Description
Violence against people on the move is systematic, and has become a well-documented form of border ‘management’ and externalisation. This is especially the case at EU borders along the so called ‘Balkan Route’, where pushbacks - the informal expulsions of people on the move to another country - where people on the move are attacked, physically and verbally abused, denied medical assistance, detained or imprisoned, usually by border officials in countries along their journeys to safety. However, such violence often made invisible and great lengths are taken by perpetrators to render it secret and it works alongside what De Genova called border spectacles’ of enforcement. In this paper, we explore the intersections of border spectacles, concealment of border violence and ways of knowing, seeing and showing violent borders through a discussion of an animation, The Pushback, we co-created with a grassroots organisation and an animation artist. We use our animation as a starting point for a broader discussion of visual epistemologies of border violence, and we raise questions about who is rendered visible and how, through reporting on border violence and our own research. We ask: what are the visual ways of knowing EU borders, and the violence which has become a key component of border policies? We examine the creative possibilities of visual storytelling and visual epistemologies of borders and border violence, by reflecting on how we co-produced a short animated film, The Pushback. The Pushback animation we present here is a creative intervention, expanding the existing counter-archive of border violence. We contribute to the broader discussions of border aesthetics, and visual politics of the border by creating our own visual material and using it as the basis of a discussion of visual epistemologies of border violence.
