“When does a war end? When some politicians sign a piece of paper?” 

This rhetorical question, posed to me by social worker and activist Diego Saccora over Zoom, is typical of how Saccora and long-time collaborator Anna Clementi think and speak. A short, simple question from Clementi or Saccora can make you rethink premises and definitions you hold, which they already stopped taking for granted a long time ago. 

It comes as no surprise, then, that Clementi and Saccora have peppered questions throughout an exhibit focused on migration to the EU along the Balkan Route. The exhibit’s title — “Panta Rei, Vite Migranti Lungo La Rotta Balcanica” or “Panta Rei, Migrant Lives Along the Balkan Route” — refers to the phrase meaning “Everything Flows,” attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. The phrase captures both the exhibit’s focus on the “flows” of migration routes and its spirit of exposing the contingency of static concepts of migration. 

“The title,” Clementi and Saccora write in the exhibit’s catalog, emphasizes “the ‘perpetual flow’ of life, and of the migratory phenomenon itself: routes, countries of origin and destination, travel methods, border policies are incessantly changing.” 

I saw “Panta Rei” at the Centro Ernesto Balducci, a Christian volunteer-run welcome center for migrants in Udine, Italy, a city near Italy’s border with Slovenia. From mirrors to clotheslines, most objects in the exhibit have a piece of paper nearby offering you a question, an opportunity to complicate and deepen your thinking about migration. 

Clementi and Saccora have put up “Panta Rei” in locations across Italy, often in schools, to facilitate deeper conversation about migration in the Italian public. Their experiences working as social workers, researchers and humanitarian workers in Syria, Palestine, Italy, Greece and Bosnia and Herzegovina facilitated finding the material for the exhibit. 

The objects in the exhibit, some left behind and others given by migrants to be preserved, were found in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Aegean Islands and along the Italy-Slovenia border. Clementi and Saccora collected the accompanying testimonies in interviews with migrants in Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Iran, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Turkey. 

While this focus on educating local audiences is one aspect of the exhibit, Clementi and Saccora also emphasize their attempt to offer “a memory of the present,” an archive of this moment in the history of migration. Heraclitus’ declaration that you never step in the same river twice is an apt metaphor for the exhibit. The exhibit both points out that there is, in fact, a continuous river by placing the Balkan Route in broader histories of migration, while also showing that no migration story happens twice. 

Questioning linear timelines

Saccora’s question about the real ending of war came while we were discussing the vast remaining minefields from the 1990s wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina that migrants along the Balkan Route are forced to navigate. One wall in the exhibit features posters of warnings about mines posted by nongovernmental organizations along the route, collected by Saccora during his time in Bosnia and Herzegovina. There is also a photo of Saccora’s friend, a migrant from Afghanistan, who had a portion of his leg blown off by a mine and now lives in Germany.

The exhibit’s questioning of linear, clear-cut timelines never allows the viewer to take the dates conventionally assigned to events for granted. A straightforward account of the Balkan Route, for example, might simply state that the Balkan Route was a humanitarian corridor opened in 2015 where refugees fleeing conflicts were given free passage from Greece to Western Europe, until it was shut down in March 2016. 

But the story of migration through the Balkans, in Clementi and Saccora’s account, does not suddenly start from thin air in 2015 nor disappear back into it in 2016, as an overemphasis on thinking about the Balkan Route as a specific moment might suggest. Beyond the institutionalized corridor, migration has remained a fact of life in the Balkans, both before the corridor and after. Understanding the Balkan Route as a continued path for migration into Western Europe today requires grappling with a dynamic past and present, which extends beyond 2015-2016, an understanding Clementi and Saccora offer with a timeline that leads the viewer into the exhibit. 

The timeline begins with a 1991 clipping of a major Italian newspaper covering the war in Croatia and extends all the way to the present. In the spirit of everything flowing, however, Clementi and Saccora are careful to nuance the relationship between migration from the Balkans to Western Europe in the 1990s and migration through the Balkans today. As they explain, the afterlives of the Balkan conflicts continue to impact today’s migrants, such as in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where scholars have often pointed to the country’s inability to form a coherent response to migrant flows due to its divided government structure. 

