Researching (in)Visible Borders and Artivism at the Crossroads between Disciplines

The term artivism refers to those practices and projects created by artists, activists and scholars that aim to respond to and critically reflect on the challenges of our time by using different languages and forms of creative expression. By combining the aesthetic dimension with ethical and political issues, artivism represents an important form of dissent and a powerful expressive device to counter hegemonic discourses such as those currently surrounding migration and borders. In front of an excessive spectacularization sustained by media and political discourses that portray migrants as "impossible citizens" or invaders and criminals, the need to build a "third imaginary" of human mobility emerges strongly.

This contribution proposes to start from the concept of artivism in order to present "Frontières (In)visibles", a visual research conceived since its elaboration through the intersection of gazes between the worlds of cultural studies and experimental artistic production. Since its elaboration, the visual research has been conducted by a cultural sociologist and an Iranian illustrator and filmmaker and has focused on a particular right, defined here as the "right to the discourse". Drawing upon the Lefebvrian concept of the "right to the city", the “right to the discourse” is conceived as the right to participate in and re-appropriate narratives by people on the move. How do artists deal with social injustices associated with exile, and how can art redefine these social, political, and narrative inequalities? How does artistic creation recreate alternative forms of “feeling at home”? The outcome is a short documentary co-created with four artists “in exile” in Marseille, divided into four chapters: Resistances (on social injustices related to mobility); Baggage (on cultural “baggage”); Crossings (on borders); Bodies (on identities).