‘Être vraiment vrai’: truth, in/visibility and migration in Morocco

ABSTRACT

This article explores truth demands, politics of in/visibility and migration in Morocco. Based on the participatory research project Arts for Advocacy: Creative Engagement with Forced Displacement in Morocco, we argue that narratives that depart from migrants’ confessional accounts of victimhood and contest truth demands can shift the in/visibility of migrants. Besides contributing to scholarship on the use of participatory, creative processes in migration studies, this article intervenes in wider debates about the construction of counter-narratives in contexts where representational practices reduce migrants to victims and villains.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• truth
• invisibility
• representation
• Morocco

Introduction

This article examines the co-production of visual narratives – resulting from the use of arts-based methods – which transgress expectations of truthfulness about migratory experiences. The project ‘Arts for Advocacy: Creative Engagement with Forced Displacement in Morocco’, conducted in partnership with civil society organizations in Morocco, generated narratives about migration aimed at disrupting dominant representational practices reducing migrants to victims and villains.¹ Such narratives offer a site of protestation that transcends truth demands from and in/visibility of migrants. This article contributes to interdisciplinary debates on the use of participatory, creative processes in migration studies. It argues that counter narratives (e.g. multivocal, fragmented, ambiguous, etc.) which depart from confessional accounts of victimhood, by transgressing truth demands, disrupt representational practices and shift migrants’ in/visibility.

Following an overview of arts-based methods in migration research, the article outlines the migratory context in Morocco, with a focus on race. This is followed by a section focusing on the project’s creative process, activities and decision-making around the co-production of visual narratives. The subsequent sections address the ways the project’s methods and visual narratives sought to transgress truth demands and disrupt migrants’ in/visibility.

Scholars in migration and refugee studies, artists and activists have questioned the dominant images and narratives of migration. Bischoff highlights how ‘visual regimes of migration’ shape the way movements across borders are conceived and acted on (Bischoff 2018, 34). The production, circulation and consumption of such images are power-laden processes that shape particular imaginaries, inform knowledge production, trigger emotional responses and justify political responses to the movement of people that disrupt the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki 1995). The moral panic around the so-called European migration crisis in 2015 was marked by images of people crossing the Mediterranean into Europe, which contributed to ‘fuelling a public imagination that conceptualises forced displacement as a humanitarian catastrophe, a threat to Europe’s welfare, and an erosion of national borders and identities’ (Stravopoulou 2020, 702). Besides the trope of the threatening racialized ‘Other’, depictions of migrants also regularly highlight the bare vulnerability, trauma and victimhood (Szörényi 2006), silencing the voices of those who have moved or been forced to move (Sigona et al. 2014). Commenting on the images that partake in the ‘social imagination of refugeeness’ (1996, 378), Lisa Malkki warns that the predicament of displaced people has become depoliticized and dehistoricized, with refugees becoming ‘pure victims in general’ (Malkki 1996, 378). Dominant representations of migrants oscillate between victims and villains, reducing people to anonymous suffering bodies on dinghies or threatening hordes climbing the fences around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.

Against the backdrop of photographs and other representations that partake in the ‘successful securitization of issues such as migration’ (Wilmott 2017, 67), we are inspired by scholars and activists who generate ‘counter-narratives’ (Blomfield and Lenette 2018) to address ‘representational failures and injustice’ through ‘purposeful knowledge’ (O’Neill 2011, 19) produced with, and not simply for or on, migrants. We deployed participatory, arts-based methods, which provide methodological tools incorporating creative and artistic practices into qualitative research to collect, analyze and/or represent data. Such methods have gained institutional recognition, especially in research with marginalized groups (e.g. migrants). By drawing on the synergies between artistic and qualitative research practices which all require flexibility, creativity and intuition (Leavy 2015), they facilitate the exploration and sharing of sensory, tacit, embodied and visual aspects of people’s experiences that may neither easily be expressed in words, nor captured by traditional research methods (Bagnoli 2009), thus ‘producing new knowledge and understandings’ (Nunn 2017, 2) and bringing to the fore ‘untold stories’ (Cole and Knowles 2008, 211). They require the creation of safe spaces to amplify the voices and self-representations of ‘knowledge holders’ (Lenette 2019), although researchers must acknowledge that power hierarchies are often blurred rather than eliminated (Stravopoulou 2020).

