approach to rehumanise
‘Art is not supposed to change the world, to change practical things, but to change perceptions. Art
can change the way we see the world. Art can create an analogy.’ JR
The so-called 2015 refugee crisis in Europe has been well documented in media and
political discourses since the tragedy of Lampedusa in 2013. Most of the time, papers refer
to the number of deaths, as a packed symbol, without any reference to individuality, such as
names, origins, and personal stories (Nicolosi, 2017). By referring to ‘x number of deaths’,
the individualities are erased as they are digitised and enshrines the refugees’ crisis within a
‘numeration’ process (Diaz and Nicolosi, 2019) of radical symbolic deindividuation by
erasing any marks of death or repression and negating social and personal identity, and the
plurality of identities.
Hence, media numeration, by overquantifying, acts as a great identity dematerialisation, de-
individualisation, and biopolitics power. If numeration and digitalisation are used to track
‘illegal migrants’, at the same time, refugees’ individual stories are masked, and the figure of
the migrant becomes immaterial and abstract. They are not the main focus of the argument,
creating a hollowed-out entity emptying any form of true and personal identity (Mbembe,
2019). There is no migrant individuality because a migrant always refers to the whole
negative group: the migrant figure is polarised through its label. Migrant is only a
homogenous group, a moving collective body calling upon mythological imaginations of
invasion, stifling the suffering endured by the exiles and vulgarising the complexity of the
European historical role in the possible affected conflicts the exiles are fleeing from. He is a
foreigner, but lacking a land base and coming from ‘outside’ of the society separating ‘us’
from ‘them’. As far as words are labels, and that ‘names make sense only when they form a
part of the discourse’ giving it its existence (May, 2010), the refugee crisis is symbolized
through the exiles expressed the in term ‘migrant’ as symbolic of a negative homogeneous
group constructed in political and media discourses.
The moving collective body is all the more so reinterpreted in visual representations. By
association (Mbembe, 2019), visual media relates to visual politics as the way in which visual
materials are re-encoded by various rhetorical narratives, which in this context is evocative
of the larger displacement of contingent political realities. Within the refugees’ crisis frame,
images of a group are reinforcing the growing polarized social and political landscape. The
iconic representation becomes the event itself creating an additional rhetorical power
(Hariman and Lucaites, 2007). If the body and its representations through history are hard
to clearly define, they always have to be seen as a political tool. ‘A picture is worth a
thousand words’ as we commonly say. Hence, if words engage an artificial relationship with
the world around them, people pay more attention to images (Garcia and Stark, 1991, cited
in Sohlberg, 2018) because images are a reinforced analogy of the objects represented and
the text circumscriptions. Even though they do not represent reality, they establish a link
with the reality that is psychologically based on verisimilitude as they require culturally
acquired skills (Nicolosi, 2017): ‘the photo brings the corpus I need to the corpus I see’
(Barthes, 1980). As metonymic and condensed codes inherited in people’s minds that
enable them to interpret symbolic and metaphoric communication influencing their
interpretations (Fawzy, 2018), the representation of the migrants as a strong collective body
on a boat, reminds of the collective imagination of the barbarian invasions, appealing to the
fear of European citizen readers reinforcing the crisis and urgency aspect. The
representation of the other’s masculine domination (Mbembe, 2019) is a negative coverage
with a collective body (Nicolosi, 2017) seen in the distance, of strong men whose faces are
indistinguishable. The focus is on able-bodied men, nameless, faceless, and people massed
at fences or gates. This collective of men is strong with an animalistic character ready to
invade.
