The Parallel Cities Project

Documentation of asylum-seekers largely focuses on their biological needs or the control and management of them by government agencies. However, “while [asylum-seekers] are discussed in the records of organizations that administer them, [their] voices are highly constrained in these and other archives” (African Studies Review 63 Issue 3, 2020).

Young men from countries in West Africa make up an increasing number of asylum-seekers living in Southern EU cities but have among the lowest asylum acceptance rates. Strict, slow, and opaque legal and administrative procedures leave them much of the time without permits to legally work or rent housing. Many must sleep outdoors or in abandoned apartments or buildings, occasionally staying in ill-equipped shelters. They form social networks in these spaces through commonalities in their experiences, languages, and religions, and through regional diasporas and the communication technologies they use. They experience violence and harassment by police and racism from landlords, neighbors, and strangers they encounter.

This project is a multimedia archive focusing on the perspectives of young men from countries in West Africa who have experienced homelessness in the past ten years as asylum-seekers in France, Italy, and Spain. Through workshops designed by applying community-based participatory research, I will engage community voices and explore collective story-telling methods in order to question how the voices of asylum-seekers are constrained in existing archives and media, who controls their narratives, and to what end they are being used.

Photographs will be generated through ongoing workshops in key cities hosted in partnership with community organizers. Focus groups meet over several months in informal outdoor areas. Participants can choose to share a testimony during discussions organized around ten chapters (five “rejections” and five “desires”). These testimonies are paired with photographs I take of spaces where participants spend or would like to spend time and spaces where participants have experienced social or physical displacement, such as touristic sites in city centers and sites of previous outdoor encampments. Commonalities between the spaces and objects being photographed will document a broader spatial experience structured by specific legal, material, and social conditions. Meanwhile, the pairing of testimonies with photographs acts as a proxy to document the spatial experience being described, exploring methods of constructing narratives that respond to community concerns over privacy, control, and history of representation in images.

The photographs generated during the workshops will be edited into (a) a series of triptychs that pair a single author/testimony with three photographs, and (b) a series of postcards, either sent by mail or displayed using stamps with designs signifying ties between European countries and the author’s country of birth. These will be presented in the archive alongside historical documents and film stills of events leading up to the establishment of international protection (through the 1951 Convention and its 1967 amendment), including involuntary conscription, forced evacuations, and the censorship of film and photography in French and English colonies in West Africa. This will examine how processes of migration, of becoming an asylum-seeker, of life in a new country, and of being denied or granted international protection are interwoven with histories of nation-states, colonialism, imperialism, transnational wars, and the operations of international organizations.