Such research projects pursue emancipatory agendas by fostering counter-narratives that ‘can inform, educate, challenge, empower and heal, […] producing and exchanging knowledge, facilitating mutual recognition, and undertaking a critical recovery of history’ (O’Neill 2011, 19). The deployment of visual and arts-based methods helps ‘to make visible continuing dynamics of exclusion’ (Sonn et al. 2014, 565) and provides migrants with another space for public engagement using their own reflections on (and not simply experiences of) migration (Stavropoulou 2019). These methods are not ‘magical’ (Lenette et al. 2020 et al., 171). The radical potential of counter-narratives requires a commitment to fostering spaces for self-expression that resist normative expectations of performing in an ‘authentic’ way and revealing participants’ ‘true self’ (Greatrick and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2017). Otherwise, researchers and artists risk perpetuating ‘narratives of disconnection, further “othering”, abjection, disempowerment, and voiceless-ness’ (Blomfield and Lenette 2018, 323). The imperative not to force people to share truthful accounts is relevant as migrants are asked to disclose the truth about their selves and journeys. In this article, we share our reflections on the fostering of a safe space with the potential to disrupt dominant representations and give shape ‘to utterances that are outside the sentences of power and control’ (Bromley 2001, 16). Through a focus on Morocco, we argue that the ambiguity of truth demands on migrants can be brought at the heart of the creative process to facilitate the disruption of the dominant politics of in/visibility which marginalize the voices, experiences, lives and rights of migrants.

Migration and Morocco

Morocco is an important nexus within the border regime that has transformed the Mediterranean as a ‘site of experimentation of new policies and practices regarding mobility and control’ (Vacchiano 2013, 337). Once mostly a migrant-sending country with a history of circular migration, Morocco has turned, since the mid-1990s, into a place of transit and a host country (Berriane, de Haas, and Natter 2015), notably for migrants from sub-Saharan countries, whose number has ‘grown dramatically in response to civil wars, political unrest and economic downturn’ (Cherti and Grant 2013, 11). This transformation has been concurrent with the security turn in European politics of migration and the closure of safe routes, notably through collaboration with non-member states (e.g. Morocco, Turkey) tasked with preventing and deterring the (irregular) migration of their own citizens and nationals transiting through their countries in exchange for visa quotas, trade, development, aid and other financial incentives (Gaibazzi et al. 2017).

Since the 1990s, mobility issues have been figured prominently in bilateral relationships between Morocco and the EU, leading to close cooperation in the reinforcement of border control, such as the fortification of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla (Andersson 2014). Morocco’s repressive legislation on migration led scholars and activists to describe the country as the ‘Gendarme of Europe’ (Belguendouz 2005). Yet, collaboration with Europe has been neither smooth nor devoid of tensions amidst asymmetrical relationships (El Qadim 2015). Warning against a Eurocentric analysis, Natter argues that the agenda-setting of irregular migration in Morocco, which until the twenty-first century had been considered largely insignificant, has been ‘a strategic decision of the Moroccan authorities […] to restore the country’s crucial role both in front of the EU and its African neighbours’ (Natter 2014, 24).

Migrants have been trapped on the southern side of the Mediterranean for increasingly long periods of time in abject living conditions, prompting scholars to critically examine the notion of transit (Bachelet 2019a) and highlight how migrants are marginalized into ‘a sort of legal limbo’ (Stock 2019, 65) where their rights are violated. Reports by national and international NGOs have documented and denounced the violations of migrants’ physical integrity, dignity and rights (e.g. GADEM 2013)

Moroccan civil society continues to monitor developments brought about by the adoption of a new politics of migration in 2013, which has included two regularization processes for irregular migrants, highlighting the continued focus on interior security (Khrouz and Lanza 2015). Reforms have allowed the Moroccan regime to reach diplomatic and economic goals with Europe and Africa (Cherti and Collyer 2015), but migrants remain vulnerable to violence, especially as border-crossing attempts (notably towards the Spanish enclaves and Canary Islands) have continued and are met by repression (see GADEM 2018). Mobilization among migrants and supporting NGOs hold the Moroccan state accountable for its own rhetoric of human rights commitment despite the threat of criminalization (Gross-Wyrtzen and Gazzotti 2020).

