Arts and the Study of the International

It was almost by chance  that I began collaborating with two artists I knew from before. I first worked with Carlo Vidoni to design an exhibition entitled Destiny/Destination, which resulted in a polyphonic book bringing together interviews with migrants and poetic evocations, drawings and photographs (Monsutti & Vidoni 2023). The words we collected uncovered the vacuity of certain predefined categories: for example, the labels “economic migrants,” “asylum seekers” and “refugees” flatten a much more complex and diverse landscape. Our interlocutors spoke of their migration trajectory in terms of a tension between attachment to the places where they grew up and curiosity about the world that exists beyond the walls of their homes. These polymorphous conversations were translated into an open language that crossed the boundaries between social anthropology and visual art, between creators and the public, to reach people who could relate to the migration narratives and enrich them with their own experience. The lines on the palm of the hand were our visual and discursive starting point. They tell stories, they convey a message of singularity and, at the same time, of shared humanity, of idiosyncrasy and universality.

 

I Am From Where I Am Going, Geneva, March 2024 (A. Monsutti).

Another artist, Loris Agosto, was struck by a sentence that an old man told me during my fieldwork in the mountains of central Afghanistan. I used this sentence to open the book Homo Itinerans (Monsutti 2020): “I come from where I am going!” An apparently paradoxical sentence, it is more than just a formula, it is an invitation to change our perspective and take a fresh look at human mobility. Here, social sciences inspired art through the production of sculptures in which human faces can be distinguished, without it being clear whether they are being born or being swallowed up by mud. The work was complemented by figurative texts I wrote to evoke migrants’ conditions of living and itinerancy as a way of being in the world (see more).