Ghost Ship: Ghostly Aesthetics, Border Regimes, and Politics of Place

• In Event: 31.025 - Beyond In/Visibilities: Working With and Through Visual Methodologies

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:
The purpose of my study is to investigate the visual, visualities, and visual productions of images on and against the border regimes of the Mediterranean Sea. With “Ghost Ships of the Mediterranean”, I analyze on the one hand violent modes of oppressing visuals; and on the other hand, I follow, Black, queer, postcolonial, and diasporic/migrant modes and understandings of the visual as tools of resistance, and resistance itself.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:
I frame the “Ghost Ships of the Mediterranean” from two perspectives. First, as modes of ghosting that are complicit white moves to innocence (working with Gloria Wekker and Eve Tuck/K. Wayne Yang), and, secondly, as haunting that continuously demands its presence (e.g. Avery Gordon, Sharon P. Holland). I refer to Indigenous cosmologies and knowledges of land (e.g. Eve Tuck/ Marcia McKenzie, Sandy Grande) to conceptualize ghosting as a process that is related to the denial of land. In order to ghost something, the concrete place has to be erased. Therefore current modes of ghosting can only be read in front of a backdrop of European land dispossession and denial.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials:
In my presentation I follow Ghost Ships, a term that was used in recent years in the media to refer to refugee boats in the Mediterranean Sea. I will examine what is visually and materially banned, locked, and kept in the sphere of ghostly and opaque by the Ghost Ship. I examine ghosting as a recent form of visual violence for the background of historical and current discourses on the Mediterranean.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:
Images of the Mediterranean Sea in the media in recent years have been those of refugee boats, dead bodies on the shores, and life vests floating at sea. Those are the pictures that we might have in mind when the term appears. In these pictures, representation is marked by an abstraction; in that way, the perception is a seascape or a body of water that could be anywhere. This anywhere or somewhere is already a way to distance perceptions from a concrete place. Hereby the actual terror and violence is banned to the somewhere, a kind of fictional space, that enables a relationship to the concrete place as lost, denied, and hidden. I summarize this strategy as ghosting.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:
The presentation is part of my ongoing PhD-in-Practice project, in which I theorize and visually work on ghosting and visual violence, as well as on ghost ships as current visual discourse around the Mediterranean border regime. Within my research I challenge oppressive forms of the visual and understandings of visualities, and ask for image and visual productions in struggles for social justice that go beyond modes of representation.

Author

• Moira Hille, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna