Category: LoveLetters

I could be speculating about the US establishment dismantling the US establishment, but I’m tired of talking about who is and who is not ESTABLISHMENT. Moreover I’m sick of talking about the US elections, which only substantiates the self-generating idea that the US runs the world.

No, instead I want to talk about how established systems of borders and control cannot continue to be used in the context of delivering aid to people who are victims of those borders and controls in the first place. How do we expect to build new ways of interacting and forming solidarities if we continue to hide poor people from view, while we monitor and control aid in the hyper-sensitive ways which we seem to be doing?

Specifically, I want to address the matter of providing donations to refugees in the context of current migration flows. I have worked in several different locations in Europe volunteering my time and in each one I have seen the same systems reproduced, presumably due to the challenge of distribution with “fairness”. Unfortunately, such systems are all too often paternalistic, racist, and at least stressful and unpleasant. They take the agency away from those that receive aid and ask aid workers to perform acts of control that border on fascist.

I am sorry to be even making the critique, because I believe so strongly in the will of these organizations and civil society who honesty believe they are doing the best that they can, and who definitely want to be doing the best they can for refugees. But somehow, there is still entrenched violence.

It’s not unusual that people who receive aid get abused by givers. Any person who has visited a government aid office can give testimony that the experience is so traumatic that they aren’t sure it’s worth it, even though they can’t survive without help in today’s economy. It is par for the course when you ask for money, you’ll be verbally bashed and disrespected, made to feel like a failure, shamed for being poor.

What I’ve seen inside refugee aide centers is not this level of abuse, but a much more subtle disdain for those who express a desire to choose what they get, who ask for something extra, who take “too much” time, who don’t play exactly by the rules or talk back to an aide worker suggesting that perhaps the policy is a bit over-regulated.

The problem presumably emerges from a lack of donations, a lack of money to pay volunteers who grow quickly frustrated with the resources granted to them. In most donation centers, volunteers are asked to strictly manage who gets what and how much they get. In one place, I was asked to make sure that no Roma people, who were standing outside the fenced in center, were allowed in. When once I “accidentally” gave clothing to a Roma person, I was reprimanded. I responded that I could not tell the difference between a Roma and a refugee—they were speechless. (Given the lack of legal definition afforded to the term Refugee, one could argue that Roma are refugees, but I wont go into that).

Several times, when passing out food, I was told that I shouldn’t give more than one item to a person; that we would run out. If I took out the entire box of, for example, granola bars, I was told that this would produce chaos, as each person would grab for several bars. The “food” in and of itself, was nothing to hoard. It was, if anything, a nicety; hardly a meal.

Similarly, in the distribution of clothing, my experience has been that refugees are not allowed to enter the clothing area. All the clothing is organized similarly to a small Salvation Army or Goodwill Store, full of clean but used clothing, organized by size and “gender” (just one of the ways that we also benignly bolster the established logic of the gender binary). In my experience, I have been allowed only to interact with refugees across a desk, who request their size and preferred color (though, this, sometimes, is deemed as suspect because its “asking too much”). Lets not mention the various difficulties inherent in translation and differences in clothing sizes around the world, thats nothing.

It is my job to then bring them the requested item—one by one. There are generally no dressing rooms for anyone who would like privacy or would like to know how an item fits. Each item has to be presented individually, which takes time and energy, and eventually both persons become very exhausted with the interaction. Naturally, “even migrants” have an idea of what they would like and feel comfortable in, because migrants are humans. But so many aid networks appear to be entrenched in the message that “beggars cant be choosers”. Refugees are often hassled into accepting something they don’t really like, or rushed out because they are taking too much time, or insulted because they haven’t taken “whats good for them.”

It’s gross, frankly.

What’s more, refugees are sometimes given vouchers which limit what they can take, how much and how often, as though they would otherwise clean out the donations in one visit. These vouchers and systems of control are meant to be enforced by volunteers, some of whom are there for just hours at a time, who must check off what, how much and when certain things are received. Given that these systems of control are so-decentralized, and volunteers don’t feel a sense of instant “seniority”, they capitulate to these systems without much manipulation. They even, in my experience, participate in telling colleagues how the system is meant to run, and point out when mistakes have been made—basically doing the job of superiors without even being asked. It’s thus very difficult to try to covertly subvert systems when apparently few people are critical of it.

More often than not, a refugee would say “no” to the droopy clothing items I offered them, so the idea that they would go on a shopping spree joy ride is kind of ridiculous. Its hard to sell old clothing to anyone, (at least from my experience of working at flea markets). But when religious customs so closely dictate fashion, its even more difficult to “sell” a wrinkly pink pantsuit (Not that we’re not grateful).

To be honest, most refugees seemed to want new items if they could get them, which we could argue is not politically or environmentally sound. But then, why expect radical sustainability from migrants as a whole if we don’t expect it from ourselves? Once, when a load of new tennis shoes were delivered from a company in China, no man, it seemed, of any age or nationality, wanted anything other than these brand new shiny tennis shoes, despite the fact that they were completely unfit for trekking through the snow. I could merely give my advice but I hesitated to tell them what to do.

