VISUAL GAPS. LOW DEFINITION FOR AN ETHICS OF BEARING WITNESS IV. BORDER (2002): Light, Flares and Political Subjects

IV. BORDER (2002): LIGHT, FLARES AND POLITICAL SUBJECTS

By Cecilia Bima

p.85-89
 

At any rate as for me (if this is of any interest to the reader), let it be clearly understood, I would, even if it is a multinational, give the whole of Montedison for a firefly.

          P.P. Pasolini, Il vuoto del potere ovvero l’articolo delle lucciole in “Corriere della Sera,” 1          February 1975
 
Shot between 2002 and 2004, Border documents the attempts of Afghan and Iraqi refugees, at the Sangatte refugee camp, to cross the English Channel. The infamous Sangatte camp is located a few kilometers south of Calais, close to the entrance to the Eurotunnel than links the French and English coasts. Passengers embark here, but also vehicles, trucks and other means of transportation that can board the train directly from the motorway exit. In the areas around the camp, Waddington follows the movements of the migrants, who every night, make their way toward the entrance of the tunnel or the motorway rest stops, to try to board a truck unobserved or meet their own smuggler, a trafficker who will take them to the United Kingdom. It is a mission, often unsuccessful, that repeats itself every night, like a ritual. Most of the time the migrants, who move in groups of two or three, or twenty or thirty people, are discovered by the police forces and returned to the camp, to try again, relentlessly, in the days that follow. For a migrant England is a much more coveted goal than France and other European countries, since the bureaucratic procedures for obtaining asylum are simpler and the social services higher in quality. Thus for many, the United Kingdom constitutes a sort of Eldorado, idealized an mythicized over the course of the journey by the rumors and stories that circulate among the migrants. It is the traffickers who exploit the golden aura, demanding enormous sums of money from the migrants, in exchange for passage and help to reach the English coasts: “Often this image was put forward and promoted by profit-oriented traffickers, who could earn large sums of money from the precarious traverse of the Channel. Especially in the camp, after all the disappointment along the way, the United Kingdom was made into an icon and collective fantasies […] were formed and cultivated.”¹

The political events that mark the stories of migrants in the Calais area begin with the war in the former Yugoslavia,² when many Albanian refugees coming from Kosovo start to arrive in this region, to subsequently reach the United Kingdom. In late September 1999 the Ministère des affaires sociales et de la santé gives the Red Cross a large, abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Sangatte, to set up as an emergency shelter for the large number of migrants coming from the East. Over time, the Red Cross warehouse becomes one of the largest refugee camps in France, harboring, from the time of its opening, more than 70 thousand refugees. In December 2002, however, the camp is closed, as a result of agreements between the French Minister of the Interior at the time and his English counterpart. Thus, in the final period prior to the closure, the terminal becomes the most sought-after destination by migrants, who increasingly attempt to climb directly onto trains, abandoning their attempts to make the crossing clandestinely on trucks. The principal reason lies in the increasingly tight inspections of vehicle trailers, with the use of infra-red rays, x-rays, CO2 and heartrate detectors, to discover any illegal passengers. It is as if in some way “the clients’ cargo was to be made more transparent.”³

In September 2001 Laura Waddington visits the region and the refugee camp for the first time, and in 2002 she decides to create the documentary; she chooses not to shoot the footage inside, but only in the area between the camp and the Eurotunnel. With the same camera utilized for CARGO, a SONY TRV 900,⁴ she moves alongside the migrants, seeking to escape police raids. The camera hangs from the director’s neck, protected by a waterproof cover to ward off the mud and rain, during frantic moments when the migrants must cross the motorway to reach the trains, while, in order to move on hands and knees in the tall grass, she always holds it in her hand with the screen facing forward.

For I was filming with the shutter wide open to compensate for the lack of light in the fields and this produced images, which were stuttered and blurred, and sensitive to the slightest movement of my hand. If I breathed too heavily, shivered or trembled, the blur in an image would become too great and the refugees would dissolve, like ghosts, into the reeds and bushes.5

The completely open diaphragm, due to the extremely unfavorable light conditions, produces blurry and flickering images, sensitive to even the slightest movement of the hand; and this is why, to avoid a complete dissolution of the clarity of the image and the unrecognizability of the subjects that are filmed, it ends up being necessary for the director to make an effort at stability, even under particularly adverse conditions. As stated directly by Waddington, as soon as an “essential image” — an image she views as fundamental — appears before her, she is provoked to bring attention to her body, imposing an iron determination.