As Hannoum argues, migration in Morocco ‘is undoubtedly racialized’ (Hannoum 2020, 17) where colonial technologies of power have conceived North Africa as disconnected from the rest of the African continent, through the ‘geography of race’ (Hannoum 2021, 235). Researchers and activists have denounced the stigmatization of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in media and other public discourses (e.g. Bachelet 2019b). Black migrants are often associated with socio-economic and political issues, which, among the wider public, conjure images, such as ‘dirt, AIDS, prostitution, and theft’ (Cherti and Grant 2013, 35). Following violent attacks against migrants between 2012 and 2014 by state and non-state agents (Menin 2016), Moroccan civil society, including migrants’ organizations, brought attention via national campaigns (e.g. ‘Je ne m’appelle pas ‘Azzi’²) to racism in Moroccan society against migrants and black Moroccans (Alexander 2019). Scholars have highlighted a link between racism against migrants in contemporary Morocco with the legacy of slavery, drawing on the work of El Hamel (2013). However, more than simply a ‘remnant’ of such racialized legacies, Menin argues that ‘“anti-black racism” […] reflects contemporary developments in Morocco’ (Menin 2020, 182), including the governance of mobility and wider inequalities. Hence, Gazzotti points to both racial privilege and prejudice in the production of illegality in Morocco, arguing that the exclusion of certain (black) bodies is ‘activated by racialized forms of prejudice which structure societies according to hierarchies of dangerousness, visibility, and deservedness’ (2021, 278).

Migration scholars have examined the intersection of race and immigration politics by tracing ‘the multiple racial(ized) histories, logics and bodies that interest in the Morocco-EU border, forging intimate and transnational spaces of freedom and unfreedom, mobility and immobility, and humanity and inhumanity’ (Gross-Wyrtzen and El Yacoubi 2022). Nevertheless, in highlighting the dialectical relation between border and race, researchers stress that ‘categories of difference do not remain uncontested’ (Perl 2020, 270). This article contributes to the growing scholarship on the entanglements of blackness and illegality in Morocco by highlighting the radical potential of small-scale, arts-based, collaborative projects to disrupt racialization processes that mark black migrants as out of place.

The creative process

‘Arts for Advocacy’ (2016–18) was an interdisciplinary project developed in this context of fraught racialized politics of migration. It was conceived and delivered by three UK-based researchers and three project partners in Morocco: an anti-racist organization (GADEM), a theatre company (DABATEATR) and a migrants’ association (ALECMA). The research project deployed innovative, interdisciplinary and participatory arts-based methods to facilitate creative engagement with migration in Morocco. It was shaped by longstanding debates over representation, the rise of visual and participatory, arts-based methods (see Jeffery et al. 2019) and creative initiatives about migration in order to strengthen burgeoning synergies between arts, activism and research on migration in Morocco. The project was structured around key research questions exploring how arts-based, participatory methods can generate fresh insights on the politics of migration and displacement, disrupt power relations to enable co-production and generate synergies between research and advocacy. Our Project Partners were actively involved in using the arts to promote dialogue and shape political discourse about migration: since 2010, DABATEATR and GADEM had co-organized a yearly arts festival in Morocco (Migrant’Scène). The academic team co-organized research activities in Morocco with Project Partners: two sets of creative workshops; transnational knowledge exchange forums for practitioners, activists and researchers; project exhibitions.

The creative workshops were realized in 2017 with the support of GADEM to explore migration in a collaborative and creative setting. They were intended firstly as an exploration of the potentials and limitations of participatory, arts-based methods for research and advocacy, and secondly as an incubator to generate creative outputs for the Migrant’Scène festival. Decisions over the creative process involved researchers, Project Partners, artists and participants. Participants were recruited through GADEM’s intercultural programme and other already established relationships with migrants’ associations. They included 6 Moroccans and 12 migrants from Western and Central Africa, all residing in Rabat. The age range was from 15 to fifties, with an overall balance of 10 male and 8 female participants. Participants from outside Morocco had diverse immigration statuses: asylum seekers, refugees, recently regularized or irregular. Legal and illegal mobility are not static categories; refugee or regularized status in Morocco does not guarantee access to socio-economic rights (Stock 2019), especially for those racialized as black migrants (Gazzotti 2021). Boredom, interest in learning new skills, loneliness and willingness to engage with other cultures were some of the reasons participants volunteered to join. Milca, a teenager from Congo, who could not attend school wanted her ‘stay in Morocco not to be wasted’ and to learn something new rather than stay at home.³ Patrick, the leader of a migrants’ association originally from the Central African Republic, wanted to gain skills to ‘be better equipped to promote interculturality’ through the arts. Hajar, a Moroccan woman in her twenties, said she ‘struggled with communication’ and joined the project ‘to make friends’. Our partner GADEM advocated for the inclusion of Moroccans alongside citizens of other countries to counter fraught inter-racial relationships.