Yet to add insult to injury, in one of my experiences, refugees were told–“one in, one out”–and in no uncertain terms. At moments, I felt like I was in the military. They were told sternly that if they wanted shoes (used or new) they had to trade in their old ones—even though most of them were simply wet, not worn out. I attempted several times to subvert this system by whispering to refugees to put their old shoes in their backpacks, but for the most part I watched as people traded in expensive wet shoes for unsuitable new dry ones and my superior seemed to monitor this with glee. Those old shoes were sometimes dried out, sprayed, and refurbished with an insole to give to another person. And some of those shoes were 200 € hiking boots. When they weren’t refurbished, they were eventually thrown out in the dumpster where finally, finally, Roma were given the chance to pick them over.

These systems take so much more time, and so many more volunteers than it presumably would if refugees were simply allowed into the “free store” at their leisure. Imagine that! Refugees would be given the autonomy they deserve—and volunteers could be in the business of helping to keep the place clean and organized, stocked, and cheerful. Dressing rooms would be there for refugees to use and workers could stand outside and kindly offer our advice and support like they do at GAP.

Sadly, systems for distribution of donations within these systems are nothing like the unencumbered freedom of capitalist marketplaces like GAP—or even downscale ones like the Dollar Tree. Nor are they like the ones you can get at your local squat or info shop’s free store—or on the street.

Yes, there were so many left over used donations that I considered doing a little shopping of my own, as did a fraction of other aid volunteers. In the end, it was a mere consideration that was never actualized, since our desires were quickly nipped in the bud by a superior who was outraged at the idea of a “privileged” volunteer taking the sacred donations earmarked for refugees. But the plain truth is, many of us are just unemployed, underemployed, and/or receiving government aid. We have time on our hands but little money. Some of us can’t even walk into a charity shop and afford the prices. If you hadn’t noticed, there is money to be made in “vintage clothes”–both Goodwill and Salvation Army have apparently been taking advantage of our freely given donations (see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-hrabe/the-worst-corporation-in-_b_1876905.html or http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1352343/Salvation-Army-millionaire-William-Booth-makes-fortune-donated-clothes.html). And yet we’re reluctant to shop at Primark when everyone knows deep down that prices that low can only be managed by underpaying workers.

But one thing is true—as a white, western migrant artist I can go back to my neighborhood and probably find a box of free stuff on the street, and no one will be standing over my shoulder monitoring what I take out of it. Nor will it be torn apart by roving bands of unemployed artists, playing tug of war with the last bra. In fact there are other gentrified systems in place like the “free your stuff” Facebook group where free stuff is passed between those of us who are effectively scavengers in today’s economy. It works just fine.

So why is it that refugees cant be trusted with taking and choosing their own clothing within a system they are forced to use? Why is it that aide organizations keep these outdated systems in tact? Its hard to think its anything other than the same old same old western paternalism and racism that contributed to these large-scale messes in the first place. But we don’t need to perpetuate it.

I’m one voice from sex workers who were upset and surprised to see a red umbrella with the words “FLASH MOB” written under it, standing for the symbol of Atlanta’s V-Day Flash Mob: One Billion Rising to End Violence Against Women and Girls (http://www.onebillionrisingatlanta.net/). I am / we are frustrated not because we don’t want to be part of a movement that puts an end to violence for women and girls.

I am frustrated because it felt like the symbol had been benignly re-appropriated by a feminist movement (albeit a diverse, multi-dimensional and contradictory one) whose voices don’t all and always have our back, or ask us for our opinions in the matter. One person in our community was so confused by the use of the red umbrella that she thought it might be sinister—a deliberate act of appropriating our symbol in an attempt to take away our power.

I don’t personally agree that this is a conscious effort to take away the power of our movement—at least I hope it isn’t—I think this is, rather, just a case of meme and ignorance. In fact, it may be more depressing to say that I have a feeling a lot of young activists just don’t realize the history of the red umbrella, don’t realize that sex workers, too, are activists, feminists, and are fighting for visibility. Moreover, that sex workers’ symbol for solidarity has been the red umbrella since 2001 ( http://www.sexworkeurope.org/campaigns/red-umbrella-campaigns). Part of the reason that many people may not know the history is because sex work is such a taboo and socially stigmatized. Many sex workers are forced to work illegally and don’t feel safe being publicly out. Many sex workers don’t feel like they can claim or are given visible space within other activist movements, like Occupy, or COP, or even, feminist spaces like V-Day (especially since prostitution is illegal in Georgia).

