Prologue WATER NARRATIVES    

How to navigate the manuscript of this PhD dissertation

This PhD dissertation comprises three main components: a written manuscript (not yet published), this website containing various multimodal works produced during the years of this dissertation, and a final exhibition scheduled for October 2024 at Humboldt University in the historical center of Berlin-Mitte, which will serve as the disputation of this dissertation.

The manuscript consists of six Chapters divided into three parts: Literature, Methodology and Theory. I will not describe each Chapter here in a linear way; instead, I track my journey through the ideas, concepts and methods on which this dissertation is based, which ranged from the introduction of anthropological theories to ethnographic and artistic experiments, with a back and forth play between theory and practise, and vice versa. On this webpage, you will find only the abstracts of each Chapter, as the manuscript is not yet publicly available.

My starting point was based on my introduction to postcolonial theory and migration studies in the Chapter Somewhere, where I question the anthropologist Marc Augé's notions of 'non-places' and the philosopher Giorgio Agamben's 'places of exception' and their critical analysis of the antropologists Efthimia Panagiotidis and Vassilis Tsianos' border regime studies on 'migrant camps'. In this Chapter, I first propose to understand these places through the concept of Liminality as defined by the ethnographer Arnold Van Gennep and the anthropologist Victor Turner and its relation to place and mobility as elucidated by the social scientist Bjørn Thomassen. I later criticize the limitations of the concept for the discussion of migration experiences of inbetweenness. Subsequently, in the Chapter Becomings, I question the possibility of viewing these places through a postcolonial lens. In looking at the narratives of the places of the Dzjangal in Calais (France), Tiburtina in Rome (Italy) and Los Arenales in Antofagasta (Chile) —the cases studies of this dissertation, I was able to identify relationships to the colonial past among the inhabitants, whereby there is not only the history shaped by colonialism in Africa and Central- South Asia, especially the relationship to the British Empire in Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea and the former Italian colony in Eritrea - countries to which the inhabitants of the Dzjangal and Tiburtina belonged - but also the connection with the Atlantic trade, the Haitian Revolution and its legacy in the Caribbean, which are essential traces in the current migration in Chile, therefore in Los Arenales.

Here I had to return to my field notes on which the Chapter Oceans & Places and People is based. In this Chapter, I went back to my field material to understand the sociability that developed in these places, which as political spaces produced resistance and territorial reclamation strategies. In this Chapter I used short stories, vignettes, poems and text fragments written by the residents of these places to describe their conviviality and their daily resistance to the border regime. In this Chapter, I also question the important issue of representation and how the story of others can be told, proposing literary and poetic elements as an alternative form of representation. In doing so, I was inspired by the idea of oceans and seas as a poetic, aesthetic and theoretical umbrella and thread between the stories of the places — in a way, a holistic idea of representation. I see the idea of oceans and seas as a container for people's stories about these places, especially the relationship between the Mediterranean and the North Sea, witnessing the stories of The Dzjangal and Tiburtina and the Pacific Ocean with the stories of Los Arenales.

The literary and poetic elements tested in this Chapter guided me to look closely into the relationship between art and anthropology in more detail. Through the autotheory described in the Chapter Autoethnography, I examine my own position between theory and practice as well as esthetics and ethics. I analyze my own approach to ethnography through my artistic practices and the processes of validation and recognition of artistic practices in the social science multimodal debate. Here I discuss "thinking by doing'," which questions thinking through and with esthetic and sensory forms opening up other ways of producing knowledge where affectivity and sensoriality come into play, contributing to broadening the more-than-textual research that explores multimodality in the social sciences today. Here I also return to the critique of Liminality, in this case from the arts. The great interest in Liminality in the artistic context and the criticism from the social sciences make me question this double perspective of the term. In this Chapter, I analyze how Liminality evolved from anthropology to the arts and became relevant in the artistic field, especially in theater and performance, through the influence of the anthropologist Victor Turner (1967). Throughout the manuscript, I critique Liminality from different angles. In this Chapter, I look at Liminality from an artistic perspective and ask: how does the concept of Liminality, so criticized by the social sciences, find a place and thrive in artistic contexts?

Reflecting on the relationship between art and anthropology led me to experiment with different methods and practices that I used in my fieldwork described in the Chapter Artifacts, which is an interweaving between artistic practices and ethnography. My first visits to the sites took place between 2016 and 2018, when I came with my artistic hat. Later, between 2021 and 2022, I returned to the sites for fieldwork purposes. This second period was burdened by the daily restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic, waiting for presidential elections due to a revolution in Chile and possible deportations by the British government to Rwanda in April 2022. On my second visit, I was faced with the challenge that two of these sites: The Dzjangal and Tiburtina, no longer existed, which challenged me to look for new forms outside of ethnography as I was confronted with the memory of 'empty places' and the traces of a community.

These methodological experiments lead me to dig into the community archives described in the Chapter Aspirational Archives, where I again delve into the narratives of these places, this time through sound and photo archives created by the residents and volunteers, as in the case of Jungala Radio, an electronic archive posted on an open platform and produced by residents, children and volunteers in The Dzjangal between 2015 and 2016. In this Chapter, inspired by the reflections of the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, I explore the idea of archives as interventions of collective memories and as a product of anticipation. This Chapter is co-authored by people who have produced and listened to these archives. These material archives are sensory and tangible examples of the conviviality and resistance of these places that counter the notion of 'non-places', which leads me to my final reflections in the Epilogue on how these places could be considered 'Somewhere Inbetween': Places that no longer conform to the notion of 'periphery' and, thanks to the processes of conviviality, resistance, hope and the ability to aspire, they engage in dialogue with urban dynamics, leaving behind the notion of the 'periphery' to become social places part of the cityscape.