With the support of Project Partners, ‘Arts for Advocacy’ recruited two visual artists, Amine Oulmakki and Julien Fleurance, a theatre practitioner, Dabcha, and a curator, Yvon Langué, whose creative practices were concerned with experiences of marginalization and mobilities. The authors of this article are the two researchers from the project who conducted fieldwork in Morocco and were involved in both workshops – as co-organizers. We also conducted participant observations, and alongside participants, we practiced technical elements in photography and video-making led by visual artists.

The first set of creative workshops (held 9am–4 pm over 10 days in April 2017 at a cultural centre in Rabat) were co-led by Amine and Julien, who based the workshops’ structure on their previous practices of working with community groups and, in dialogue with the researchers and Project Partners, proposed a focus on technical elements in photography and video-making prior to moving on to the construction of narratives and visual storytelling. The activities, such as photo shoots, sought to habituate participants to being in front of and behind the camera and to foster connections within the group. Fatima, a 24-year-old Moroccan woman, highlighted how the project enabled her to meet people from Sub-Saharan countries; for her ‘Sub-Saharans are no longer strangers’. At the workshops, participants shared among themselves difficult experiences of life in Morocco, and personal stories and imaginaries of migration. The two artists gradually shifted workshop activities to visual storytelling and encouraged participants – divided into three groups – to focus on one object to channel their reflections about migration. One group focused on ‘Cutting Objects’ at the centre of an eponymous series of portraits and reflected on what divides and unites people. In this group, Reuben, a Ghanaian musician and cultural activist in his thirties, explained: ‘we are not here to give answers. Our pictures show that diversity is une richesse’. Another group chose a mobile phone and produced a video entitled ‘Missed Call’ about being apart in migration. A suitcase was the focus of the last group, which narrated a story about love and mixed marriages.

The second set of workshops (held 9 am–4 pm over 9 days in September 2017 at a cultural centre in Rabat), involving the same participants, were led by Amine and theatre practitioner Dabcha who co-devised the sessions using video and photography to focus on the construction of narratives and truth. Dabcha, an elusive, giving and empathetic theatre practitioner, spoke Darija and some French, but used language sparsely; he led activities which included physical warm-ups, building narratives collectively through improvisation. The workshops enabled participants to learn more from and about each other, sharing memories, and in some instances to confront assumptions they held about one another. Oussama, a Moroccan man in his early twenties, said that working alongside sub-Saharans he ‘expected to see survival, but what I saw instead was intelligence’. Collaborative work between migrants and Moroccans in this creative setting was instrumental in disrupting preconceptions about ‘the sub-Saharans’ and ‘the Moroccans’ amidst a broader context marked by violence and racism.

Participant observation in this second set of workshops took a different form; we participated in the physical routine in the mornings – involving warm-up, trust and group-building exercises led by Dabcha – but took an observational role during the exercises involving the construction of narratives and camera work. The first few days of these workshops entailed on on-camera exercises and aimed to help participants reach what Dabcha called ‘le point mort’, a neutral point or gear. One key exercise asked participants to face the camera, and to silently ask themselves a question and reflect until they reached that neutral point. They would then walk up to the camera to deliver a message through their gaze. During a session, Dabcha asked about the difference between being on stage and off stage; reminiscent of Goffman’s dramaturgical theory (1959), he brought to the fore issues of performance and appearances. Being stressed, facing public or ‘acting’ were some of the responses from participants; while agreeing with some of the suggestions, Dabcha added that it was simply about breathing differently and remaining ‘engaged’. Dabcha and Amine gradually introduced speech in the practice; participants would sit facing each other with a set of two cameras. Once they reached that neutral position, participants could express whatever they wanted to by remaining silent or talking, singing, using their preferred language – whether Moroccan Arabic, Lingala, Tamazigh, etc. Dabcha invited participants to narrate ‘positive or negative stories’ while displaying the opposite feelings (e.g. laughing while telling something sad). Blandine, a Congolese woman in her fifties, shared a story in Lingala about her village being attacked, while laughing loudly, falling onto the floor.

Truthfulness

In this section, we explore how the workshops were the locus of collaborative engagements driven by an artistic and emancipatory approach to truth, whereby participants were encouraged to express themselves however they wanted. This approach departed from dominant understandings of truth in bordering processes. We examine how the workshops elicited counter-narratives of migration among the participants through a different kind of truth-demand in this creative setting: the imperative ‘to be really true’.

