Art and the refugee crisis

Abstract

Artists are mapping new itineraries of the Mediterranean, throwing into relief an incurable colonial wound that continues to bleed into the present. The so­ called contemporary migrant 'emergency' in the Mediterranean is the deliberate political and juridical construction of Europe. Refusing Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), all European states have decided that not everyone has the right to move and migrate. This violent exercise of European and First World power reopens a profound colonial wound. Migrants rendered objects of our legislation and laws signal once again the asymmetrical relations of power that produced the colonial world and its ongoing fashioning of the present.