The Mapping Journey Project
Maps have long been used by artists as a basis for their work. From Alighiero Boetti’s embroidered maps of flags, to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s charts of his peripatetic childhood, and Grayson Perry’s markings of social norms in Great Britain, objective maps are used as the originating points from which subjective interpretations of strife, relocation, identity, and cultural affinities are drawn. But rarely does one see a pristine map sullied only by a single line. In the French-Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11), on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, six maps displayed on flat screens, accompanied by six different voiceovers, chart the harrowing journeys of illegal immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere to Europe.
Suspended from the ceiling in the open atrium section on the first floor of the Museum, six flat screens depict circuitous immigrant routes from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia to Europe. A line drawn with a marker by a hand on each map enables the viewer to follow the path of each journey. Poised between a documentary and a film, Khalili’s uninterrupted, spontaneous recording of each subject’s narrative is accompanied by the slow almost surreal movement of their hands along the borders of several countries.
Accounts of treks from Algeria to Tangiers, and others from Mogadishu and Somalia to Italy, and some traveling from Dhaka to Delhi to Moscow, through wide-open deserts, choppy seas, and hazardous checkpoints, are just stops for the immigrants in their hope of reaching the United Kingdom or the Scandinavian countries. Their clear, almost clinical tales recount treacherous journeys of concealment, subjugation, and incarceration. Presented without images of the landscapes or photographs of the speakers, with