"Cette poétique du politique": Political and Representational Ecologies in the Work of Yto Barrada

A graduate of history and political science, the Franco-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada was born in Paris in 1971 and studied in Tangier, Paris, and New York. Her work has been widely exhibited, for example in Paris (Elles, Centre Pompidou, 2009), New York (Tarjama/Translation, Queens Museum of Art, 2009), Madrid (Casa Arabe—Arab Cosmovisions, Photo España, 2009), Amsterdam (Snap Judgements: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, Stedelijk Museum, 2008), and Oxford (Transmission Interrupted, Modern Art Oxford, 2009). In 2006 she was awarded the Ellen Auerbach Award by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and was also shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. She is a founder and director of the Cinémathèque de Tanger. Her practice, which encompasses video, photography, and sculptural installation, takes as its starting point her own dual nationality and the possibility this affords of traveling freely between Morocco and France, while the mobility of her Moroccan peers is increasingly constricted by strict visa and border controls. She writes, "I think I was a privileged child. I crossed borders without really thinking about it. My parents are Moroccan, but I was born in France. So I'm interested because I could have had the same destiny too—to dream of Europe and never see it come true."¹

In this article, I will explore how Barrada engages with the unevenness of mobility and the "asymmetries of boundaries"² between Europe and Morocco, the global North and South. I will show how, in her work on the Strait of Gibraltar, she discloses the border not as a line, but as a shifting zone of political, economic, and cultural negotiation. In so doing, she draws our attention to the complex ecology of globalization, calling for an ethics of relation and representation that challenges both the disconnectedness described by the prevailing geopolitical imaginary and the politics of fear in which it is constituted and sustained.³ In her own practice, I will suggest, Barrada reflects critically on the politics of representation and exhibition, seeking to negotiate a conceptual path between poetics and politics in order to describe the iniquity of prevailing global structures and the chronic socio-political configurations they produce, but also to create an openness that allows for creative interpretive work and the imagining of other possibilities and (political) narratives. In other words, within the "système fantasmatique clos," she reveals the latent and subversive potential of "la possibilité du hasard."⁴

The Strait of Gibraltar, like the border between the USA and Mexico, is the site of an anxiogenic proximity between the global North and South. The EU sees Morocco as a highly problematic conduit for clandestine African (trans)migration to Europe, a worrying portal from a global South whose migrants promise to bring with them waves of terrorism, religious fundamentalism, trafficking in people and drugs, and transnational crime. For this reason, the boundary between the countries is aggressively defended. In fact, as the OECD⁵ and scholars such as Hein de Haas⁶ and Ali Bensaâd⁷ have argued, the number of African migrants coming to Europe is relatively small in terms of global migratory trends. However, the "paranoid Eurocentric vision" of migration⁸ has led the EU to transform relations radically in the Mediterranean basin, limiting inward migration and investing substantial human, financial, and technological resources in the policing of its external boundaries. A raft of EU policy measures, such as the introduction of new visa requirements for non-European nationals, the development and deployment of hi-tech security systems (such as Spain's systema integrado de vigiliancia exterior) and the creation of a cross-border EU database, containing fingerprint and DNA data, as well as driving licence and vehicle registration details, have all contributed to what has been commonly described as the fortification of Europe.⁹ These measures have had a particular impact on relations between southern European and North African states. France had already introduced visa restrictions for Algerian nationals in 1986, with Italy and Spain introducing visas for Moroccan nationals in 1990 and 1991...