Drawing on Foucault’s argument that confession is central to producing docile subjects, Salter argues that ‘acts of examination, obedience, and confession’ (2006, 168) to provide representatives of the sovereign with truth for authorization (e.g. ‘I have nothing to declare’) have been crucial to the construction of borders. Agents of the sovereign adjudicate the veracity of migrants’ claims, motives, documents and even bodies (Fassin and d’Halluin 2005). Such ‘truth demands and expectations’ are inscribed in unequal power relationships over which migrants have little control (Friedman 2010, 167). In the case of asylum determination and expectations over narratives of suffering (Good 2007), these processes entail assumptions over what constitutes a truthful story from claimants, with real effects on their ability to cross borders, settle in another country and receive adequate protection.

In Morocco, many flagship measures of the new national strategy on migration and asylum have not yet been implemented. A national asylum framework is pending and the UNHCR continues to process refugee claims (Stock 2019). Civil society organizations denounced difficulties for migrants applying through the regularization process, notably stringent criteria and burdensome requirements for supportive documents (GADEM and FIDH 2015). As argued by Manby, when ‘refugees and migrants’ in Morocco are not able to overcome the obstacles to obtain identifying documents, notably for birth registrations, ‘they live in the “illegible” margins of the state, invisible to the authorities, or are forced to adapt their identities to satisfy the rules and fit into the categories established by state procedures’ (Manby 2019, 29). One male participant, a refugee from a Central African country, reflected on the challenges to access support: ‘you find out that they [UNHCR] don’t like truth. Even if you did not consider lying, you tell yourself you have to’. In response to the violation of their rights, migrants have issued their own truth demands on Moroccan authorities and their European partners, mobilizing to ‘expose the true realities’ (Bachelet 2018) of migration governance in Morocco through advocacy work.

Participants in the workshops stressed that in most contexts where they were invited to speak about their lives and journeys (e.g. conferences on migration), there were expectations over what and how they could articulate their experiences. Discussing the scarcity of opportunities for migrants to express themselves openly, Alpha, a migrant activist from Guinea, complained that participation in such events was always ‘framed’ for invited speakers from migrant communities: ‘it is not possible to talk about whatever you want or feel […]. Here [in the workshops] we can go from one story to the other’. The participants enjoyed the workshops as a safe space for encounters and self-expression, which provided some ‘relief’ from being always ‘stressed’ and opportunities to discuss what mattered to them. For instance, those involved in creating the short film (‘And Time Breathes’) about the importance of family and inter-marriage with migrants in Morocco wished to talk about love, and not just suffering.⁴

In the ‘Arts for Advocacy’ project, we sought to depart from and disrupt dominant representations of migration and asylum in Morocco. The participatory creative process for visual narratives did not aim to elicit ‘the whole, entire, self-policing truth’ (Salter 2006, 183) to be presented to border agents, or a public in an exhibition setting. When Dabcha asked participants ‘to be really true’, he was not asking for the kind of ‘single, linear, verifiable’ narrative (Woolley 2014, 20) that migrants are expected to articulate. Rather, drawing on his theatre practice and techniques, Dabcha reminded participants that they should never be looking for ‘external validation’, that when they were facing the cameras, they should be on ‘an interior journey’ and that ‘being true’ meant being ‘engaged and present in the space’. Dabcha stresses that people could tell the truth and/or make up stories if they wanted. His call to participants for truthfulness was in itself a truth demand, albeit one that departed from institutional ones in migration processes. He encouraged participants to use ‘the opposite reaction’ when addressing cameras, for instance, laughing if the story was sad. Dabcha also introduced participants to a technique he regularly employed with actors called ‘mafia codes’ involving groups of three where one person would tell a story, another would listen and the third would film. The person listening would use three secret hand signals to prompt the storyteller into either pausing, repeating what they had said, or changing the last element of the story to modify the narrative. The codes provided tools to highlight and transgress expectations over truthfulness in narratives of migration. For Dabcha, such exercise enabled people to ‘break the [narrative] circle towards making a new story’. Some stories would begin with recognizable personal accounts – including memories previously shared during the workshop – and, under the gaze of the video-maker, both the listener and the teller would transform the narratives mixing truth and fiction.

