Assembling Samira and Travel: Understanding Sexual Humanitarianism From the Global South Through Experimental Ethnofictional Filmmaking

• In Event: Roundtable: On the Concept of Exploitation: Manipulating Migrant Identities in the Trafficking Discourse

Abstract

My film-installations Samira and Travel form the diptych resulting from the Emborders art-science project questioning the effectiveness and scope of humanitarian initiatives targeting migrant sex workers and sexual minority asylum seekers through ethnographic research and ethnofictional filmmaking. To get their rights recognized and avoid deportation migrant women, men and transgender people selling sex need to represent their biographies and experiences according to stereotypical canons of exploitation and sex-gender taxonomies geared towards the global North, often acting as humanitarian biographical borders excluding them from protection and asylum.

I aim to convey sensuous, performative and intersubjective dimensions of knowledge production as well as migrant’s understandings of their needs and priorities, which often express experiences and sensibilities of the global South. Therefore I developed a participative, creative and filmmaking-based methodology inspired by Jean Rouch’s ethnofictions, including research subjects as active producers and performers of their own representations by transcending the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, participation and observation, knowledge and emotions. By approaching the genre of ethnofiction I intend to convey the complexity of migrants’ understandings of exploitation and self-realisation, protect their identities and challenge hegemonic neoliberal criteria of authenticity in scientific, documentary and humanitarian terms.

Trailer Samira: https://vimeo.com/84704860
Trailer Travel: https://vimeo.com/139963138

Author

• Nicola Mai, Kingston University London