If media and political regimes have shaped our world according to their interests and
ideology through the use of visual representation, Imam Omar takes part in the colonial
deconstruction movement by giving an account of another world through presentation from
the subject perspective. By taking the opposite approach of the dominant visual politics
depicting and defining exiles as victims in need of help and/or (more and more) as criminals,
Imam Omar, a Syrian refugee and artist based in Amsterdam, developed in 2018 the
photography project called ‘Live, Love, Refugee’ with the aim to question the convention of
the humanitarian photo more than giving answers or solutions to the current crisis through
a sort of wanderism 1 . As part of the Arab Documentary Program 2 , the approach leads to
slow reflection instead of fast news answering. Taking place in Beqaa Valley, Lebanon, he
interviewed, staged, and photographed Syrian refugees living in this camp. Through a
collaborative artistic decolonial strategy, his work questions the humanitarian data
collection and the dominant media trope to instigate new visual politics. ‘Politics [consist] of
tedious and banal daily governance, best narrated by an increasingly sensational mass
media. We, as artists, were supposed to elevate ourselves beyond such a temporary current
of airs. We were to dedicate ourselves to the ambiguities and anxieties of the human
condition. The idea of changing the world was left to demagogues and idealists, whereas
our task was to reflect on it.’ (Staal, 2019). Hence, instead of the usual humanitarian photo
depicting and freezing in time and space single helpless bodies to perpetuity - such as the
picture of Aylan Kurdi (figure 1) and of the Chinese child during the cold war (figure 2) that
1 ‘A state of mind that is not about being displaced or lost but about creating an alternative road with no
beginning or ending’ (Boukhari, 2014, cited in Duong, 2018)
2 DEFINIR
are calling for victimisation and helplessness, or artwork depicting the naturalised violence
of the migration such as Turner (figure 3) and Picasso (figure 4) – Imam’s work invites the
viewer to reflection and dialogue recentred on individual stories transforming the camp into
a space of multiple possibilities.
Moreover, for a complete colonial deconstruction, a decolonial work must be
embedded with feminism (find author). In this sense, Imam’s work is well enshrined within a
feminist refugee epistemology 3 (FRE) through a particular reading displacement that
concerns collaborative acts and intimate spaces. His work questions the affected spaces that
exist behind, between, and beyond these publicised spaces. This collaborative refugee
artwork becomes a crucial site of new forms of decolonial knowledge intertwining critical
and creative fields. To the question ‘can photography change the image of the refugee?’ 4 ,
JR would answer Art changes our perceptions. With the same idea, Imam does not aim to
give proper answers to the current crisis but to rehumanise through the creation of surreal
spaces (I) that give back agency to the subject as a counter-narrative servicing their story
first (II).
Surrealism: an aesthetic approach to the duplicate world
Fast news on the refugee crisis tends to be enshrined in neo-colonial practices
dehumanising the exiles and leading to the perpetuation of the Manichean World as Fanon
(2005) heard it, i.e. between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This ‘Other’, is a victim and an enemy of the
Nation and its values (Foucault, 1976; Mbembe, 2019). As a result, the solution for society is
to rescue him through a civilising mission ideology and/or (more and more) to push him
back as not fitting with the Judeo-Christian civilisation (Nicolosi, 2017).
‘I want to disrupt the audience’s expectations of images of refugees and to present them
with questions rather than answers’.
(Omar, 2018)
3 The feminist refugee epistemology is a theory developed by Duong (2018) in which feminism and decolonial
approach of refugees are combined.
4 Imam Omar, 2018
‘Live, Love, Refugee’ issues the hasty and oversimplified representation of the
imaginary Manichean World. Hence, Imam’s work describes a duplicate world inviting
viewers to long reflection by placing the latter on the same level as the subjects. Thus, it
questions largely the conventions of ‘humanitarian photography’ and disrupts the
hegemony of the dominant media trope of visual politics. Slow reflection is embedded
instead of an urgent approach and is made possible by surrealism, whether it can be the
representation of dreams, hopes, and memories, or the use of real objects, but whose
symbolism is diverted from the usual one. For instance, some pictures are taken in front of
the white tents provided by NGOs (figure 5). Instead of simply representing urgent shelters
provided by the global community, the tents refer to the refugees’ theatre of intimate life.