I happened to notice the irony of the red umbrella for the first time, when I saw it “accidentally” appropriated, reading the coverage of the 2015 Climate Change Talks in Paris. On the last Saturday of COP21, activists protested the outcome of the conference, saying that the agreements hadn’t gone far enough. Protesters carried or created with their bodies a long red ribbon—red to symbolize that Earth is in an emergency situation. Many people wore red raincoats, carried red tulips, carried a red ribbon, held the sides of large red ribbons, or carried a red umbrella. When I first saw a photograph Online, my eyes locked onto this beautiful sea of red umbrellas, and I wondered what wonderful sex worker protest this could be. Then I realized seconds later that these weren’t sex workers at all. After all, this the New York Times—and this was coverage of the 2015 Climate Change Conference in Paris (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/world/europe/climate-activists-gather-in-paris-to-protest-outcome-of-conference.html). And what does sex work have to do with climate change? Well. I’ll get to that.

At first I looked with mild amusement—some of these people, presumably unbeknownst to themselves, were carrying the signature of sex worker solidarity. At first I thought it was great. But then, I wasn’t so sure. It dawned on me that, maybe, not all of the people there cared about the rights of sex workers or believed in sex work as a legitimate and positive form of work. Maybe some wouldn’t be carrying a red umbrella if they knew it was a symbol of rights for sex workers, and that possibly some of the people there were working to support programs that actually hurt or disrespect sex workers in the long run. If they were all aware of the symbol and carrying it proudly, I would be happy. But given how divided the feminist community is over this topic, let alone the community at large, I had my doubts.

I believe that I know how this all got started. At the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2014 (which I had the luck of being able to attend) protesters were carrying umbrellas to shield themselves from pepperspray and tear gas (http://mashable.com/2014/09/29/umbrella-revolution-protests-spread/#BQ2.fpciKZqs). It was dubbed the Umbrella Revolution, and since that time, the umbrella has taken on a larger revolutionary significance. So when, at Paris, everyone had to join the sea of red, a red umbrella was perfect. And for a V-Day Flash mob—why not? An activist symbol paired with the Valentines Color and the Vulva / Vagina Color – perfect. I get it—umbrellas weren’t invented yesterday and no one owns the color red.

Still, I couldn’t help start to think about how sex workers are so often hidden from large movements like these. As a contingent, they usually aren’t invited to the table to speak. As a unit, they usually aren’t represented because it can be so dangerous for us to do so (personally and politically). Sex workers rights, too, are shielded from relevance. Its not that concerns about the bodies of women “in general” (if one could generalize), or the bodies of sex workers aren’t represented at protests like these—in critiques of neoliberalism or migration or war or global corporate takeover or free trade or any of those issues. It’s that normally sex work is looked at as the unfortunate byproduct of all those icky things, and sex work is often viewed as a choice no powerful person would make. Sex workers are read as victims—often, its assumed, of trafficking—to be saved. Their voices are often not invited to be heard. Their real needs are lost. And their real strengths are forgotten.

But then, the rights of women (any gendered person in fact) and the rights of bodies to chose labor and the rights of bodies to chose environments that are free of toxins, these things are all closely connected. And those bodies who have to make those choices actually have a lot to say. I just wish that someone at COP21 amidst the activists had said something, anything, about the rights of sex workers and the importance of having sex workers at the table. I wish that sex workers voices had been loud enough to say, I DO hope you know what that red umbrella stands for. And I wish that programs in the so-called interest of woman and girls really took better care to involved a diverse community of voices of women and girls, to decide for themselves what’s best for them.

Take for example the Rights not Rescue movement in Cambodia, where in the last several years, in the name of anti-trafficking, police have been arresting sex workers and forcing them into other, “more respectful” labor—any labor—because presumably its better “for them”. The reality of this has been that many sex workers have been forced into factory work, often at the hands of police who brutally arrest them while not hesitating to berate and insult them because of their labor.

“Sweatshop conditions” or not, factory work might not be the choice that many people would make when they could be working as independent sex workers (especially if their work weren’t stigmatized and they had safe and secure places to get health care and support). But even without those things – many people would still rather choose to be sex workers than work in a factory. We know this because so many factory workers have risen up in Cambodia in the past years to protest the abhorrent salaries and labor conditions—many of whom were former sex workers—and many continue to dodge the law to continue to work as sex workers, some of whom are represented in this fantastic documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZYMRHlzb9o).

There are really specific and important links between the global economy, mass-production, the bodies of people doing the labor, and the idea of choice when faced with different kinds of poverties. But the fact remains that the best way to discern whats best for a person is to talk to them directly and to understand who they are and what specific challenges they face. This is why its so important to invite people at all parts of the global economy to participate and be heard at COP, OCCUPY, and V-Days around the world. How to end violence against women and girls? Lets talk to women and girls who have been sex workers and understand what violence means for them.

But lets take this one step further. I would like to move beyond speaking defensively about sex work and start speaking affirmatively about sex work.