I remember the violent contrast between those moments of extreme immobility and silence, which passed, as if in a dream, everything abstract and in slow motion and the sudden bursts of frantic movement, bright light and police violence.⁶

Thus, one perceives the hostility of the environment in which the Afghan and Iraqi migrants, and consequently the filmmaker herself are moving. The lack of definition seems to be the visual equivalent to the severely testing physical and mental conditions, in which the perception of events appears obfuscated. In fact, while shooting, Waddington suffers fainting spells and blackouts that cause her to actually perceive the space around her as out of focus and undefined, just as it appears to the eyes of the viewer. Thus her personal narrative is not omitted, but rather becomes the means through which she presents a political condition that does not pertain to her, yet the distance whereby she experiences it firsthand is shortened, thanks to the reproduction of the gestures and actions of the subjects themselves: “she was there, she became an intermediary and transformed the political event into a personal experience.”⁷ Not surprisingly, the choice to film outside the camp is significant; namely, it takes on an ethical value, given that it keeps the spectator aware of the difference in condition between the refugee and the director. In other words, the artist maintains her otherness in the modalities of enunciation, not through physical distance, as in CARGO, but through a subtle relationship of coexistence between vicinity and exclusion. The first — vicinity, proximity — occurs when, hidden among the bushes, exposed to the elements, to the wind, to police raids, Waddington proceeds step by step with the women and men from the camp; her condition of exclusion — and, therefore, of asymmetry of gaze with regard to the event — instead, is revealed precisely in her choice to remain outside the camp. In the second sequence, perhaps one of the most significant, the framing attests to precisely this ambiguous relationship. A man, wrapped in a silver blanket, moves and twirls in a space in front of a large gate (fig. 1), probably the entrance to the camp, marked by the symbol of a red cross against a white background. The gate marks a threshold beyond which the observer’s gaze cannot reach, is not allowed, and so the viewer does not see what is happening beyond the entrance. At a certain point, the figure moves beyond the threshold and the camera, with a now-familiar wide zoom, follows him up to the limit of visibility. (fig. 2). The observer, in contrast, is excluded from the entire dimension of the interior of the camp, but the artist’s voice makes it possible to discern that vicinity — that proximité⁸ — which functions as a second boundary in the relationship with the migrants: “a boy from Kurdistan dancing with his blanket in the wind, and the way that even when the refugees came back gassed or injured, they’d talk to me so warmly, and laugh and sometimes sing.” Namely, there is dialogue, sharing and proximity with the experience of the migrant; in this regard, Didi-Huberman speaks about the “ethics of an image,”⁹ that is, when the artist succeeds in granting “the actors their dignity.”

Thus, participating in the experience of the migrant entails a basic questioning of the traditional “safe distance” between the position of the observer and that of the filmed subjects; viewers are neither presented with a context nor furnished with an explanation of what they are about to observe. A single text appears at the beginning of the film: This is a film about Afghan and Iraqi refugees, I met in the field around the Sangatte Red Cross Camp, in France. Unable to get to England legally, they tried to enter the channel tunnel, hidden in trucks and on freight trains. Immediately thereafter we enter the dark and indecipherable dimension of night, in which the subjects of the documentary operate. In this case we are not talking about a total and direct immersion in the experience that is presented, but, on the contrary, a “perceptual chaos” — which leaves the observer “alienated and engulfed.”

[,,,] the power of this particular movie stems from the fact that instead of reinforcing the division between the safe position of the viewer and the imposed “elsewhere”, to which the film gives the viewer access, the author pulls us deep into the space of the interval, she forces us to inhabit the area between previously negotiated identities.¹⁰