First, it puts the subject and the viewer on an equal footing. Then, it confronts the viewer’s
gaze for him to pay more attention by combining unconceivable scenarios with mundane
documentation (Gottesman, 2016) instead of relying on analogical verisimilitude. Instead of
simply representing a situation, Omar opens the everyday life reality of the refugees’ space
and time to invite the viewer to get in (raj figure). By recontextualization of this time and
space, a decolonial strategy enshrined within FRE, Omar’s work disrupts the audience’s
expectations by contrasting with the hegemonic-dominated public space to highlight strong
dissensus 5 . ‘Is it real? What are [we] seeing?’: the artist invites the viewer to a preferential
relation by critically engaging him with what he knows or does not know through these
surreal representations (figure 4), evocative of the dreams, hopes, and memories of the
subjects. The slight distance between reality and this surreal world breaks and blurs barriers
between the photo and the subject, the subject and the viewer, the citizen and the refugee,
so the viewers can imagine themselves and feel closer to imagining the reality of the horror
the exiles lived.
The use of analog monochrome photography is at the same time a playful and
realistic sparse: it opposes people to bright backgrounds in an uncanny neatness of the
modelled composition which destabilises the usually represented chaotic camps. The
overrepresented loudness of the migration is diverted for a calm and pure representation
(Reintjes, 2020). This surrealist artistic work creates a duplicate world confronting the
mainstream Manichean one. Because ‘Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic
5 ‘Dissensus’ (Ranciere, 2010). CF NOTES
entreprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world… narrower but more dramatic than the
one we perceived by natural vision’ (Sontag, On Photography, cited in Gottesman, 2016),
Omar’s work highlights the camp space through a sort of wandersism 6 : the surreal aesthetics
does not represent the camp space as a waiting space of passivity and helplessness, but as a
dynamic location of liminality in which multiple possibilities of ‘organizing, networking, [and]
speaking out’ (Mountz, 2011, cited in Duong, 2018) emerge.
For the artist Grant Kester, this collaborative and personal work “transcend[s] existing divisions and
identifications. [...] It is reframed as an active, generative process that can help us speak and imagine
beyond the limits of fixed identities, [dominant] discourse, and the perceived inevitability of [...]
conflict.’
This space is also in fact a possibility of creating or presenting new communal ties, a
new community, and a new identity. In this sense, the photography work explores the
spectrum of the refugee identity. Hence, the work reclaims the refugees’ private sphere
instead of the public object of rescue, numbers, reports, and statistics. It combines loss and
grief, past, present, and future, the remnants of identity they carried with them from their
old nation to the new identity they forged through exile (figure?). It represents the Syrian
‘complex personhood’ (Gordon, 1997, cited in Duong, 2018), of a population, still holding to
the memory of their lost place. While the white tents usually represent the helplessness of
populations waiting for international help, it tends to present in Omar’s work at the same
time a space of past memories, making memories, and liminality where the population
operates with their own economy forming the very basis of a community: ‘Live, Love,
Refugee’ to replace ‘Live, Love, Lebanon’ as a new form of identity. Hence, neo-colonial
practices often create new identities for oppressed populations 7 .
In their duplicate world where they have reconstituted their compatriots in a foreign
love, the ‘Sport Team’ picture (figure 5) is one of its representations expressing the
construction of a new sense of belonging to replace the conflicted nationalism from which
they must have fled. ‘We are making one team’: often unlikely to be cobbled together, fans
are citizens in the sense they have their own individuality but are all united behind one and
the same jersey. In mainstream Western media and political discourses, the migrant group
6 ‘A state of mind that is not about being displaced or lost but about creating an alternative road with no
beginning or ending’ (Boukhari, 2014, cited in Duong, 2018)
7 See the use of graffiti on the West Bank Wall by local oppressed populations
is created through their categorisation as an outgroup from the Manichean World, allowing
their targeting. Instead, the representation of a team thus allows counterbalancing the very
essence of a homogenised group aspect by uniting unity and disunity. In this, the work takes
issue with the dominant political trope by rejecting the hard and oversimplified
categorisation of individuals under the homogeneous umbrella of the term migrant, which
calls for victimisation, urgency, and danger. Here, the complexity and fluidity of the ethnic
group are emphasised. Hence, according to Bhabha (??), it is ‘in this interlocutory voice of
change and cultural expression that is at the heart of the aesthetic experience [...] which is
the basis of human creativity and political democracy [Interlocution] is the recognition of
communication - talk, conversation, discourse, dialogue - as it comes to constitute the
‘human right to narrate’ which is essential in building diverse, non-consensual
communities’, of communities gathered around their intimate dissensus.
