A DISCURSIVE PERSPECTIVE ON THE SCULPTURE "ANGELS UNAWARES": A CARTOGRAPHY OF MIGRANT–REFUGEE BODIES IN TRANSIT
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study, we gaze at a sculpture that takes us to different paths taken by individuals from different places and cultures. This is the sculpture of the Angels Unawares, a work in honor of the 105th World Day of Migrant and Refugee, created by the Canadian artist and sculptor Timothy Schmalz, in 2019, and which is on display in Saint Peter's Square, in the Vatican. Theoretically, we are guided by a discursive perspective which arises from Discourse Analysis in interface with Deconstruction. In our gestures of interpretation, we designate the subjects of the sculpture's discursive scene as "migrant-refugee-bodies", sice they are bodies amalgamated by bronze that perform a crossing scene and are crowded together on boats, ferries and rafts. This way, we aim to show a certain discursive functioning of a specific significant materiality that resonates a discursive memory about migratory flows. We interpret that the sculpture encapsulates multiple narratives of crossing, each body representing a story of forced or voluntary migration. This amalgam of individual stories makes up a cartography of bodies that highlights the complexity and diversity of migratory journeys. On the sculpture's durable bronze, the migrant-refugee bodies are remembered, contrasting with the fragility of their lives on the journey. Under the guise of a discourse that seeks to evoke sacredness, a biblical passage is mobilized, and the representation of the figure of an angel's wings is brought into the sculpture. This would be a view we consider reductionist because it silences the material and political conditions that cause crossings, especially those resulting from forced displacement. A silencing that can suggest complacency, acceptance or agreement with these conditions, and that, contradictorily, brings to light the need to look more closely at the issue of migratory flows and the treatment given to this other, who is stranger, foreigner, migrant, refugee.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".