Dabcha’s encouragement to ‘be really true’ was in stark contrast with the demands placed on migrants in the contexts of border regimes, which call for truth, coherence and linearity. Whilst often confusing to those with little experience of theatre, participants commented on how exhilarating they found the imperative to ‘be true’ and the freedom to express themselves however they wanted. Dabcha asked participants what brought us all together: participants discussed the sharing of stories, the exchange of knowledge and working together; Dabcha said we were there altogether ‘to leave something truthful that speaks of us’. The workshops’ exercises led to emotionally charged stories by the participants, yet the emphasis was never put on confessing truthful personal narratives, and the objective was not to reveal them for public consumption. The first set of workshops led to finished visual pieces (still photography, a short film and a video-installation); participants were involved in all stages: from devising and delivery (they chose topics and narratives to share with the public) to production (e.g. shooting, montage, editing, etc). Ndlend Fils, a Cameroonian migrant activist in his mid-forties, felt that it was important to have ‘realised the work ourselves […] often it’s not the case, you are kept at distance’. The second set of workshops did not generate finished creative outputs, partly because there was not enough time. We agreed collectively with Amine and Dabcha, the participants, Project Partners and the curator Yvon, that videos from the daily exercises would feed into an exhibition alongside pieces from the first set of workshops. In the next section, we focus on the project’s exhibition, and reflect on the significance of the video installation (derived from the second set of workshops) in disrupting the politics of in/visibility.

In/Visibility and representation

Migrants are simultaneously invisibilized and hypervisibilized. The bordering regimes that govern their ability to move and settle entail both obscuration and exposure, facilitated by the invasive gaze of technological means (e.g. radars, X-rays). The ‘border spectacle’ (De Genova 2013) of deportations and other bordering practices to stop, remove and deter people presented as undesirable perform an important function in migration politics by enforcing the containment of racialized ‘others’ and maintaining fearful publics. At the same time, such politics entail the invisibilization of migrants, notably through physical distancing. In Morocco, NGOs have denounced arbitrary police raids and the deportation of migrants to the Algerian border and, increasingly, to southern parts of the country (GADEM 2018). Images of migrants saturate public discourses in Morocco and beyond, contributing to moral panics. Yet, ‘the mechanisms and ramifications of exclusion, those most affected by them, and the colonial, geopoliticized histories that cause crisis, displacement, and migration’ (Mountz 2015, 197) remain largely hidden from view in public discourses. Exposed and constituted as more or less deserving subjects through the production of categories (e.g. illegal migrant) that rely on ‘stigmatising, criminalising and/or victimising representations’ (Sager 2018, 4), migrants are forced to hide and live ‘shadowed lives’ (Shavez 1992) to avoid detection. Nadine, Milca’s mum, felt the project enabled her and her daughter to ‘meet cultures, which I have not been able to be alongside [cotoyer]’, since she spent little time out of the house for fear of being assaulted or arrested.

In Morocco, the lives of migrants who are pushed out of sight into forest camps and marginal urban neighbourhoods are marked by fear and uncertainty (Stock 2019), heightened by violent repression from Moroccan authorities and the poor enforcement of their rights (Bachelet 2018). Their precariousness and invisibility often involve arduous working conditions in the informal labour market which partake in wider exploitative processes benefiting from the marginalization of migrants (Andersson 2014). Many of our project’s participants stressed that this had not changed with the new politics of migration. For Brice, a refugee from Cameroon who was hoping for resettlement away from Morocco, discrimination against migrants from sub-Saharan Africa was just more ‘hidden’ and ‘deceitful’. The in/visibilization of migrants in Morocco is marked by the legacy of racism and slavery as discussed above. Drawing on the work of Fanon to explore spaces of in/visibility for migrants, Villegas argues that ‘particular bodies spark questioning and suspicion regarding status’ (2010: 149). The dangers of in/visibility for black migrants were brought to the fore when, as part of an activity, participants took pictures in the Oudaya Kasbah, a touristic neighbourhood of Rabat where (usually white) tourists with cameras are a familiar sight. Black people handling cameras was enough to arouse the suspicion of the police who came to make polite yet intimidating inquiries. Joel, a 40-year-old refugee from Central African Republic, said he needed to be vigilant when returning home late after the workshop, as he, like other migrants living in marginal neighbourhoods, was a frequent target for muggings. Participants’ attendance was in part motivated by a desire to disrupt hegemonic modes of representation and shift the terms of their in/visibility, despite the constant threat of harm. Joel complained about being ‘bored’ at home and was happy to be part of the project as ‘an opportunity to encounter one another’; he rejoiced at the opportunity to share time with other people, including Moroccans and other migrants.