A sex worker who is empowered in their employment has a wonderful set of skills. They can speak through the energy of the body to other bodies to unlock places of discomfort, to bring pleasure to areas of the body that feel numb. These are all skills that are valued by physical therapists, counselors, body healers, masseurs, and doctors. Sex workers do the same. Some think that a sex worker comes into a room, gets pounded, and leaves. Maybe there is dinner ahead of time. But the reality is that sex workers see a variety of clients, bodies, people with different blocks, hangups, insecurities, have difference desires. Some are differently-abled, queer, or want to explore desires that fall outside of the heteronormative or otherwise restricting sexualities they are able to engage in within the confines of their relationships.

Sex workers know how to hold a stranger in their arms and sometimes, those clients want to be comforted and talked to softly. Sometimes they want their power to be renegotiated and played with. Skilled and supported sex workers are able to work with their clients to figure out how to help them feel good in their bodies. With a supportive work environment (and even despite it), sex workers learn to communicate across the borders of class and race and gender and all sorts of other differences—this work is almost always about bridging difference. I wouldn’t argue that every exchange is spiritual or “deep”–it’s true that, like in any capitalist exchange, sometimes a customer just wants a pack of cigs. But the potential for profound exchange is there, and its up to the bodies involved and the comfort they are afforded.

But lets take it even one step further. Sex workers have valuable knowledge about working with, touching, bringing pleasure to, differently bodied persons. Strangers. When we consider the vast amount of work we need to do—whether in the area of migration and integration, in the area of demilitarization, in the area of caring enough about the global community in order to think more sustainably about our local communities–their skills are invaluable. The connections that sex workers, and many other people who work closely one-on-one with other bodies—these are the kinds of personal-global connections we need to be making with each other in other to understand why questioning our own privilege is worth sacrificing for the future of the body of the world.

So please, lets remember the skills and voices of sex workers. Let’s remember what the red umbrella stands for and hold it proudly.

why do you think I move
why do you think I move
do you think I move out of fear
do you think I move out of need
do you think I move to be near you
do you think I’m following you
why do you think I move
why do you think I move
do you think I move out of fear
do you think I move out of need
do you think I move to be near you
do you think I want to be like you
do you think I want to have the things you have
do you think I want to take the things you have
why do you think I move
why do you think I move
I move I move I move I move I move
I want to move
can you cross this line
do you want to cross this line
do you have your papers
yes I have my papers
can I cross this line
do you have your papers
do you have your papers
I want to cross this line
do you have your papers
I want to cross this line
do you have your papers
I want to cross this line
I want to move
I want to move
I want to move
can can I can I cross this line
do you want to come to this line
do you want to cross this line
do you have
yes I want to move
yes I have my papers can I cross this line
can I cross this line
I dont have my have my have my papers
I want to move
I want to move
move
move
move

We didn’t get to the migrant camps or group homes or detention centers this time at all. The plan was to go to the refugee center outside of Catania – CARA Mineo – but I got sick for several days and we stayed in Catania center; didn’t get to Palermo until the day of the show. I felt like I failed my own project, in not getting to the largest camp in Sicily this time. But the only way it was going to happen would be the wrangling of an expensive rental car and a few nights on the road in a hotel, both of which seemed antithetical to the project. The point of the project is to go slow, within our means, to move without consuming. But I felt, not being able to go the camp, that I was hovering at a familiar plane, as its easy to do—the plane of a white world that has managed to hide the face of its refugee population by placing them mostly in camps and centers far from easy access.

In Palermo, we played in a place I would call White. Nice, really nice, really nice audience, but not the kind of place you are likely to find new immigrants hanging out—not the crowded tiny bar just a few streets away where last April we had danced to new music out of Nigeria sweating and crushed our bodies hip to hip while babies slept in strollers parked just outside. There where we were the only white people. I mention this because it is something at least to consider, at least to point out, and to wonder about how to make our shows spaces of increased integration. When I forget to point it out, its like I’m forgetting about the veneer that covers our various worlds and separates us from each other.

It makes us think that it would be nice to have talks after the show, organized discussions where we invite people to talk about migration and the issues inherent in migration politics—problems, fears, every day concerns or experiences, whatever people are feeling as they think about how migration affects their community. Alternatively, we could pose one question to all the people who speak to us after the show, anyone we can grab, really, and just focus on one question. These could be an opportunity to make sound recordings, documentations and sound studies. And that way, by introducing this topic into our show, we don’t limit our discussions of migration to places where migrants are visible. We don’t want to just talk to people in camps about the situation in camps. We don’t want to just talk to our (white) audiences about how they experienced our show. We want to talk to everyone and anyone about their feelings about migration. We want to talk to everyone and anyone about art.

It surprises me how migrants are hidden from view even in cities that are full of migrants, and/or how blind non-migrants are to issues that are of life and death importance to those seeking some form of asylum. We can be in Budapest making a show in a queer anti-establishment former squat with a host of artists making political commentary and there are maybe two people who themselves come from non Western nations. And then we go just half an hour outside town and irregular migrants and asylum seekers are there, walking back and forth between an open camp and the Tesco superstore because it is a free place to live and maybe they have a small allowance to buy a phone card. And when we talk for just two minutes to one person, he tells us about the death of his brother after being held on a train for 36 hours with no food or water.