And so the notion of perceptual chaos,¹¹ includes that of the interval, understood as a liminal space, an area in which the conventional definition of the viewer’s gaze does not apply and, rather, the very role of the observer is subverted. It is in this area of interval that the tangency between a human condition and a dis-human environment is constituted, that is, being a person in a refugee camp. The existence of female and male refugees, is, on the other hand, an anomaly in the system of the Nation-State. The prolongation of this status, and the very definition of the refugee, delineate the features of an excess figure for the State, one that cannot always be integrated into its system and thus ending up being undesirable, along with the entire community to which it belongs. The camp in which he or she reside that zone circumscribed within a State, also exceeds the legal framework and thus does not benefit from any official recognition. Khosravi describes their principal features: “wherever they may be, they — [the camps] — impose the status of “refugee” on people, not as a legal category, but as a mode of being, as identity. In Malkki’s words, “they become refugees.”¹² Thus, fulfilling an anomalous role, the migrant (male or female) establishes a connection, both controversial and ambiguous, between the being inserted into a community and simultaneously ending up excluded from it, between being inside and being outside, or between the condition of visibility and invisibility: a dynamic that is reproduced by the artist herself in her filming of attempts at flight. In this “inclusive exclusion,”¹³ to quote Giorgio Agamben, illegals, refugees, half-citizens, are positioned on the threshold between inside and outside, and their very experience overlaps at the border, enough to make the subjects themselves become a “border”; “the undesirables are no longer expelled from the border, but are forced to be the border.”¹⁴
 
p. 90

It is about the border, that is, the opaque zone, the irreducible, that, according to George Agamben, takes the form of “shadows, reflections and mirrorings,” but which in Waddington’s documentary is perceived as a grainy and indefinite surface, difficult to decipher. “The opaque is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence.”¹⁸

On an aesthetic level, we are witnessing the effects of the blur and graininess concurrently with the nocturnal scenes, shot amidst the bushes and in the darkness of the street: this is the opaque that emerges on the surfaces of the images. To the observer’s eyes, it looks like an interval, a lack to be filled; as Dusi emphasizes, on a sculptural level,¹⁹ the blurring generates a weakening of the categories of configuration of the form, eidetic in matrix, and the modulation of the diffusion of light. In other words, there is a dispersion of boundaries and a “dissipation of the density of the figures.”²⁰ Light is therefore the nucleus from which one starts to analyze a series of contrasts that are implemented throughout the duration of the documentary. Waddington, in shooting and following the migrants in the places near the camp, amid the tall grass and on the highway, is forced to keep the diaphragm of the camera very open, because of the very low light conditions. This is why the images end up being very blurry and the outlines decidedly indefinite. In a first sequence, we see a group of men walking along an asphalt surface, while all around them a vaguely reddish halo spreads; at the sides of the road, an orderly and cadenced series of lampposts draw strips of light on the surface of the tarmac, and the men are invariably hit, as they gradually advance in their procession (figs. 5, 6). Thus, at cadenced intervals, they enter and exit the illuminated spaces, intermittently visible and invisible. The camera visibly moves, generating bumps that in turn create effects of doubling the human figures; the opening of the diaphragm, in other words, precludes a greater degree of clarity and consequently creates an effect of the decomposition of the outlines, precisely a doubling (fig. 7). The eye attempts a “tensing” of these doublings, in a cognitive effort of recognition. The low light intensity, therefore, is the reason for the first two effects of meaning, intermittency and doubling; the migrants appear and disappear beneath the presence of the streetlights, and their consistency is fragmented by a short trail, as if to dismember their contours.

It is at this precise point that the work of Laura Waddington situates itself, in the region of absence and loss. Her territory begins at the edges of the visible, where absence persists in maintaining itself for a moment longer. It is the darkness which allows the palpitation of the visible, the recording of a luminous imprint signaling a presence which does not stop disappearing. And a quality of image grain, which marks itself out as a difficult and necessary vision.²¹

Khalili’s words dwell on the concepts of “presence that doesn’t cease disappearing” and “grain that emerges as a difficult and necessary vision.” If, in the first case, it is possible to connect those notions of intermittence and doubling, actually intended as an alternation of vision and the presence of the subjects, in the second case, however, the emphasis is placed directly on a specific effect: the graininess.

In the following sequence there appears the figure of a man seen from the back, scanning the horizon, in a lookout position (figs. 8, 9). The artist is crouched lower down and shoots the dark landscape in the foreground — a field with tall grass where it is possible to hide — while in the background one can glimpse a purplish gleam, sometimes interrupted by the lights of vehicles passing on the road. Everything found on this side of the road, that is on the onlookers’ side, remains blurry and grainy, in sharp contrast with the luminosity of the background with its purplish gleam and vehicles’ headlights. Likewise, the first sequence of the documentary shows a contrasting light condition between the foreground, occupied by the figure of a migrant waiting to jump onto a moving train, and the light and illuminated background.

