This is a supplement to “Visual Regimes of Mobility: Photographic Exhibitions on Refugees during the Financial Crisis in Greece” by PINELOPI TOPALI. Read the article here.

In this article, Pinelopi Topali explores how photographic images of refugees in modern Greece condition national imagination and construct new ethnopolitical moral fantasies. She examines how repetitive images of suffering in photographic exhibitions become constitutive of a new regime of mobility in the country during the financial and refugee crisis, arguing that refugees’ images articulate kinship and gender norms, national archetypes, ethnic hierarchies, and ideas of mobility and rootedness. They bind together northern European landscapes and resistant Mediterranean subjects and weave new and old visualities into a single mobility aesthetic that reinvents national memory and initiates new political moralities.

Photo: Pinelopi Topali

Photo: Pinelopi Topali

Activity #1: Explore Visual Collections on Mobility

Ask students to collect photos of people on the move from art exhibitions and their press releases (in newspapers and websites) as well as photos from art exhibitions used for political events.  

  1. Which contexts can be used for the interpretation of these photographs?

  2. What are the motifs that arise from the photos in relation to kinship, gender, ethnicity and mobility?

  3. If you observe the organization of this photographic material in the exhibition(s), how do you find that these motifs are related? Do these relations also construct mobility materials and which are they? 

 

Photo: Georgia-Agape Kypraiou

Photo: Georgia-Agape Kypraiou

Activity #2: Create your own Visual Mobility Material

Ask students to imagine and then take pictures on the subject of mobility (objects, spaces, landscapes) in their own location/town. After a classroom discussion on ethics in visual anthropology, make it clear that the activity is not a license to photograph the refugees themselves.

  1. How do they imagine a photo exhibition of their own material about people on the move?

  2. How does what they had imagined change with their actual photographic decisions, when informed by ethnographic knowledge?

  3. How do students place their self-reproduction of visual representations in the wider process of mobility’s knowledge and production?

 

Photo: Pinelopi Topali

Photo: Pinelopi Topali

Activity #3: Exhibit and Reflect on Visual Constructions of Mobility

Ask students to organize a photo exhibition on mobility, using the photographs they took. Try to create multi-ethic groups of students: others responsible for the selection of photos, others for their placement in the space chosen (e.g. classroom, university corridor, outside wall), others for the captions, titles and texts used in the exhibition.

  1. What kind of visual motifs of mobility does their exhibition produce?

  2. What tensions arise in the organization of such an exhibition and what are the cultural origins (ethnic, political, religious, etc) of these tensions? Do students experience ethno-cultural hierarchies in the process of organizing the exhibition and in their final product?

  3. How do students cope with cross-cultural differences in the organization of material that is about cultural Others?

  4. Which part of the exhibition do they see as visualizing mostly their own cultural backgrounds?

 UPDATED NOVEMBER 1, 2021