Pornoscapes of Migration

• In Event: On Public Art

Abstract

This paper focuses on the growing trend of what some have termed “migration porn,” media projects that transform the process of border crossing into a consumable experience for more privileged citizens around the world. Media scholars have rightly critiqued the fraught politics of these projects, such as tourist walks in Mexico or reality television shows in Australia (Hasian, Maldonado, and Ono 2015; Nikunen 2015). Likewise, critics have theorized the “ironic spectator” as a contradictory position for engaging politics of empathy at a global scale (Chouliaraki 2013). The aim of this paper is to take seriously the “porn” in “migration porn”; that is, to bring existing interventions into conversation with scholarship on pornography as a mode of active, affective engagement with media.

In particular, I focus on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s augmented reality installation Carne y Arena, currently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco in Mexico City. The project has received much mainstream attention and was even awarded a Special Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “in recognition of a visionary and powerful experience in storytelling.” Museum patrons are supposed to experience the trials of crossing the border through the senses, based on stories recollected by González Iñárritu from migrants’ real life stories. In doing so, publics that purportedly have not had to travel across the Sonoran Desert between Mexico and the United States are able to feel the ordeal “in the flesh.” The project thus attempts to mobilize affect, rather than rational deliberation, to effectively activate ethical response and political involvement. I am interested in tracing both the affordances and the limits of such an affective engagement, particularly within two discursive contexts: the emergent hype of augmented and virtual reality technologies as “empathy machines” and the heated public debates on immigrant rights in the United States and Mexico.

I argue that, through its mobilization of augmented reality technologies and in-person theatrics, Carne y Arena gives rise to a “pornoscape” that mobilizes voyeuristic impulses in hopes of instigating humanitarian intervention. Following on both Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) and Susanna Paasonen’s (2011) theorizations, a pornospace links flows of affect across transnational borders through a carnal capacity — that is, the potential for bodies to enjoy and act, or not enjoy and not act. Crucially, a pornoscape allows for excess, where the sensations engendered in the augmented reality experience can be pleasurable and discomforting, immediate and long-lasting at once. Accounting for audiences’ engagement with media on these terms requires reevaluating the paradigms of cause-and-effect and positive/negative dichotomies that have prevailed in critical analyses of humanitarian-inclined migration media. How can we theorize ambivalent positions to human rights mobilization through mediated experiences? Can a critique of humanitarian media account for connections beyond subject identities? Tackling these questions remains an urgent task in light of the emergence of transmedia projects with global outlooks across the United States and Mexico.

Author

• Juan Llamas Rodriguez, The University of Texas at Dallas