Performing like an asylum seeker: paradoxes of hyper-authenticity

Abstract

This essay investigates performance events that feature actual refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants, but in instances where presence and embodiment are mediated and made ambiguous. My focus is a fashion show by Catalan designer Antonio Miro, who uses refugees from Senegal as models, and Christoph Schlingensief's public art project Foreigners Out!. In different ways and to varying degrees, these case studies exemplify the phenomenon that I call the hyper-authentic – where the authenticity of the subject is partly constructed through the gaze of the beholder. Although the projects in question use real refugees and asylum seekers as performers, exilic voices and bodies are often subordinated to the creative and/or entrepreneurial concepts of the established Western artists. Nevertheless, I would argue that the relationship between performance ethics and efficacy remains ambiguous, making these case studies difficult to dismiss as merely gratuitous.

Keywords:

• authenticity
• agency
• performance
• exile
• immigration

Notes

1. In Britain 80% of refugees fail to meet the government's criteria for granting asylum. An article published in The Observer, for example, highlights the inability of the immigration system to recognise the experience of women asylum seekers: ‘the fact that a woman in their initial interview might say she's been persecuted because she's the wife or sister of an activist, or because she was involved in low-level political activity such as hiding someone or cooking for political meetings, is sometimes not taken seriously’ (France 2007).

2. See Human Rights Watch website: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/07/26/spain16449.htm.

3. Although I have contacted the designer to find out more details about the conditions of the immigrants’ engagement in the show and what happened to them afterwards, I have never received a reply.