Border is in fact a rare example of harmonious coincidence between the ethical and the esthetic plane; the touching quality of the images (grainy, unstable, sometimes actually slowed down) is always in the service of emotion, and thus it can happen that the fragile beauty of silhouettes pressed against the horizon becomes a cry, a flash, a firefly.²²

The contrast of light exists already within these two sequences; that is, an opposition of meaning is created between the space occupied by the refugees, an opaque space, subject to very precarious and intermittent light conditions, and the other space, that of civilization, cars, trains, definable as the space of the Nation-State.23 In this sense the scene of the police raid, where we see for the first time the faces of the clandestine men, crammed together and in turmoil, and those of the uniformed police, is paradigmatic. The opening of this scene marks a clear contrast with the progression – subdued, poetic and at the same time immersed in shadow – of the rest of the documentary. An almost indistinct mass of men filmed in a panoramic type movement stand out from the frame: beams of light coming from torches turned toward the camera, and then an orderly troop of police who prevent the migrants from escaping (figs. 10, 11). The setting is urban, it seems to be that of a city piazza. After a few seconds of clarity, the camera begins to spin out of control, as if the gaze were unexpectedly drawn by an event or a noise to quickly turn back to the source of its interest; the figures become distorted, lose their outlines and a set of lights and torches invades the visual field (fig. 12). In spurts, it seems that the artist is taking back control of the camera, while recognizable figures reenter the frame, for the most part police agents, annoyed by the video camera. Then, garments, shoes abandoned on the ground and men piled up upon one another like a human wall (fig. 13) precede a series of hallucinatory flashes, like strobe lights, which reveal violent scenes of crowd control inflicted on the large group of migrants (fig. 14). The refugees from the camp are pressed against the ground by the police, while Waddington’s camera wanders restlessly amid the general disorder, picking up individual situations, while continually and unsteadily moving about.

[…] despite the repeated police charges, the video camera dances, enhances the violence of the lunges through a play of colours, rhythm and shadings. Before returning to stalk the edges of the camp, there is time for a few images drowned in an unreal silence. Here, the dance of the video camera becomes macabre, capturing all the senselessness and banality of evil.²⁴

There is thus a detachment, a strong opposition in the use of light between scenes relating to the escape of the migrants, their hiding in the bushes and tall grass, and the isolated and central sequence of the attack by the police. The intermittency, the doubling and graininess, effects of meaning provoked by a use of faint and diffused light, are replaced in the police scene by blinding and hallucinatory flashes. The result is, therefore, like one of strobe lights that create the illusion of a slowdown of the movements. The contrast is further amplified by the unexpected change in the soundtrack; the music score composed by Simon Fisher Turner is suddenly interrupted and gives way to shouts, disturbances and noises of the tumult in the piazza.

In his analysis of the documentary, George Didi-Huberman establishes an argument that begins with the great differences in the intensities of light; two worlds exist, one inundated by a blinding luminosity and one scattered with small flashes. The spotlights in the first world are only “ Smoke and mirrors, part of the system of the “kingdom’s” effective glory:”²⁵ while the second is the world of the “Firefly-peoples [who] when they retreat into the night, seek their freedom of movement as they can, flee the spotlights of the “kingdom” [26] The “reign” cited here refers to the ideas put forward by Giorgio Agamben in Il regno e la gloria,²⁷ which would be located at the root of the genealogy of the West’s power. The notion utilized to indicate the exercise of sovereign power is then summoned by Didi-Huberman to delineate the features of contemporary society; “the luminous images” that this produces contribute to turning us, the observers, into “ subservient peoples, hypnotized by the images’ flow.”²⁸ The blinding luminosity that affects the world, the Kingdom, with its images transmitted by the media, hides, however, entire communities of firefly-peoples, namely human beings, who, like the migrants in Border, survive the all-embracing force of power: resistant and intermittent, they manifest themselves in the observer’s eyes as faint light sources. “People are all those who are not distinguished and different, all those who are not privileged, all those who are not placed above the lot by their possessions, their social position or their background.“29 These, then, are those who flee the Glory of the Kingdom, who acquire visibility only in the shadows. Indeed, it would be madness, Did-Huberman maintains, to think of observing a firefly by shining a blinding torch on it. They are the oppressed who constitute a “tradition of counter-powers.”³⁰

In Border in particular, however, and in the case of the migrant, what significance does the condition of the firefly acquire?

