Migrant Bodies

Corporal experiences of migrants are, one the one hand, almost systematically overshadowed by contemporary political and media discourses, and, on the other hand, frequently instrumentalized by the multiple procedures of control they have to go through at their arrival in Europe. At the crossroads of philosophy and media studies, this text explores four artistic creations which try to put these experiences back at the center of their staging of the real without replaying this twofold desubjectivation. The play Ceux que j'ai rencontres ne m'ont peut-etre pas vu (2016) by the NIMIS group, Cristina Cattaneo's autobiographical account of her work as a coroner, Naufrages sans visage (2019), the theatrical installation Sortir du noir (2019) by Benedicte Lienard and Mary Jimenez, and finally Chantal Akerman's documentary film on the Mexico-U.S. border De l'autre cote (2002) sequentially build the milestones of an analysis that eventually reveals a possible staging of the migrants' experiences without running the risk of ignoring their subjectivity or reducing them to their sole physical suffering.