Article:

‘The refugee is … FOOD FOR BIOPOLITICS’: Critical knowledgescapes in Ursula Biemann’s CONTAINED MOBILITY and X-MISSION

There is an aggressive dichotomy between what migration is to modern humans and how migration continues to be (re)presented throughout history. While an essential characteristic of human existence, migration also carries highly problematic associations of danger, threat, and weakness within official designations of the ‘refugee’, the ‘asylum seeker’, and the ‘illegal’. This article focuses on the continuously unfolding narrative of the refugee experience through two essay films by Ursula Biemann, CONTAINED MOBILITY (2004) and X-MISSION (2008). By employing the interdisciplinary approach of ‘critical knowledgescapes’, it offers a contextualised glimpse into the deliberate historical and sociopolitical circumstances that shape the popular global perception of ‘modern rapid migration’. Ultimately, the article demonstrates how new media works challenge problematic narratives of human existence. Works such as CONTAINED MOBILITY and X-MISSION offer new forms of visuo-narrative evidence in which individuals caught in rapid migration successfully and productively negotiate their space, compelling us to move past viewing rapid migration as an exceptional reality and to begin accepting it as one of the constant ways of life.