There was a permanent contrast between the glaring light of the police torches and the dark night in which the refugees sheltered. Everywhere there were blank spots, seemingly outside the reach of police surveillance, subject to other laws; the land crisscrossed by invisible lines, marking out the different zones, controlled by numerous people smugglers.³¹

Waddington speaks of blank spots³² — blind interstices — where the monitoring eye of the police seemingly doesn’t reach. These are spaces where escape is possible, where the anomaly that is the migrant can live, the flaw in the system of the Nation-State.

Khosravi, in his autoethnography,³³ retraces “the illegal odyssey” that lead him, departing Iran, to become a Swedish citizen, delineating the features that characterize the existence of a migrant. Unpredictability and wandering are fundamental to the migratory journey, punctuated by drastic and abrupt interruptions: arrest, deportation or even a fortuitous occasion to be able to continue the journey. The refugee camps, consequently, constitute a system where illegal immigrants are surveyed and kept under control by the laws of the State, but without ever becoming part of it: “the camp protects the virtue of the Nation, regulating, governing and circumscribing mobility.”³⁴ In other words this is a space, but one that does not enjoy full-fledged official recognition; in other words it serves to protect society from the undesirable figure of the refugee, who is placed under surveillance, outside the sphere of normal social life. Khosravi again analyzes the meanings that overlay the concept of “camp,” and he notes that there is a recurring notion of “protection” in most cases. At the Nazi internment camp the legal justification of Schutzhaft, literally “protective custody,” was bestowed, while in Swedish, the förvar detention camp has an assonance, which Khosravi calls “equivocal,” with the term försvar, namely “protection.” Thus a desire for immunization, or rather the normalization of anomaly, is fundamental to the logic of the camp, through a dynamic of inclusive exclusion. The inhabitants of the camp, in turn, automatically fall within the status of victim, through a process of “refugization,” which teaches them to be refugees.³⁵

“Refugization” entails adjusting one’s way of living to conventional expectations. Malkki emphasizes the “tendency to universalize the “refugee” as a specific ‘type” of person, not only in textual representations but also in photographic ones.” The stereotype of the refugee and his appearance is shaped by the plethora of images that circulate in the press on television and finally also in photographic books.³⁶

The refugee camp thus is established as the illuminated element of the blinding headlights of the Kingdom, as a precinct functional to safeguarding the State’s social equilibrium. The surveillance and consequently the containment of people who cannot be integrated into the system make it possible to install the migrant in a border area.

This is why Laura Waddington decides to recapture attempts at flight specifically outside the circumscribed zone of the camp, flooded by the blinding and overseeing lights of the State. It is instead the blank spots, the area just outside, that attracts her attention: the darkness, tall grass and bushes are the occasion for those fleeing to free themselves from the headlights of the Kingdom and to emerge, in Pasolini’s words, as fireflies: “It would be criminal and stupid to place fireflies beneath a projector believing to observe them better.”³⁷

Translated by Marguerite Shore
 
h3. FOOTNOTES

¹ S. Laacher, Après Sangatte: Nouvelles immigrations, nouveaux enjeux, Paris, La Dispute, 2002, pp. 101-105; see E. Kuhn, Border: The Videographic Traces by Laura Waddington as a Cinematographic Memorial, in Images of Illegalized Immigration, Towards a Critical Iconology of Politics, Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, Germany, 2010, p. 131.

² For historical-political acknowledgment, see E. Kuhn, Border: The Videographic traces by Laura Waddington, op.cit., pp. 129-141; see J. Fezer, Grenzgeografie Sangatte, in “An Architektur,” 03, July, Berlin, 2003.

³ E. Kuhn, Border: the Videographic Traces by Laura Waddington as a Cinematographic Memorial, op.cit., p. 131. Italics are mine.

⁴ L. Waddington, Scattered Truth, part 2b, 2014 [online http://www.laurawaddington.com/article.php?article=67, accessible November 2020]. During the shooting, the video-camera is replaced twice, in the first instance by a SONY TRV 950, and subsequently by a high-definition HDV 1080i, which, however, will not allow her to film under conditions of darkness; moreover, the camera settings are accessible only through a menu that can must be accessed by the screen, a process that is too long and cumbersome for a type of improvised and unstudied direction such as Border.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ E. Kunn, Border: The Videographic Traces by Laura Waddington as a Cinematographic Memorial, op.cit., p. 135.

