There is a moment in M.I.A.'s Borders — released in December 2015, four months into what German media had already named the Flüchtlingskrise — where the camera lingers on a group of young men arranged into the silhouette of a boat. Their bodies form the hull. M.I.A. stands at the prow. The image is striking, compositionally deliberate, and deeply troubling in ways I have been trying to name ever since.
I want to try again here.
In the summer of 2015, the Mediterranean washed both people and images onto the shores of our perception. The dynamics were inseparable: flight and its visual mediation arrived simultaneously, so that the news cycle and the experience of arrival became entangled in ways that made it nearly impossible to distinguish between witnessing and consuming. Into this saturation, artists intervened. Pop music, film, performance — they all reached for the image of the crossing, trying to find aesthetic forms adequate to what was happening. Borders was M.I.A.'s intervention: shot in a refugee camp in Greece, the video aimed — explicitly — to do something other than what mainstream media coverage was already doing.
And in some respects it succeeded. The imagery refuses the documentary idiom: there are no boats sinking, no bodies on shorelines. The colors are warm, the movements choreographed, the aesthetic somewhere between fashion editorial and protest banner. M.I.A. does not attempt to pass as neutral. She is present as herself — Sri Lankan-born, British, Tamil, globally famous — positioned alongside and among the young men she films. "Identities, what's up with that? / Your privilege, what's up with that?" (0:52–0:56). The lyric calls out the viewer directly. This is not the distanced gaze of the humanitarian news photograph.
And yet.
As the video progresses, M.I.A. remains consistently centered — compositionally, luminously. As her surroundings dim, she stays lit. In the image of the human boat, the young men's bodies become material: scaffold, symbol, vessel. They carry her. This is precisely the structure of well-intentioned representation that Trinh T. Minh-ha diagnosed decades ago — speaking over rather than nearby, claiming proximity to a subject while preserving the conditions that keep that subject as object. The refugees in Borders are visible, which is more than most mainstream coverage offered them. But visibility, as Stuart Hall reminds us, is not the same as subjecthood. They are seen; they do not speak.
What would it mean to actually disrupt the representational space, rather than reframe it from the same vantage point?
The question matters because the aestheticization of Fluchterfahrung — the experience of flight — carries specific risks. When "being a refugee" becomes a visual signature, a category that precedes and overrides all other attributes of personhood, the aestheticizing gesture does something structurally similar to what it claims to oppose: it fixes. It marks. The refugee remains legible only as refugee, and the viewer remains legible only as witness. Both are stabilized in positions they cannot leave.
What I find myself returning to is the concept of Autonomie der Migration — the autonomy of migration — as Manuela Bojadžijev and Serhat Karakayalı developed it: migration not as crisis, not as problem to be managed, but as a constitutive social force, as a form of political life already underway. If migration is already active, already organizing, already speaking — in the legal battles of refugee organizations, in the community archives of displaced collectives, in the languages people refuse to abandon — then the artistic question is not how to represent migration, but how to create forms that can receive it, that do not domesticate it into legibility for someone else's consumption.
M.I.A.'s "refugee we" is genuinely interesting as a rhetorical gesture — it attempts to construct solidarity across an asymmetry that ordinarily enforces separation. But the construction of "we" is always a site of struggle. Whose terms does the community form on? Who controls the conditions of belonging? The "refugee we" in Borders still circulates through M.I.A.'s image, her platform, her production economy. It is a "we" assembled by someone with the camera and the budget. This is not a reason to dismiss the video — it is a reason to ask what other forms remain uninvented.
In Migrant Potentiality, Giorgio Agamben's concept of potentiality is quietly at stake — not because he is especially useful for migration theory, but because the distinction between potentiality and actuality maps onto something real in these debates. The young men in Borders are shown as they are: stranded, circumscribed, subjected to the management of their movement. But potentiality — what they could be, what they already are beyond the frame — is not representable through the image of containment, however aesthetically generous. Potentiality lives in what is not shown, in the capacities that border regimes specifically work to suppress, in the forms of life that continue despite the camp.
This is where artistic practice might find its most radical task: not to make the refugee legible within existing representational economies, but to produce forms that register what those economies structurally cannot contain. Not the image of the crossing, but the music made after arrival. Not the human boat, but the archive of a language kept alive in a reception center in Mytilini.
Does art have the capacity to do this? Can an image produced for mass consumption — for Apple Music, for the news cycle, for the viral circuit — genuinely rupture the logic it enters? Or does the medium impose its own conditions of legibility before the content has a chance to speak?
I don't think the question has a clean answer. But I notice that the works I return to most — Filipa César's Spell Reel, Philip Scheffner's Revision, Trinh T. Minh-ha's insistence on speaking nearby — are all works that refuse resolution, that leave the asymmetry visible rather than papering over it, that make their own conditions of production part of the thinking. They do not grant permission for the viewer to feel that something has been done.
What would it mean for citizenship itself — not as legal status but as political imaginary — to take migration as its inherent condition rather than its constitutive exception? It remains, as I said, a highly unlikely utopia. But utopia, as Ernst Bloch understood it, is not the description of an achievable future. It is the pressure of the not-yet on the present. The image that won't quite close. The hull still moving through water, even when the camera is off.