Or take for example the Sri Lankan young men we met in Sid, on the Serbian Croatian border, who were just waiting with limbo status, waiting for what, because they were not from any of the countries that were going be granted asylum in Germany or Sweden considering the intense numbers, the new wave of migrants. In effect they already knew that to go much further into Europe could be madness. Even if they do have a “legitimate asylum claim”, their country of origin may keep them from even being allowed entry at the border (most EU countries limited entry to Syrians and Afghanis)–therefore they have no chance of being heard. If they stay in Sid, they are hidden from view. Who stays in Sid other than aid workers and migrants? No one without a permit is allowed to enter the camp.

Alternatively, they could leave the camp, leave Sid. They can try their luck, then, at avoiding the system altogether, keep walking further into Europe, dodging police and border crossings, trying to work illegally at some pointless job that “civilized society” doesn’t want –selling cheap things on the street, from plastic massage gadgets and lighters, toilet tissue to drugs. Maybe all the while they’ll know that their claim for asylum is perfectly justified, that to go home would be suicide. But the rest of society, who knows nothing of their story, sees only an “illegal” immigrant who doesn’t even have a pending asylum case. Looks with disdain and ignorance. The relationship of disassociation, of misunderstanding, is maintained.

And what holds “us” back from integration, a predominantly white/Western artist music world and the non-white world of people living in a refugee camp or open camp? One could say that they just wouldn’t let us in, or its not a venue set up for music. One could busk outside. One could make special arrangements to transport a few cars of people from the detention center to a club. But its much easier to say, this would be difficult. I don’t know anyone there. I have no money to get there. I have no money to spend there. I don’t speak the language to talk to other people there. I have never been to an event of this type before. And one could say, I have never performed in a detention center before, I don’t know if you want me there, I could busk but I don’t have an electric generator. Would it be strange. We talk ourselves back into spaces of comfort.

Fascinating. I woke up today to an image I found powerful and provocative—one of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei laying face down on a beach, evoking the tragic death of Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi (http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/feb/01/ai-weiwei-poses-as-drowned-syrian-infant-refugee-in-haunting-photo). And to my surprise, “No One” seems to mind.
I must take pause. It was only a few weeks ago that white Hungarian human rights lawyer and journalist Boglarka Balogh posed as African Tribeswomen in a set of digitally manipulated photographs in order to raise awareness of their secluded cultures (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/07/boglarka-balogh-seven-types-of-blackface). For this she was eviscerated on the killing room floor of traditional and social media.
One writer for Jezebel sneered that “the world weeps in gratitude for a dimwitted Hungarian woman who thought it prudent to plaster herself in seven different kinds of blackface” (http://jezebel.com/world-weeps-in-gratitude-for-woke-hungarian-who-did-7-t-1751448258). In stark contrast, when a grown Chinese man poses as a dead Syrian infant in order to bring attention to the plight of migrants, the Internet world, does, indeed, weep. “Powerful” and “haunting” is the rererereretweet.
So what is the fundamental difference between these two artistic interventions? In the case of Balogh, “we” all got to chuckle politely at her ignorance of political history, social theory, and, under our breaths, at her poor English and inability to articulate an effective rebuttal before retreating. Another chance to pat ourselves on the back for being less racist than she, or at least versed on what racism “is” in order to navigate the difference.
This intellectual superiority allowed her critics to ignore her apparently failed intention to raise “issues regarding a number of endangered tribes” which she names and details “and the speed at which they are fading away”.
Perhaps an important distinction was missed. Balogh was not trying to represent the plight of Africans as a whole or the African diaspora. In fact her work called attention to the difference between peoples and the specific risk these people face. These tribeswomen’s Blackness is not the same as any and every other Blackness—one could argue they are being swallowed up by Blackness. And yet critics may have fortified an essentialist notion of all of African or African diaspora experience. Would it be Blackface if Balogh were Black? Balogh’s work may make us uncomfortable, but this, too, is deeply problematic.
Cultural theorist Stuart Hall put it best when he said that race is a floating signifier; there is no scientific evidence of Race, nor have scientists ever been able to find the Black gene, nor do we share the same definitions of Blackness or Whiteness cross culturally. How White or Black is a Hungarian migrant in the UK? How White or Black is a Chinese migrant in Italy? How White or Black is an African American migrant in Nigeria? And whom, how and why did they migrate?–we should appropriately ask.
In the case of a dead Syrian infant, it might be said that Ai Weiwei is portraying an experience of Blackness; one of abandonment and exploitation. This representation places us— those of us who witness Weiwei’s work in galleries, in our international papers, online—in the position of Whiteness; of exploiters, who stare on, unable to do anything, unable to change our own nation’s laws to allow for free migration.
The comparative case of Weiwei and Balogh could bring us to think critically about Whiteness and Blackness and the societal construction of race, and bring us to a more nuanced discussion about how our identities are and will be shaped in the coming centuries. Balogh and Weiwei’s creations belong to a nascent artistic and lived genre we could call “transracialism”, in which artists and non artists alike play with a racial identity that society does not normally assign to them.
It could also invite us to question the way society constructs notions of legitimacy. In one case, transracialist art is celebrated, while in another the artist is castigated and humiliated, in part due to the cultural capital of the artists themselves: On the one hand we have a famous, arguably non-White artist. On the other, an unknown, arguably White amateur with less linguistic tools than the Art World expects. By discouraging each other and shaming each other away from dialogue, we substantiate constructed categories—ie, what it is to be Black or to be White, to be Man or the be Woman and who has the right to play the authenticity card.
But this imbalance is also due to who gets the chance to comment and express offense. What I miss most often within social media or the Art World are the voices of those who are specifically represented; of Syrian refugees represented by famous artists, or the African tribeswomen represented by “dimwitted” ones. Moreover rude epitaphs don’t help us arrive at solutions to the toughest problems—ie, how to get along with each other and de-escalate violence, address structural violence that contributes to vanishing peoples and languages, or how we can express constructively our hurt and offense at what others say and do.
Get ready for it; in the next years transracialism will be increasingly explored both within and outside of the art wold. The question is, could it bring us together, and, as Balogh said in her imperfect English after taking down her initial post, help us to “keep calm and love every human”?

