Long-term perspective

According to the United Nations, international migrants are people who move away from their place of usual residence, irrespective of their reason for migration or legal status, while refugees are people who are outside their country of origin for reasons of feared persecution, conflict, generalised violence or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order and require international protection. However, the distinction between migrants and refugees is not always clear, as both most often move more or less forcedly due to multiple reasons, including political conflicts, wars or extreme poverty. Despite the legal definitions that aim to differentiate between being a refugee or a migrant, when we move to other spheres those differences become blurred. Moreover, in the public debate, the distinction between ‘economic migrants’ and ‘genuine refugees’ sometimes is made to establish a hierarchical categorisation of deservingness, where some are more entitled to settle or gain access to certain rights than others. This is where the concept of forced mobility or forced migration becomes useful, as it includes both categories in a continuum of varying degrees of violence that motivate people to move to another country.

In Time-Lapse, we also frame the phenomenon of migration in a broad sense, including multidirectional movements (not only from the Global South to the Global North) that are motivated by several grounds (e.g. economic, political and environmental) over a more or less prolonged period of time, including temporary and long-term migrants.

Who is European? Where is Europe located? What does Europe mean? These questions have underpinned several narratives related to migration, mobility and otherness. These narratives have often been built in relation to ‘the Other’. In short, in defining who we are we typically use this other as a mirror showing what we are not (or what we think we are not). But how do we build these narratives and what do we understand by them? Narratives aspire to describe reality with simple stories to make it more understandable. yet this is not done from a neutral perspective: mainstream narratives usually correspond to the interests of powerful actors and have a normative component, by proposing actions to achieve desired outcomes (Boswell et al, 2021). Here it is when the link between narratives and policies is established: we try to justify policies with simple and convincing messages (as narratives), and these messages in turn shape what we do (as policies).

Migrants are often represented as a threat to ‘European civilisation’, national security or to welfare states. Increasingly European countries such as Hungary, Poland and France have a large representation of far-right parties in their governments and/or institutions. These parties, and other similar political organisations, use narratives to justify the closing of borders with the pretext of protecting autochthonous citizens from a perceived feeling of ‘invasion’. In this scenario, the media also play a key role in amplifying exclusionary narratives from these actors and contribute to polarising public opinion, taking advantage of people’s discontent and setting the ground for a radical turn of the political agenda (Neidhardt and Butcher, 2020).

In this sense, more awareness is needed to enable narratives that support migrants’ rights and make references to the structural factors that foster their situation of vulnerability, whilst also including their stories and voices.

This is the contextual background upon which we propose to analyse misinformation and disinformation about migration and forced mobility, and to question hostile narratives with contextual and empirical data. A long-term perspective of migration history and narratives is thus fundamental to understanding that current migration discourses are conditioned by fears and tropes from the past and which may sustain distorted messages. 

Building on this analysis, the Time-Lapse migration project aims to shed light on such messages  by exploring the different geographies of the dispute – borders, everyday life and identity – while also fostering a space for reflection and critical thinking on the phenomena of migration and mis/disinformation through the hosting of artistic exhibitions with first-person perspectives.

Elaboration of contents: Berta Güell, PhD in Sociology and researcher at Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB) and Elena Ananiadou, museologist at La Tempesta