The work of Bouchra Khalili is very simple in its presentation. Although it takes up a whole room, it only consists of eight screens. Each video is of an immigrant’s journey told through the visuals of maps. The camera is still the whole time. The emotional investment we get is all from the stories that each person tells using a sharpie and tracing his or her difficult journey in the map. Although we think of immigration as one person going from one place moves to another, it is far more complicated than that. It often takes many cities and many travels to finally settle on a place that you can home. In all eight stories, the immigrants had to jump from place to place, getting there by boat or road.

 

It’s interested how Khalili decided to present these stories. The stories are simple and stripped of much details. We don’t even see the faces of the people. It’s very intriguing that although thousands of people cross over to the United States, we don’t know their stories and we don’t know their faces. They’re seen as a threat. The refugees in Europe are sometimes blamed for horrible acts. In very few visuals or camera tricks, the artist was able to capture the importance of immigration and its political and economic implications.