the predicament of Senegalese youths, who risk their lives in the attempt to reach the Canarias Islands and the shores of Southern Europe in small, amateurishly motorized fishing boats.4 In a series of minimalist images, Quax photographed the rooms where young Senegalese men had lived before they embarked on their turbulent journeys. The photographs of the empty rooms or their curtained windows gesture to the traces of their former occupants. The impressions of their lives left in the sparsely furnished rooms can be detected in the few images (photos of famous Senegalese marabous and mourides) decorating Nka•131 migrations is critical to examining the layers of significance of the sociocultural and political...