A refugee is not a legal term. It is an informal term, defined differently at different times by different people, which at base means: someone who is seeking refuge. A migrant is a person who moves. Most people move because they believe the place they would like to go to will give them better opportunities than where they are. The differences between a migrant and a refugee are informal, not legal terms, and not defined by any international standards. They are generally understood as simply degrees of severity in understanding the reasons why people move, which are basically around the same needs of opportunity, safety, and security.

A refugee is someone who is traveling away from where they live because where they live is or feels unsafe. A place only “is” unsafe when the violence a person experiences becomes so pronounced that it either injures them or takes their life, but most people don’t want to wait long enough to find out. So they usually decide to leave their home on the basis of “feeling” unsafe. A migrant might not feel as unsafe as a person who is considered a refugee, and yet their reasons for moving and their reasons for wanting to live in a new place could stem from basically the same concerns and problems and from the hope that a new place will be better.

A refugee could be YOU. A migrant could be YOU. You might feel unsafe and want to leave where you live. If YOU want to leave where you live, YOU want to have the freedom to do so. You want to have the financial means to do so. If you do have the financial means to do so, you want your government to give you the permission to leave and another government the permission to arrive.

Why would a person feel unsafe where they live? Why would you feel unsafe where you live?

It might feel unsafe because of DIRECT VIOLENCE. Direct violence could be violence in the streets by fellow citizens—people you know have been mugged on a daily basis. There is gang violence and you fear for the safety of your children. You do not want your children to go to school where they are meant to go to school because you have heard that many kids are being bullied. You fear for your safety when you walk around after dark. You have received threats of violence from someone you know who lives in your community. It might be that there are people being shot by the police on a regular basis or harassed and jailed for what appears to be unjust reasons. It might be that people are being beaten or killed for being gay or deemed “different” or differently gendered or different religion. You might have heard that people who are protesting or organizing for their employment rights have been beaten or killed. It might be that you have been actively protesting and are experiencing violence or threat of violence while organizing. It might be that the job you do makes some people angry and you have received threats of violence. These are all reasons for feeling unsafe and these are all reasons to want to leave.

Direct violence could also be violence from your government’s military—bombs, guns, the presence of tanks, either directly against you—its own citizens—or indirectly while fighting against an internal or international military or organization, damaging the homes and livelihood of its own citizens. The direct war could be putting pressure on citizens within a country to join one side or the other. You might feel unsafe and unwilling to fight for your government because you don’t agree with their position, but you also don’t agree with the violent resistance within your country. You feel pressure from both sides to take one side or the other, and you feel unsafe if you don’t join either side. You fear that your government wont offer you protection or continue to offer you security if you don’t join their side.

Direct violence could be the violence from an external military force or organization who is using bombs, guns, drones, or the constant presence of military force to exert pressure, power, and fear upon your government, and indirectly upon civilians like you. You may feel pressure to take sides or that you must fight for your government’s military. These are all reasons to leave, either because you fear for your life or because you fear that you cannot live and work the way that you want to under those conditions.

You might feel unsafe and want to leave the place that you live because of INDIRECT VIOLENCE: the violence of poverty which is related to things like lack of food, lack of infrastructure, lack of health care, lack of education, lack of general employment possibility, and/or poor environmental conditions that give rise to all of these things.