Hence, this collaborative work which emerges from exchanges between the artist
and the subjects leads to the self-representation of the subjects expressing the complexity
of their individualities and identities, close to mythical characters that need to heal. The
space of the photographs becomes an active space allowing the subject to transformation,
to overcome trauma through its personal expression. Close to the graffiti practices on the
West Bank Wall by local Palestinian populations, it is ‘a mode of response to trauma and
issues of identity negotiation for passive recipients of enforcement-based border policies
against the externally imposed structure to advocate for local’ (Hanauer, 1992, cited in
Madsen, 2015). The communicative function is shaping the identity of a positive message
that transcends inequalities and unites separation creating an imaginary visual rhetoric of
the refugees. It creates a free zone in the mind leading to a decolonizing function and self-
therapy as a cultural struggle for emancipation. Indeed, the identity is shaped through an
expression of traumatic suffering that aims to heal. The public expression of their everyday
life, intimacy, and suffering is on the first hand a way to recognize, control, and explain the
trauma to overcome it through retroactive historicization (figure 7); to have, on the second
hand, an assumed position of conscious commitment to recognizing the brutality of exile.
**
Giving back agency: an FRE counter-narrative servicing the story
first.
‘Live, Love, Refugee’ is a cultural production that disrupts the mainstream visual
trope and redefines the very concept of the nation by showing the complexity of the
refugees’ individualities, spaces, and memories. By servicing the story first through a
collaborative art-based process, it creates a counternarrative to depersonalising discourses
as a healing Catharsis for the subjects to seize back their agency. If trauma is an unfinished
relationship with the past impossible to represent (Freud, cited in Roth, 2012), it needs a
narrative, a Catharsis. The collaboration between the subjects and the artist expresses the
strong desire to recognition of their individualities and suffering. The very personal aspect of
the evocation of dreams, hopes, memories, and hallucinations is enshrined within a sort of
supranatural communication to the world with the picture as a sacred medium to transmit
wishes where the subjects are seized of transformative powers (figure 5). Through this
duplicate world of a new identity, healing one another from trauma is possible. Questioning
the memory representation of oneself and so historicization, Omar’s work represents the
theatre of life of the refugees in the Lebanon camp of Beqaa Valley through the self-
narrative of the latter’s everyday life. Through collaboration between the subjects and the
artist, and the publication of the work, it combinates private grief and public trauma.
Because trauma needs to be represented (Freud, 1938), It is an asking for the ‘Real’ as a
negation of all symbolic constitutions and coordinates (Lacan, cited in Wardle, 2016). The
trauma needs a narrative, it is then the construction of a counter-myth within the social
space working to deconstruct naturalized colonial ideologies. There is an emergent desire to
recognition of the colonial traumatic past (Achille and Moudileno, 2016) manifesting around
representations to give a narrative to traumatic memories, thus both participating in a
healing process and reinforcing their commune identity (Freud, cited in Roth, 2012). In fact,
Omar’s work is even a self-healing process: as a Syrian refugee, he introduces himself in the
Sport Team photography (figure ?). ‘Through this project, I was able to rediscover my story
through their stories. I am a Syrian refugee myself, and we are making one team’: The
process is close to the Freudian psychoanalytic approach, i.e. to remember and reconstruct
the past as a form of treatment. But from the psychoanalytic perspective, for the
reconstruction post-trauma to be possible, there is the necessity to recognize what has been
suffered. For the other to recognize its trauma, the unconscious material will need to
become conscious for him too to filling-in the gap of his perceptions (Freud, 1938), made
possible through the surrealistic invitation of the viewer.
In this idea of traumatic expression, Omar gives a voice to the refugees to represent
it. ‘Live, Love, Refugee’ is a collaborative art-based project resulting from the collaboration
between the subjects present in the photographs and the artist. It is the result of exchanges
in intimate interviews between the two parties, the latter of which puts into practice the
intimate thoughts of the former but in a way that emphasizes aesthetics more than ethics.
