Rescue Politics: Richard Mosse’s Thermal Imaging and the Containment of Migration

In the opening scene of Incoming (2017), a multi-channel video installation by New York-based Irish artist Richard Mosse (b. 1980), an American A-10 Thunderbolt aircraft dive-bombs a village near Dabiq, Syria. The military strike is shown in fragments across three image tracks. White hot shapes careen across the black sky. You hear a high-pitched whine and the thunder of a jet. The sound elicits a physical response, unsettling the view of distant action. Your heart rate accelerates, and then there is the thud of bombs reaching their targets. The noise works as an emotional trigger, making the events feel very close. The incident was filmed with a modified thermal camera from about 10 kilometres away as the Free Syrian Army moved in on a town held by ISIS. Mosse recounts that at the time a group of displaced Syrians trying desperately to get away from the conflict were turned back at the Turkish border.1 Produced in collaboration with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost, Incoming and the related photographic series, Heat Maps, offer a critical new perspective on twenty-first-century migration. Produced in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa between 2014 and 2017, the artwork portrays the migration routes and makeshift camps of the so-called refugee crisis. It is centred along two of the main migration routes from the Middle East and Africa to Europe. Along the eastern route, people are fleeing countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They travel to Turkey and enter the European Union (EU) through Greece. The southern route runs from the Sahel region of Africa through the Sahara Desert to Libya, and across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy.2 From there, people often try to get to France, Germany, and the United Kingdom (UK). The challenges migrants face while travelling along these routes are frequently represented in the media.3 One often-cited image is Nilüfer Demir’s September 2015 photograph of a Turkish rescue worker on a beach carrying the body of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Kurdish boy. The photograph was commonly interpreted by Western media outlets as putting a human face on the hardship faced by those fleeing conflict zones. In the mainstream media, it at once raised awareness and reinforced the experience of looking at tragedy happening elsewhere. Mosse’s work uses a range of formal and conceptual strategies to present another perspective and to offer insight into the ethical and political stakes of attempts by the global north to contain involuntary migration. This article focuses on a body of work by Mosse that includes the multi-channel video installation Incoming, shown as a 52:12 minute three-channel video installation with 7.3 surround sound, and the photographic series Heat Maps (2015–2017) (Fig. 1). While Incoming concentrates on migration routes, Heat Maps portrays the architecture of refugee camps.4 I consider how the artist’s use of thermal imaging and his immersive mode of documentary complicates tropes used to represent migration. I reflect on the way Mosse’s artwork intersects with a long-standing interest by practitioners and theorists of film and photography in the idea of the camera as a tool that extends vision, and in this way, how it takes up Jacques Rancière’s claim regarding the political significance of an aesthetic endeavour as its ability to make visible what is not normally recognised.5 I differentiate my approach from discussions that deal with forced migration in terms of the concept of bare life and migration zones as spaces of exception.6 This framework, which borrows from philosopher Giorgio Agamben, tends to establish an opposition between subjects with and without rights, disconnecting migrants from the complex problems that have caused their displacement. Instead, taking a cue from Lilie Chouliaraki and Tijana Stolic, I consider how Mosse’s representation of involuntary migration offers insight into the political failures that have led to migrant precarity.7 Richard Mosse: Incoming, installation view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 26 October 2019 – 17 February 2020. © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. (Photo: Katherine Du Tiel.) The four-year period that Mosse spent making the artwork is significant not only because of the high number of people on the move, but also because during that time the global north established new policies of containment to control access to their borders. I draw on political theorist Martina Tazzioli’s concept of ‘rescue politics’, a term she uses to describe a mode of governance that military and in the of migrant through military of such as that rescue a of migration in to in the Mediterranean Sea in the in countries policies of containment which the military to a in migration. by and migrants were subjects by the strategies of and I at how Mosse’s work attempts by the global north to migration through rescue – the of military and I his artwork the of and draw on formal a with about his and political in my In the I the of in political about global Mosse’s artwork is a to a period of migration that its in people conflict in the Middle East and in the global north strategies to The term an way to describe the and that the the of the and their and of to to to to the the spent on in to people from reaching In France, the and were into with with of the to the the to from on of and with thermal imaging were at the of those in European used military and to their borders. have the of twenty-first-century migration from a of One approach to draw to the human of forced artist in his documentary while his of the (2017), a with the of migration. artwork such as by artist installation of the of a that in the Mediterranean Sea in of was shown at the without that of the challenges is to new of the complex and of the migration without and into a One artwork that with this is the installation by a artist of which uses to represent and the of life in the Mediterranean of an of across the an are three of a in high with to from This work a to consider what to migrants without on have a approach by of displacement. 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Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. 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