Suppose a hurricane just struck and all the homes in your area are destroyed. Maybe your home is not destroyed, but the homes and businesses around you are so destroyed that its difficult to live the life you once knew and it does not seem so easy to start over where you are. You might lack the support from your local or national government to start over. You might want to leave where you are living because over time the climate has grown so hot that the camels you own have died, you can no longer raise your livestock, or grow the crops that your family has grown for generations, or that you have spent your whole life learning to grow. Now there is no longer a market for what you grow, or you cannot grow enough to be competitive in the market. These are all reasons to want to leave where you live.

You might be seeking refuge because the job that you are trained to do is not available anymore in the area where you live, or the jobs that are available to you are so uninteresting, so devalued and so physically or emotionally strenuous that you would rather seek other employment in other places. You might be seeking education for a job that you would like to do but cannot get educated in the way that you want to in the place where you live. This lack of resources and lack of possibility makes you feel ultimately unsafe and insecure.

You might want to leave the place where you live because the company that employed you and most of the people that you know had to leave your town. You want to continue working in the type of job that you had and if you stay you might be forced into a labor that you never wanted to do nor do you want to do in the future. The idea of working another kind of job makes you depressed, maybe even suicidal. You feel as though your entire future and your happiness are insecure. This is a reason for wanting to leave where you live.

There are many reasons that you might seek “refuge”. There are many reasons why people want to move. There are many reasons that you might fear direct or indirect violence in the place that you live. There are many reasons why people you know might feel direct or or indirect violence in the place that they live.

A refugee could be YOU. A migrant could be YOU. You might feel unsafe and want to leave where you live. You might feel discontent and that opportunities are better somewhere else. The discontent might feel so strong that you feel an ultimate sense of insecurity related to the place in which you live. You might want to come to the aid of someone else you know who feels unsafe. You might want to move to live near to them, to assist them.

If YOU want to leave where you live, YOU want to have the freedom to do so. You want to have the financial means to do so or the ability to leave so that you can gain the financial means to sustain yourself. If you do have the financial means to leave, you want your government—local or national—to give you the permission to leave and another government—local or national—the permission to arrive. At the bare minimum, you want the CHANCE to look for work, to ATTEMPT to start a new life, to TRY to find education, to have the PERMISSION to find a new place to school your kids, to have the AUTONOMY to find friends and support networks for yourself.

Some of us never have to consider how difficult it is to leave the place that we live and come to a new place. Some of us have the privilege to be able to travel as much as 4000 kilometers away and still live within the political sovereignty of the country to which we have citizenship and the right to work. Some of us are happy with the political conditions and rights of the country to which we were born. Some of us have enough money to buy power or permissions to live almost anyplace in the world, to visit places that we would like to consider living. We have the ability to at least travel to another town that might have better opportunities.

In the United States after Hurricane Katrina, there was a lot of talk about whether the people fleeing the hurricane to go to other states were refugees or not (http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2005/09/refugees_vs_eva.html). The fact is, without legal category, it really doesn’t matter what they are called—refugees, migrants, internally displaced persons, adventurers, travelers, victims. A legal category is only important insofar as it affects the “legality” of a persons’ right or lack of rights to be in or live in a place. The fact is, many of the persons who traveled from disaster areas to safer areas were received by other cities and other states. The fact is, for those that had the financial means or familial connections available to them and wanted to leave, had, at the very least, the legal permission to do so because they were citizens of the United States.

Consider that the distance from New York to San Francisco is 4706 kilometers, and that at any time, if someone has the financial means, a citizen can travel between those two cities or any other in the United States without problem. If a US citizen were experiencing some difficulty or lack of opportunity in their city, they could travel easily between cities looking for a new job or new opportunity.

Consider that Aleppo, Syria and Berlin, Germany are two cities 3389 kilometers apart. The long “road” between those two places is traversed by many Syrian migrants who believe that Germany might accept them legally “if they can get there.” But in order to do to, they have to cross through many other countries where they will not be received and might be harassed, beaten, killed, or have their possessions stolen from them. They must travel through illegal means because no country nor corporation, not even their idealized destination Germany, is offering them a safe and legal means to travel (even if they had money for the plane ticket). The average Syrian cannot simply board a plane for Germany and land and expect to come into the country the way that most people traveling on a tourist visa can, or the way that a person flying from New York to San Francisco can.

A refugee could be YOU, a migrant could be YOU. If you wanted to travel 4000 kilometers away, or even 1000 kilometers away, you would want the permission to do so. You would want the freedom of movement that would allow you to find another place suitable for you and your goals. If at every few hundred kilometers you were stopped, fingerprinted, placed in a camp, a prison, a center, an internment camp, a work camp, an orphanage, a homeless shelter, an institution—and told that because you wanted to move and for no other reason than simply the fact of wanting to move, that you must now be under constant watch of the state, your potential to self actualize and reach your goals would be severely challenged. If you were told that you could not legally work simply because you wanted to migrate, you would have a very hard time finding meaningful work. If you were told that your body had to be managed simply because you were unhappy, discontent, felt unsafe, insecure, or wanted other opportunities, that management could seriously limit your future.