The photo is then entirely composed by the subject, turning the latter from a passive object
to a participant in the telling of their stories. The deconstruction of this subject dynamic
offers him back his agency, a power to his own voice. By replacing numbers, reports, and
statistics with hallucinations, fears, and dreams resulting from the subjects’ words and
visual framing, Omar collaborates with individuals through a process of catharsis 8 , one he
believes to be deeply healing. The image breaks the mainstream visual rhetoric by making it
accessible to his subject and by servicing their story first 9 . He asks them to recreate their
dreams of escape, emasculation, love, or terror. It thus creates a specific aesthetic counter-
narrative where the subject seizes back its agency, as a means of empowerment, within the
active space of the photography (Gottesman, 2016; Reintjes, 2020). It creates a space by
and for global voices, a particular and intimate storytelling, as a tool for rehumanisation
against divisiveness, and a way of reappropriating the meaning of the word ‘refugee’
(Reintjes, 2020). The slow approach results in a holistic representation of the refugees’
individualities that recentres the reflection on the personal stories of the marginalised as a
multifaced and empowered narrative. ‘I am trying to create work that gives you positive
energy, but at the same time addresses the conflict in Middle-East’: it aims to achieve a shift
8 Catharsis as the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions
9 In decolonial artwork, servicing the story of the marginalised subject first is the very first responsibility of the
artist.
in logic from the point of view of the forcibly displaced by dismantling categories to give
back agency to the subjects through their own production of knowledge. By echoing the FRE
definition that concerns collaborative acts and intimate spaces ‘draw[ing] our awareness to
routine, intimate, and private sites where power is both reproduced and contested’
(Shalboub-Kevorkian, 2015, cited in Duong, 2018), it combinates private grief and public
trauma highlighting the political forces hidden in the site of intimate domestic interaction
(figure ?). Omar’s collaborative work reproducing life-making acts becomes a crucial site of
social and political critiques against imperialism as they are radical acts of social freedom
and struggle.
In the end, this Artwork is a practical rehumanisation of the refugees living in the
Beqaa Valley camp. A humanity that needs to be claimed to the world through a bridge of
communication (e.g. the tents) of the everyday life reality of the resident and outsider. It
then offers an entry into the expressive interior from which our humanity stems. It is the
responsibility of the artist, who needs to understand his own bias, to reconstruct the visual
narrative of the refugee, as an agent of change exploring different modes of thought in a
transformative process. By transcribing each refugee’s story into surrealist photography,
Imam Omar achieves, through collaboration, the expression of a refugee counter-narrative,
as a counterpower within visual politics and over the dominant media trope. One that
provides a refugee-centric perspective and narrative of their daily and intimate life over the
strict refugee status and trauma. One that presents to rehumanise and counterbalances the
dominant that represents and dehumanises.
***
Rehumanisation of the subjects is made by Imam Omar’s work reading of the
refugee interiority as a feminist space where the refugee artists become knowledge
producers to challenge the mainstream dehumanisation of the refugee as the ‘Other’. The
collaboration leads to a refugee cultural production enshrined within an FRE approach in the
sense of ‘paying attention to the intersection between private grief and public
commemoration, of looking for the hidden political forces within the site of intimate
domestic and familial interaction’ (Duong, 2018). The de-cantered and holistic approach
towards a more nuanced Art reflects the complexity of the refugees’ individualities as being
the very essence of humanness. This Catharsis is part of and responds to, the human need
for traumatic expression to heal by focusing on the subjects’ narratives, everyday lives,
memories, dreams, and hopes.
Perceptions, coming from visual representations as inherently political, are the
major influence of policies and public opinion regarding international crises, especially
within the current context of rising Western populism. Art and culture become major assets
to deal with humans crisis with more humanity as they allow to change mainstream
stereotypical perceptions. To resume our first Omar’s questioning as ‘can photography
change the image of the refugee?’ this work cries out the responsibility of the artist to
supply to context and create an engagement that relates to a power-balance shifting in
favor of the subject who can access to it, to give him back his human agency and his own
identity to heal.