Bouchra Khallili’s “The Mapping Journey Project” is a project that resists easy description.

I believe this is primarily by virtue of the many seeming contradictions at play in the piece. First, each video is formally and structurally identical, but the actual content is entirely distinct. Second, the visuals are apparently simple and straightforward, but their explanations and trajectories are particularly convoluted. Third, the piece works to express a vital point about the paths walked by refugees, but does so by powerfully individualizing each refugee’s story.

This is the key to the piece, I think. In our culture, the dominant dialogue regarding refugees is, on both sides of the political spectrum, reductive. The far right reduces refugees to dangerous, fear-inspiring stereotypes, and the far left reduces refugees to the suffering other that will benefit “from” us. For both sides, refugees represent political capital to be used in self-interest. Neither side seems particularly interested in the humanity of those refugees, in the stories of those refugees. And of course, why should they be? The acknowledgement of their narratives can only undermine the cohesion of these constructed narratives.

Khallili resists that dialogue so simply, by literally illustrating how different each refugee’s tale is. Khalili then empowers those same refugees by allowing them to tell their own stories, to draw their own paths. Here, those stories become distinct from the geopolitical consequences and circumstances typically associated with refugees. Issues of sovereignty and statehood are less important to these narratives than the simple facts of their journeys. None of the journeys drawn in permanent marker align with any easily conceivable trajectories or borders. Every map is different, and every journey is wildly unique. The only thing about each person’s story that’s the same is that they each have one.

I felt an odd instinct while looking at Khalili’s piece. I wanted to see all the maps, all the journeys, projected onto one large map of the world. I wanted to see how they overlapped and how they diverged from one another. But Khalili resists that urge too. These maps aren’t maps of the world, they’re maps of stories. So they don’t belong to us, they belong to the storytellers.