International Competition Program 3: Flow
Flow Umi Lestari
Galadriel said, “You are nameless. You have no power here,” to Sauron in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (Peter Jackson, 2014). Galadriel as a representation of an established system, existing uncontested for hundreds of years, must face Sauron who brought Orcs and other demonic beings that have never been considered as residence of The Hobbit’s world. The scene promptly reminded me of the European anxiety in response to the massive migration of the Mediterranean Sea refugees. Clandestine or the massive migration is a process that takes several years and became the latest phenomenon. Fantasy of freedom, welfare, stable life, and a situation far from conflict in a new land is the estuary of the clandestine flow. Different to Galadriel’s firm rejection, the effort to recount and refocusing “the nameless” is fragmented both by individuals or institutions who attempted to review the phenomenon and the effects today. Hakim Abderrezak, an academia focusing on the discipline of linguistic and French speaking countries, attempted to label the literature works of Morrocan migrant who had resided in Paris for several years as “illiterature”, a sub-genre that slowly headbutting the established French literature genres and emphasizes on the experiences of being illegal.1 Two years ago, the sphere of “the nameless” was also attempted by the 31st Sau Paulo Biennial in “How to (...) things that don’t exist.” Reflecting the two examples, the question arise is then the understanding of illegality and non-existence is present in whose perspective? Like the current of a river, the flowing dominant ideology left behind “the nameless”: sometimes it forms a creek flow that develops into a new system as a competitor, on the other hand it can push forward asking to return and acknowledgement by the main current and then a new order is established. But, is the estuary only the European soil, where the clandestine floods in to obtain the sweet promise of security, away from conflict of ideology in their own territory? Actually, no. Market and War, residues of small fragments of the ideological space that was once established pushing forward into various
[1] See Abderrezak, H. (2009), “Burning the sea: Clandenstine migration across the strait of gibraltar in francophone moroccan “illiterature”” Contemporary French and Francophone studies, 13 (4). 461-469. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17409290903096335 4rd JAKARTA INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY & EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL 2016 | 47