There is simply no reason to manage the movement of bodies to the degree that States are currently managing the bodies of migrants, whether they are later deemed to be political asylees or not. If those bodies were your body you would not want to be managed.

It does not matter for what reason you are moving. You need the right to live outside of an institution, you need the right to self-actualize and to build the necessary structures of support as a person and as a community, and you need the right to look for work. You could be a refugee. You could be a migrant. Oppose the management of the bodies of migrants as you would oppose the management of your own body.

On Friday at This Human World Festival, Sadie Lune and I got the chance to talk about porn and sex work. The experience “flew by” and I realized afterwards how much more I wanted to say, or perhaps, how much the conversation continues on in constant flow. as i take my morning shower. as i walk down the street. in another conversation with a journalist. in conversation with my partner. now in some writing. “empowerment” is this constant dialogue between my selves or sides of selves, in constant state of becoming. the empowered self informs actions, the actions themselves empower the self. the empowered self informs more actions. it is not one or the other or one without the other.

i am in this constant process of finding new language with which to understand and speak about sex work, about work with sex. sexuality. performance of sex. performance of sexuality. simply: why do i do what i do, why i dig and continue to dig into these questions. the questions: what does it FEEL like to put the naked body on stage, the naked sexualized body on stage (is my body even sexualized any more, given my age, given its exposure, given its strangeness? but HAH! was it ever unequivocally sexualized, in any case, at any point? no.). what does it feel like to put this body in front of other people; in light of their sexual orientation, in light of their sense of power, their sense of entitlement, in light of their sense of shame, in light of their gender. can this “body” be subversive relative to the socialized sense of what it symbolizes to see the naked cunt-bearing thin white body? And then again, what does it FEEL like to place the (THIS) naked body next to, in personal relation with, another naked body, to encounter the sexualized selves together. To sexualize each other, to allow oneself to be sexualized. We (my body, my brain, my dynamic becoming selves) would like to understand this. We would like to learn, what it feels like to encounter another body and to decide to provide pleasure, to feel and listen to the other body, to feel and understand their desires and to find the pathways towards that fulfillment. is that empowering? yes, i experience it so.

Reflections on “when we are together we can be everywhere” (dir. marit östberg) that I could not articulate after the screenings.

Marit could have chosen not to make this film — and the process would have remained as beautiful in my mind as it was that day in the wagonplatz, lived on forever as memory and wish fulfilled. which speaks a lot about the process and reasons of making porn. It is, in the moment, about the act itself, about full presence, just as any fulfilling sexual encounter is. It is not about watching it years later, or the anticipation of the picture itself, but the pseudo-realities we both set up and enact in the framework of what appears to be almost a child’s game. We see it in our silly smiles, our laughter, the permission we give each other. The boundaries to encounter that we choose to cross—boundaries that perhaps, on another day, we might not have crossed if it weren’t for this framework.

And yet she did make the film, which was a process I cannot speak to, except for knowing its tremendous outcome and felt impact. One where in which she was able to capture precisely what the memory evokes, as well as its fragility. She was able to capture the slipperiness of our time … the way that a thousand lives, a million encounters, could have been chosen, can be chosen still, have been chosen, to live out. And yet how we cannot choose to live all of them, in all time, given the limit of time.

And there I must say, we are so privileged to be dynamic, in our bodies, in our ability to migrate, to change, on our ability to study, to work, to switch profession, to not work. To work in porn. To be out. But I don’t mean that as a simple act of privilege. It is also an affirmative and brave act that one chooses at all, to decide to make the sacrifices, to live out our true dreams and fight for our felt identities to emerge from inside our fears.

And still, of course, the choice(s) are not perfect, as neither is the community, both felt and not felt. Marit captures this; a community which both exists and does not exist. Not only literally, because it is transient and fleeting, but in its imagined perfection. Because, at end, it is built by creatures–wildly passionate dreamers, utopian visionaries, and depressive misanthropes and socially awkward misfits. At least, I always thought, berlin attracted this.

Perhaps for this reason as well among some we chose porn. Here we can enact dreams; it can push as to create realities, if only for a day. We enact a polyamory that is less complicated than years of work. And we can show on screen something that we believe: that we are not a community who has illusions of looking for a one-fit glove that fits us today and forever and for all time. But rather here we present the sliding doors of time. It could have been this partner or that. It could have been this home or that. This one could have been the long term love, or that one. But she or he was not, but could be. Could be still.

I think this is what brought for me so many tears, this kind of frustration of time. That I have to always choose. That I could be living in a wagon with Paula but in fact I am not. But not the mere fact of not living with her only specifically, but rather what this says, in a larger sense, about the limitations of all the dreams and identities I want to live out.

So I really thank Marit and Liz and the whole crew for both giving me a glimpse into a life lived—in the experience of making the porn itself—but also capturing that slippery crystalline moment.