Geneviève Guetemme

 

University of Orléans – associated with REMELICE-EA 4709 (Reception and mediation of foreign and comparative literature and culture)

genevieve.guetemme@univ-orleans.fr

 

My research focuses on artistic representation of contemporary migrations (films, photographs, installations, performances, poetic texts etc.) at the intersection of the visual arts, languages and social sciences. Its aim is to study the contexts and the actors of migration in relation to culture, identity and gender. It also tends to explore the impact of Humanities and more specifically of the Arts on public life. My research has been published in a number of papers covering artists, writers and poets like Leila Alaoui, Nathalie Loubèye, Laurine Rousselet, Jacques Jouet among others.

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19-20 November 2020 HOSPITALITIES, HOSTILITIES: NARRATIVES AND REPRESENTATIONS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE Grenoble Alpes University

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Migrant children as photographic subjects: images of a non-hospitable but charitable world

Genevieve Guetemme

 

When it comes to represent migration, children are everywhere : crying at the Mexican border (John Moore, World Press photo 2019),  on their way to Germany with their families (Marie Dorigny, Displaced 2015) or gathered in refugee-camps (Leila Allaoui - Nasreen 2013), not to mention the famous photograph of Aylan Kurdi stranded on the beach of Bodrum in Turkey . The way migrants are accepted - or not - in the United States, Greece, Lebanon, Jordan ... is often told with images of children: such images are hospitality tales.

The focus on children presents the situation of a category of migrants, subject to specific rules in relation to their age and family situation (unaccompanied minors or not). But above all it reveals a metonymic process that represents the experience of refugees or exiles: children become the symbol of a population in limbo, mistreated at borders, protected by international conventions but, nevertheless, often judged suspicious and left behind.

My presentation will describe the presence of young children at the heart of photographic accounts of migration as a strategy to denounce the contemporary disappearance of the traditional social organisation that sees hospitality as a fundamental and sacred duty. And to do so it will first, question the photographic figure of the child as an emblem of distraught migrants. It will then analyse the role of the photographic process that has been used by the three professional photographers mentioned above, to fabricate and present their migration and hospitality stories. It will for example, examine the role of specific details, but more importantly, show how the photographer’s spatial position, exposed as well as protected behind the camera, is playing a role in revealing and, possibly, countering the hostility of societies that see migrants as enemies. The photographer’s positioning relates indeed to the risky, both welcoming and hostile act of looking directly at the face of migrants. 

The aim is to show that by mediating such an act, the photographer contributes to the contemporary deterioration of ancestral and theoretically unconditional hospitality, from individual to individual, to shielded, conditional and collective practice, delegated to institutions, local authorities and humanitarian organisations, left to deal directly with migrants.

The idea is to highlight the adequacy of the photographic medium to represent hospitality in its ambivalence while questioning its contemporary shift or qualitative transformation: from the individual to the collective, from ritual to politics and from duty to favour or, to put it another way, from a complex and risky practice to virtuous self-reassuring charity.