What is revealed and hidden from view matters since ‘representation has increasingly played a role in defining who is entitled to have rights’ (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013, 181–2). Borren (2008) argues that asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants are excluded from what Arendt calls the ‘space of appearances’ (Arendt, 1958, 198), the locus of meaningful political participation where actions are performed and seen among actors. Instead, they are reduced to organic life marked by harmful conditions (public invisibility and natural visibility). As a ‘field of struggle’ (Tazzioli and Walters 2016, 463), visibility holds the promise of reversals in relations of power, through public and visible demonstrations and less spectacular tactics taking place ‘in the micro-political spectrum of everyday life and private life’ (Ataç et al. 2015, 7). Drawing on Rancière and Arendt, Brambilla and Pötzcsh outline how counter-hegemonic self-representations by migrants ‘entail the inclusion of new and potentially subversive subjectivities’ (Brambilla and Pötzcsh 2017, 75). Interventions over the in/visibility of migrants foster ‘new trajectories between what can be seen, what can be said, and what can be done’ (Rancière 2010, 194).

The value of in/visibility depends on the context as neither has any inherent ethical superiority (Latham 2014) nor is a permanent attribute of social spaces (Marquez 2012). Scholars draw attention to the negotiation of ‘the contradictions, losses and gains of in/visibility’ (Tyler and Marciniak 2013, 152) as migrants deploy strategies of in/visibility to evade surveillance and bring about socio-political transformations. Yet, revealing the violence of bordering regimes risks reproducing divisions between deserving and non-deserving subjects, and exposing migrants to renewed repression. In Morocco, changes in national migration politics were partly a result of intense pressure from civil society, including a growing number of migrant activists who had set up associations to denounce ‘the true realities of their violent predicament’ (Bachelet 2018). Their political activities exposed them to further intimidation and repression from the authorities.

Through the exhibition ‘Migration. Récits. Mouvements.’, we sought to contribute to the disruption of politics of in/visibility in Morocco. Co-designed by Cameroonian curator Yvon in close collaboration with Amine, the exhibition took place in December 2017 within the Villa des Arts, a cultural venue owned by a private foundation. In reflecting on its scenography, Yvon stresses the symbolic value of the exhibition as an act of representation about migration in Morocco, arguing that ‘its potential lies in the luminescence of its video screens, which give these narratives an unusual scope, as well as an intense proximity’ (Langué 2019, 48). It was important that participants’ faces, particularly migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, lit up the dark, underground gallery in a venue associated with Rabat’s Moroccan intelligentsia and located a short walk away from the royal palace.

Alongside videos and close portraits from the two sets of workshops, the main audio-visual installation consisted of nine screens, assembled in a U-shape, projecting the faces of the participants who seemingly stared at the viewers while talking, singing or in silence. The installation’s sound was a single audio track. The set of nine screens articulated visually and orally an assemblage of voices and silences in different languages. Disrupting expectations over truthful and coherent account of participants’ experiences of migration (Woolley 2014), the screens display a montage from the workshops’ exercises during which participants would be encouraged to be ‘really true’ and to remain engaged with the camera.

For Yvon, the screens making up this installation ‘show and hide at the same time’ (Langué 2019, 48). The exhibition’s challenge to the prevailing politics of in/visibility draws on Glissant’s notion of the ‘right to opacity’, a rejection of the principle of transparency at the core of Western epistemology. Instead, Glissant calls for the right to opacity for everyone, ‘that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity’ (Glissant 1997, 190). Through screens, which conceal as much as they reveal, the exhibition disrupts truth expectations and the dominant politics of in/visibility that hamper migrants’ recognition and membership within the Moroccan polity. For Yvon, the shift from the poetic towards the political at the core of the exhibition pertains to the possible reconfiguration of the relationship between images and viewers.

The visual and oral experience of this installation disrupts common tropes reducing migrants to suffering, notably within the representational strategies of humanitarian agencies which use close-ups to elicit sympathy for fundraising (Blachnicka-Ciacek 2020). Viewers navigate a space where bodies trace their own emotional and physical journeys. Participants in the workshop had been looking at two different cameras, thus, their shifting gazes on the screens in the installation result in them looking away – as if to each other via the screens – and straight to the cameras, seemingly directly to the public. For the spectators, the exhibition entailed walking through and looking at the nine-screen installation, holding back the gazes of the participants. The exhibition space displayed a spectrum of possibilities between an Arendtian space of appearance and a Foucauldian space of surveillance where ‘selves and subjects are partially constituted by the ways in which they become visible’ (Marquez 2012, 7). Viewers also experienced a disrupted temporality between screens and sound: the participants’ emboldened presence on the screens was out of sync with the sound installation. This audio-visual installation sought to escape expectations of truth demands, by eschewing the very syntax of coherent and chronological narratives expected of migrants.