⁸ Georges Didi-Huberman, “Figurants,” op.cit., p. 340.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ P. Moscicki, The Image as Common Good. On Laura Waddington’s Film “Border”, in “View. Theories and Practices of visual cultures” 14, Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, Foundation for Visual Culture, Poland, 2016, p. 11. Corsivo mio.

¹¹ Moscicki con il termine “caos” fa riferimento alla nozione di “chaos-monde” citato in E. Glissant, The poetics of relation, Ann Aror: University of Michi-gan Press, 1997.

¹² S. Khosravi, Io sono confine, Milano, Elèuthera, 2019, p. 127-128.

¹³ G. Agamben, Homo Sa-cer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, Torino, Einaudi 2005.

¹⁴ S. Khosravi, Io sono confine, cit., p. 170, cfr. E. Balibar, Politics and the other scene, New York, Verso, 2002.

¹⁵ F. Zucconi, Mediazione radicale, coscienza impersonale, in “Fata Morgana” n. 31, gennaio-aprile 2017, p. 248.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 250. See J. Rancière, Éclats de Lumière, op.cit., p. 73.

¹⁷ J Rancière, Éclats de Lumière, op.cit., p. 73.

¹⁸ P. Moscicki, “The Image as Common Good. On Laura Waddington’s Film “Border,” op.cit., p. 10. See E. Glissant, The poetics of relation, op.cit., p. 191.

¹⁹ A.J. Greimas, “Semiotica figurativa e semiotica plastica,” in Fabbri-Marrone (eds.), Semiotica in nuce II. Teoria del discorso, Rome, Meltemi, 2001; “Plastica, semiotica” ad vocem in: “Per un lessico de semiotica visiva,” P. Basso Fossali (ed.), in Lucia Corrain (ed.), Leggere l’opera d’arte II, Bologna Esculapio, 1999, p. 130.

²⁰ N. Dusi, Strategie della defigurazione. Lo sfocato: dinamiche espressive e processi di enunciazione tra pittura e cinema, op.cit., p. 16.

²¹ B. Khalili, The Pain of Seeing: The Videos of Laura Waddington, op.cit. Italics are mine.

²² S. Rimini, Immaginazioni: riscritture e ibridazioni fra teatro e cinema, Rome, Bonanno Editore, 2012 [online https://www.laurawaddington.com/articles/80/immaginazioni-riscritture-e-ibridazioni-fra-teatro-e-cinema, accessible November 2020].

²³ S. Khosravi, Io sono confine, op.cit.

²⁴ S. Rimini, Immaginazioni: riscritture e ibridazioni fra teatro e cinema, op.cit.

²⁵ G. Didi-Huberman, Survivance de lucioles, Les éditions de Minuit, Paris, 2009, p. 134.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ G. Agamben, Il regno e la gloria, Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo, Vicenza, Neri Pozza, 2007.

²⁸ G. Didi-Huberman, Survivance de lucioles, op.cit., p. 86.

²⁹ Ibid., see C. Schmitt, Théorie de la constitution, Paris, PUF, 1993, pp. 382-383.

³⁰ “Une tradition des contre-pouvoirs,” G. Didi-Huberman, Survivance de lucioles, op.cit., p. 86.

³¹ L. Waddington, Scattered Truth, op. cit.

³² See J. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Harmondsworth, Penguin Modern Classics, (ebook ed.], 1982. The notion of blank spots emerges throughout the entire novel, to indicate places on the map that Marlow, the young protagonist, is interested in exploring. They are empty and unknown spaces, not yet exposed to progress and industrialization; He is particularly attracted to a point in the center of Africa, which, however, over time, will lose the character of a blank space, because it will be contaminated by the violence of Western culture.

³³ S. Khosravi, Io sono confine, op.cit. Khosravi uses the term autoethnography to indicate a literary genre that alternates the telling of personal experiences with what is called ethnographic analysis.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ S. Khosravi, Io sono confine, op.cit., p. 128. See L. Malkki, Purity and exile. Violence, memory and national cosmology among Hutu refugees in Tanzania, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1995.

³⁶ S. Khosravi, Io sono confine, op.cit., pp 130-131.

³⁷ G. Didi-Huberman, Survivance de lucioles, op.cit., p. 43.