Until the city understands that migrants are a resource and not a problem, few steps will be taken forward.
Francesco Careri
On this side of the world almost all of us are migrants, if not in our flesh, at least from some of our close ancestors. For example, one of the writers [of this foreword] is the son of migrants from a nearby village and the other comes from another country. In the twentieth century, Bogota went from having 100,000 inhabitants to over 6,000,000. This means that the inhabitants of this city were very likely not born here or their ancestors came from somewhere else to make their lives here.
So, this is a city of migrants, developed by the strength of many generations who have come from different places to build it, who have contributed with their cultures and customs to what defines us as Bogotanos. Today, this city continues to receive hundreds of thousands from a recent migration, this time from neighbouring Venezuela. Receive can be an appropriate word, because in most cases, neither the attitude nor the resources of those we receive make it possible to speak of welcoming or hospitality, treatment deserved by those displaced due to different circumstances of their place of origin.1
We cannot stop thinking of these 21st century walkers, who travel for days on roads until they reach our gates. Crossing a border always implies some fear; however, this feeling is significantly different for those who have been forced from the places of origin, from the company of their relatives and acquaintances, from their economic livelihood, and who have left because of violence or the need to survive.
Borders are cold, anodyne spaces without identity. Ports, airports, customs, walls, fences, or those thin imperceptible lines that politically divide territories are not places connected to life. The disposition and encouragement of the people who gather there to walk through a door into a new life makes them shake hands with sadness and hope. They are forgotten and transitory spaces that deserve to be the subject of research and publication.
Daniela Ahrens talks about the possibility of understanding and building a space that qualifies as relational.2 It is a space that arises only when human beings establish relationships with others, with their surroundings, with other beings. That relational space is quite the opposite of another type of preestablished space, that of science, in which we are educated and easily believed. The space where we work in front of the screens of our computers as entities without a body, without an up or a down, without size or measure, without memory or dreams.
That, among other topics, is what this issue of Dearq journal is all about: “Spaces in Migration”, that space that appears and arises only through those who move. From those who, with no other choice, dramatically move an entire culture, an identity dragged with conflicts and stories on their shoulders and belongings.
Then, the space is glued to the skin and sometimes penetrates through. That space is made, it is not understood; it is lived, it is not measured; it is walked. And that puts us in a special temporality that does not understand perfect pasts or simple futures, it is pure present. A present that keeps the mystery of those who do not understand what is happening to them, a world that sometimes fits in one hand and sometimes extends infinitely in front of the eyes.
The space and movement shown in this issue of the journal is full of life. A life that clings to everything it can, to a world that seems to slip through its fingers. Right now, as we write this, a song played in the computer says: “You always go back to the old places where you loved life…”. What will it be like to load those places into your body, without them remaining?
The movement in these bodies, which at certain times are forced to stop, surpasses any understanding of the territory, borders and strokes that mark an in and an out. These obligatory arrests put into tension the power of any life, like yours or ours. Lives that dream of moving forward, moving inwards, beating with the tempered pulse of salty seas, moving outward, waving fabrics that fill with hot wind and bring fluxed whispers.
As we learned, we need a fixed point to make movement possible. A fixed point that cannot be contained either, and also moves. With this issue of the journal, we want to invite you to move to a beat, to get up from your chair and walk between letters and photographs, certain territories near and far, to see if everything moves. To see if everything moves that much that at a certain point, we cannot find the place from which we started to walk sometime, someday… And then it’s all going, going again, going curiously without taking it for granted and not so much coming back.