The exhibition invited visitors to reflect on their own involvement within the complex relationships among Moroccans and citizens from sub-Saharan countries in Morocco. It extended the participatory process to the 200 people who attended the opening. As Alpha put it that evening, visitors were not simply spectators but ‘actors’ too, walking within the exhibition where most participants were also physically present, watching themselves on the screens, taking selfies alone or in small groups and talking with visitors. Both the people on the screens and those looking at them are invited to meet in what photography theorist Azoulay calls a ‘shared civil space’ (Azoulay 2008). Azoulay argues that the widespread use of cameras across the world has not only resulted in the mass production of images but has also created encounters ‘between people who take, watch, and show other people’s photographs, […] thus opening new possibilities of political action and forming new conditions for its visibility’ (Azoulay 2008, 22). In this civil space, which is not mediated solely by the governing state powers, all participants (photographers, photographed, viewers) enter into negotiations over what is shown and the production of meaning as ‘participant citizens’. The polyphonic and fragmented audio-visual installation does not offer a single, coherent narrative about migration in, from and through Morocco, but echoes complex lives amidst fraught Moroccan politics and intercultural encounters laden with racism and solidarity in which the spectators are also participants. The power of counter-representational strategies over migration then lies in generating ‘uncertainty about “common sense” understandings of belonging’ (Tyler and Marciniak 2013, 152), but also more widely about expectations over the roles ascribed to migrants.

Conclusion

Through a focus on the ‘Arts for Advocacy’ project, we have explored how visual narratives, which challenge truth demands, can disrupt politics of in/visibility and provide counter-hegemonic representational strategies. The visual and audio material exhibited in ‘Migration. Récits. Mouvements.’ hinged on the ambiguous imperative ‘to be really true’, to depart from confessional accounts of migratory experiences. The exhibition critically engaged the public with the participants’ plurality of reflections (and not just experiences) of migration and with the ‘many encounters, connections, mutualities, and both modes of solidarity and of rejection’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020, 4) which emerged from the project. For Joel, the workshops enabled people ‘to cohabit, be together among sub-Saharans and Moroccans, to build something together. […] There was love’. The project illustrates the potential of arts-based initiatives to oppose historical and contemporary processes of exclusion by disrupting the association of blackness with illegality that is constitutive of migration politics in Morocco and beyond. Other visual projects in Morocco (e.g. Minority Globe’s ‘Look at Me’) have sought to utilize the arts to challenge dominant (racialized) narratives and representations. However, despite the radical transformative potential of such processes for alternative political arrangements over issues such as mobility and belonging, the success (and ‘impact’) of these counter-representations and the use of arts-based methods remain ‘often difficult to measure’ (Lenette 2019, 171). Just as creative methods do not replace but complement more traditional research methods, creative processes do not offer straightforward solutions for empowerment and political recognition. Like us, Yvon hoped that the exhibition’s cultivation of reflections on migration in Morocco would have been amplified thanks to the hosting cultural venue. However, the Villa des Arts’ tepid promotion reflected its ‘opportunistic’ stance – the instrumentalization of an increasingly visible issue (migration in Morocco) ‘to make a face and not to heal’ (Langué 2019, 52). Nevertheless, the creative pieces have since featured in other exhibitions in Morocco and the UK. The reflections and collaborations between artists, activists, participants and researchers – fostered through the project – have furthered debates and praxis on transgressing truth demands and the politics of in/visibility of migrants.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Laura Jeffery, PI for the project ‘Arts for Advocacy’ and attentive critical reader for this paper; and to colleagues, especially Agnes Woolley and Eva Giraud, for their insightful readings of our drafts. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their astute suggestions and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/P004598/1].

Notes

1. The authors acknowledge the constructed nature of migration categories, and recognize that labels in processes of migration and displacement entail different journeys, protection needs, and regimes of rights. Throughout the article, they use the term ‘migrant’ to refer to individuals with a range of migratory statuses and overlapping experiences, people from ‘sub-Saharan’ Africa who – irrespective of their status – are racialized and subjected to similar bordering regimes in Morocco.

2. My name is not ‘Azzi. ‘Azzi translates as ‘negro’, ‘slave’ or ‘black’ in Moroccan Arabic. The term is derogatory (Menin 2016, 13).

3. We refer to participants by their first name only, as agreed with the participants during the workshops when discussing their visibility. This is consistent with how they are introduced on the project website and other materials.

4. Photographs and videos are available here: www.artsforadvocacy.org