L’association des termes mobilité et absence qui constituent le cœur de ce dossier suggère un parti pris : celui de penser l’immigration avec et à partir des sociétés de départ afin de ne pas considérer cet intervalle temporel uniquement du point de vue du lieu de la présence mais aussi avec celui de l’absence. C’est en effet cette temporalité effacée et ignorée par la science de l’immigration qu’il convient de réintroduire pour comprendre autrement les expériences plurielles de la mobilité et les interroger à l’aune des transformations induites par le transnationalisme.
Les contributions rassemblées dans ce numéro problématisent les perspectives ouvertes par ce paradigme et explorent des pistes de recherche inédites dont certaines sont mises à l’épreuve des contextes sociaux apparus depuis les révoltes dans le monde arabe. En posant comme hypothèse la nécessité de sonder la densité de l’expérience relationnelle que l’absence révèle ou dont elle est l’indicateur, les auteurs ont relevé le défi de montrer que l’absence n’est pas seulement le contraire de la présence, comme pourrait le laisser penser le remplacement de la « double absence » par la « double présence », mais une autre expérience du social au cœur de laquelle résident les effets de la distance et de la séparation. En réunissant onze contributions de spécialistes, ce dossier entend ainsi contribuer au renouvellement des recherches sur les questions migratoires en faisant de l’absence un poste d’observation inédit des transformations à l’œuvre dans le monde méditerranéen.
The article explores “empty migrant rooms” in Central Albania and their photographic image as seen through an anthropology of absence. In which way can a dialogic work between ethnographer and photographer reveal the local meanings of such spaces as lieux de mémoire commenting on temporary absences and prospective presences? The authors explore the local terminology, the affective care and the social interaction generated by and around such rooms. It is argued that such spaces are not only fluctuating between the material and the immaterial, but are also characterized by emotional ambiguities. Their local relevance is referred to as “absence signifiers”, as material substitutes for physical bodies of flesh and blood, as “memory boxes” of the immaterial. The article also discusses ethical questions which concern the very nature and the preservability of “migrant’s traces”.
Authors :
Eckehard Pistrick (text)
Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
eckehard.pistrick@musikwiss.uni-halle.de
&
Florian Bachmeier (photo and text)
n-Ost Network for Reporting on Eastern Europe, Germany
Eckehard Pistrick, membre du Crisalide vient de publier un ouvrage inédit, traitant d’un aspect peu étudié des migrations. Celles-ci sont abordées sous l’angle de la musique, lien ténu qui raccorde ceux qui sont partis à leur pays d’origine. Une façon originale de souligner les effets de l’absence dans le rapport à soi, à l’autre et au pays d’origine.
Texte de présentation :
Migration studies is an area of increasing significance in musicology as in other disciplines. How do migrants express and imagine themselves through musical practice? How does music help them to construct social imaginaries and to cope with longings and belongings? In this study of migration music in postsocialist Albania, Eckehard Pistrick identifies links between sound, space, emotionality and mobility in performance, provides new insights into the controversial relationship between sound and migration, and sheds light on the cultural effects of migration processes. Central to Pistrick’s approach is the essential role of emotionality for musical creativity which is highlighted throughout the volume: pain and longing are discussed not as a traumatising end point, but as a driving force for human action and as a source for cultural creativity. Continuer la lecture de A lire : Performing Nostalgia – Migration Culture and Creativity in South Albania→
“Materializing Absence – Migrants Living Spaces in Albania” (projet en cours)
réalisateur: Miguel Filgueras; recherche/assistance: Gerda Dalipaj/Eckehard Pistrick
The film will employ a scientific (anthropological-philosophical) as well as an artistic approach on the topic of absence and abandonment. What concerns the scientific approach of the film, the filmmakers will build on the recently established anthropology of absence (Bille, Hastrup and Sorensen 2010) and use the approach of Australian philosopher Patrick Fuery (1995) concerned with the mediation of presences through representations of absence.
What concerns the artistic approach, the film – both in its visual imagery and in the editing process – will be inspired by the work of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoj (1864-1916). Overall the project will be concerned with the imagination of space in the eyes of those who will watch the film. The tension between boundedness/enclosure and openness as well as the tension between materiality and immateriality, the intimate and the public anonymous space will stand at the core of the project. The final work will thus eventually provide different perspectives on spatial construction, playing with the imagination of those who watch the film. These different spatialities – set into relation to oral narratives – will convey different modes of remembering individual migrant destinies and evoking different emotional states.
These two approaches will be applied on a concrete ethnographic object, unravelled through meticious fieldwork. These objects are the newly constructed houses/rooms in the peripheric district of the Central Albanian town of Elbasan and the “migrant rooms” in family houses in the mountainous district of Shpati, located 20 km from Elbasan. Both settings are tightly (inter-)connected both to internal migration from Mountain Shpati to the urban center of Elbasan and through external migration to Greece and Italy.
The film understands itself as a case study of a Mediterranean phenomenon experienced especially in the rural areas of Portugal, Spain, Greece and Turkey since the 1960s (Gastarbeitermigration) and in relation to the flux of Asian and African immigrants to Europe through the Mediterranean. Abandoned villages, displaced families and an emotional vaccum are an imminent feature of many rural areas in these countries. The film may provide essential insights into the psychological marks migration experience leaves. It will provide a much closer and more intimate perspective than demographic and statistical studies on the subject.
The film will be a concrete and imaginative contribution to the interdisciplinary discipline of Migration Studies. It will effectively show how methods of visual anthropology (photography and film) may be used to artistically render visible the emotionality of migration experience, the individual destinies and life histories which stand at the core of human mobility. But it will as well provide answers to more existential problems such as absence and human separation omnipresent in a globalized world.
The management of the film is currently searching for institutional and financial support to realize the film project. For further information please contact: Mrs Margarida Gonçalves altodominho@gmail.com
