SESSION: Mapping Human and Non-Human Migration in Contemporary Art
Maps have historically been used to delineate borders, yet artists return to maps to imagine, probe, and redraw border crossings. We consider art historical inquiries on artists’ works which utilize actual geographical maps or gestures at mapping as retracing movement.
Numerous artists use mapping strategies when they undertake historical and/or activist research on entangled histories of human and non-human migrations. In her project Seeds of Change (1999-ongoing) Maria-Tereza Alves traces the circulation of seeds in ships’ ballast showing how plants persistently “fail to respect national borders” (Fisher 2013). In Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008-2011), migrants trace their journeys with permanent markers on generic maps and redraw the territory. Artists demonstrate how movement is political and mapping is too; they show histories constructed not only around nation-states and stable communities, but also around those that move. The emergence of a variety of artistic media, methodologies, and approaches to histories of migration should be reflected in art history.
Amid global heating, we can only anticipate more people, animals, and plants on the move as climate migrants (Shah, 2020). As images are major narrators of migration, there is a growing urgency to engage with this topic also in art history. Therefore, we invite papers that address the right to move: papers which critically question mapping and maps of movement; and papers which consider the interdependencies between the migration of humans and non-humans. In this panel, papers are followed by a discussion which investigates human and non-human movement in Contemporary Art.
Session Convenors:
Anna Sejbæk Torp-Pedersen, KU Leuven, Belgium
Marta Wódz, KU Leuven, Belgium
Session Speakers:
Rhea Dehn Tutosaus, Technical University of Darmstadt
Mapping from below: Rethinking the Spanish–Moroccan Border through Contemporary Art
This paper investigates contemporary artistic practices at the Spanish–Moroccan border as acts of counter-mapping from below. Focusing on Randa Maroufi’s Bab Sebta (2019), it explores how the film’s meticulously staged sequences trace the everyday movements of those who cross the border of Ceuta, thereby rendering the borderscape through the lived experience of its inhabitants.
By focusing on the entanglements of artistic methodologies, visuality and knowledge-production, the aim of this lecture is two-fold: First, it interrogates artistic methodology as a collaborative practice that recognizes border inhabitants as crucial agents in the production of knowledge about the border itself. This leads to the second aim and answers the following question: how does this artistic methodology provide new ways of seeing and knowing the borderscape, rather than from a supposedly objective viewpoint, common to hegemonial forms of mapping? Taking decolonial approaches into account, art becomes not only a site of reflection on coloniality and modernity, but also a producer of border thinking and thus a site of emergence of ‘other’ epistemologies.
From an art-historical perspective, mapping here functions not only as a research tool but also as a material and conceptual practice that renders the Spanish–Moroccan border as an experienced, negotiated, and continuously reimagined space. In doing so, the analysis reintroduces the border inhabitants into the visual and epistemic field, counteracting the cartographic erasure that traditionally marks the map as an empty or neutral space.
Chiara Bianchessi, Academy of Fine Arts of Brera
Alessandro Maruccia, Academy of Fine Arts of Brera
Learning to listen: Diary of Six Movements in a Disobedient Garden
This paper addresses the deconstruction of the human and non-human dualism in Six Movements in a Disobedient Garden (2025) by Alexandra Gelis. Developed during a residency period at Kunst Meran, the performance featured sound and voice performance by Adriana Ghimp. Gelis’s practice situates within the discourse of posthuman art, ecofeminism and decolonial methodologies, exploring the relationship between plants and people.
This research question is pivotal because she creates a map made of encounters, shared and embodied knowledge. Her research in South Tyrol, historically marked by cultural and linguistic tensions caused by its shifting borders, was transposed in a performance which made evident the collaboration with non-human actors, as plants.
A constant emotional and academic confrontation led to the text, which incorporates events, ideas, and dissertation within a larger critical framework. Gelis redefines mapping as an act of listening rather than imposing. If borders were drawn through violence and domination, her work proposes care and coexistence as ways to dismantle anthropocentric perspectives.
What was found in Alexandra’s process is her way of dealing with human and non-human dualism, taking plants into consideration as living witnesses of migrations, of stories and histories, challenging the notion of fixed national borders as they continuously adapt, change and evolve. Plants and seeds, both subjects and companions in the stories of migration, carry tastes, smells and memories that evoke home. By creating a space where she gave plants freedom to resonate, she made the public aware that different narrations and perspectives exist.
Maria Bartkowiak, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan
Maja Olesińska, Jagiellonian University, Kraków
Jaonna Sztanka, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Mural Public Art and Symbolism of Global Migration: Implications for Polish–Ukrainian Solidarities in the face of War
Migration is widely discussed in the literature as a natural and continuous process of human movement shaped by social, economic and climate conditions. Street art, particularly murals, increasingly engages with themes of migration and intercultural encounters. Located in public spaces, murals comment on the experiences of migrating individuals, highlight the challenges of border crossings, and offer alternative ways of viewing cultural diversity. This article examines the evolution of Polish mural art in the context of migration, with a particular focus on iconography and narratives surrounding the influx of Ukrainians to Poland after 2014 and the escalation of war since 2022. The study employs an integrated visual-social approach, combining semiotic analysis of murals, their spatial mapping within urban environments, and discourse analysis of accompanying narratives (media coverage, municipal programs, participatory initiatives). To identify global visual and discursive trends, Polish examples are compared with migration-related murals in Germany, the United States, Mexico, and the Middle East. Findings reveal a significant narrative shift: from depictions of anonymous economic migrants toward visualizations of empathy, coexistence, and Polish-Ukrainian solidarity. Since 2022, there has been a notable increase in projects co-created by Polish and Ukrainian artists, with dominant messages moving away from threat-based narratives toward representations of community, safety, and individual refugee stories. Murals thus emerge as a durable medium of social communication and a tool for constructing multicultural collective memory in Polish cities. This analysis demonstrates how public art responds to migration crises, reshaping both local and global visual discourses.
Vanessa Badagliacca, Universidad de Oviedo
A studio out in the garden and beyond. Thoughts on Alexandra do Carmo’s The Green Studio at IC19 (2018)
The aim of this contribution is to focus on The Green Studio by Portuguese artist Alexandra do Carmo (Lisbon, 1966). This contemporary video art piece, which significantly combines human and more-than-human migration, also challenges that same idea of mapping, presenting public areas as spaces of resilience. Composed of three parts (Document #1 “The Green Studio at IC19”; Document #2 “Occupy”; Document #3 “Colonial Bean”) The Green Studio at IC19 is the result of Do Carmo’s exchange with a community of Portuguese and African people living in the suburbs of Lisbon and growing plants and doing their gardening for subsistence. As the title of the second part alludes, by occupying a public abandoned area at the outskirts of the city, these communities attempt to resist the hegemonic control that intervenes with continuous attacks to dismantle those spaces. Approaching a perspective from the south, that conveys geography, agriculture, language, and colonial history, the work of Alexandra do Carmo embodies a reflection on the public space, which is not a merely physical space, but rather a reality shaped by the social interconnections occurring in it. Those cultivated pieces of land do not just provide food supply for those who take care of them; they are also spaces of affection, interchange, relational textures; they are spaces of belonging.