# 3
Every image in the Alterlibrary collection is intended as a quote, an excerpt of a larger discourse. But every image also stands as a matter that could undergo a series of operations and alterations. Therefore, images are renewable sources.
Operations: Extraction and Collection. Image alteration: none.
This is an original photographic image extracted from my series called Please do not show my face. It is a collection of photographs divided into six chapters. All images have been shot in Calais and Dunkerque migration camps, across the cities and in the so-called jungles. Please do not show my face is not a documentary series on migration or migrants (but no one can control how images can collect arguments)—this work aims mainly to be an essay on the concept of the gaze. In using documentary photography materials, it interrogates the boundaries of visibility, authorship, and power of representation.
In the chapter devoted to thresholds, each image probes the notion of a threshold as a political act for those possessing the means of representation, compelling us to ask how far we can—or should—go in portraying others. Simultaneously, migration—moving from one place, status, or idea to another—is inextricably linked to thresholds and is never neutral: having, or being denied, the power to cross them determines who can move freely and who remains excluded.
Invitations to contemplate
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- We would ask to transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (cité) belongs to the state, as in a developing Europe or in international juridical structures still dominated by the inviolable rule of state sovereignty […] This should no longer be the ultimate horizon for citie …
# 3
Constructing cities of refuge
We would ask to transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (cité) belongs to the state, as in a developing Europe or in international juridical structures still dominated by the inviolable rule of state sovereignty […] This should no longer be the ultimate horizon for cities of refuge. Is this possible? […] How can the right to asylum be redefined and developed without repatriation and without naturalisation? Could the City, equipped with new rights and greater sovereignty, open up new horizons of possibility previously undreamt of by international state law? […]
If the name and the identity of something like the city still has a meaning, could it, when dealing with the related questions of hospitality and refuge, elevate itself above nation-states or at least free itself from them (s’affranchir), in order to become, to coin a phrase in anew and novel way, a free city (une ville franche)? Under the exemption itself (en général), the statutes of immunity or exemption occasionally had attached to them, as in the case of the right to asylum, certain places (diplomatic or religious) to which one could retreat in order to escape from the threat of injustice.
Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism, 2021Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
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- A city is crooked because it is diverse, full of migrants speaking dozens of languages; because its inequalities are so glaring, svelte ladies lunching a few blocks away from exhausted transport cleaners; because of its stresses, as in concentrating too many young graduates chasing too few jobs … C …
of our Imagination