However, they also critique those who think of the two moments as equivalent, a faulty assumption they see present in some foreign activists who have worked with migrants in both periods. The people, policies and power involved are different today, a difference that has to be grappled with to ensure the “migrant” does not become an ahistorical abstraction across eras. The 1990s are a provisional starting point for a story that could start even earlier in another telling; migration is a constant fact of life, meaning any set “beginning” for its story will always be provisional at best. 

On the other side, one cannot say the timeline really “ends,” as Clementi and Saccora consistently put the show up in new locations, adjusting the content each time. 

Clementi said that up until the moment the exhibit went up in Udine, they were printing new material for the timeline to reflect new numbers and developments in European countries’ border regimes. Sometimes these updates are so dynamic they cannot be printed in time and appear in pen, a material practice embodying the far from static reality of life along the Balkan Route. 

Migration’s material realities

Having deconstructed received timelines of migration, the exhibit moves beyond the “Balkan Route” toward grappling with material realities. Leaving the timeline introduction, one encounters a display of passports affixed with the question “How much is your passport worth?” As Clementi explains it, Italian students who come to the exhibit in school groups have never thought consciously about differences in “passport power,” let alone how these differences produce radically different experiences of borders in the lives of, for example, the average Italian citizen versus the average citizen of Afghanistan. 

As visitors move through the exhibit, they are immediately confronted with representations of the different lives borders produce through collections of objects used by people along the route. The majority of the exhibit consists of objects — backpacks, life vests, medications and jackets — Clementi and Saccora have collected from all along the Balkan Route, accompanied by commentary and stories offered by people who have been on it about the role the objects might play in one’s journey. 

Clementi points to one specific life vest, noting how one woman told of the stark difference between her two core memories of using life vests: once, for fun as a child, the next time, in adulthood, as part of a dangerous sea crossing to Greece. Such objects symbolize how much a border can transform everyday objects of recreation into tools in a desperate attempt to grasp a different future. 

These physical objects can have a large impact on visitors, breaking through pre-held conceptions of migration. Clementi told me about an Italian girl who said that while she grew up hearing stories of her father’s migration from Bangladesh, she had never believed just how intense the stories were. Words simply could not have the same impact as seeing and touching a tangible object. The raw materiality of the objects exceeds any idea of “migrant” or “border” you might enter the exhibit with. Such ideas suddenly find themselves utterly inadequate to explain what is directly in front of you. 

Fostering ‘epistemic friction’

The exhibit intentionally curates this sort of moment of rupture, where the space for rethinking preconceived concepts is created from the friction between those concepts and the tangible reality you are confronting. In one case, a large piece of paper invites students to write reflections on what they use their phones for, generating thrilling answers such as the Clash Royale mobile game. 

After priming students to think about their conception of phones, the exhibit then shatters it to devastating effect, through the rather literal metaphor of a large table of smashed phones previously used by people along the route for tasks like navigating borders with Google Maps. 

Saccora collected these shattered phones as material evidence documenting the brutality of illegal pushbacks conducted by border patrols along the Balkan Route. Ironically, these objects now serve to, in a sense, pushback against the pushback, to counter state-held monopolies on truth represented by pushbacks, which often destroy evidence of asylum seekers’ identities such as ID cards and other legal documents, as well as devices like phones that might be used to record the pushback’s brutality. 

As political geographers Thom Davies, Arshad Isakjee and Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik write in their analysis of pushbacks on the Croatia-Bosnia and Herzegovina border, the EU border regime relies on not just physical violence, but also on what postcolonial scholars call “epistemic violence.” Epistemic violence happens, for example, when states destroy items migrants might use to assert their own narrative like their identity documents. 

In addition to physically policing the border, there is the “guarding [of] truth claims, silencing [of] unwanted voices, and shutting out [of] perspectives that expose the injustice of the border itself.” In this account, “Censoring the capacity of migrants and refugees to bear witness to their own suffering and admonishing their truth claims” becomes “a key function of contemporary borders,” manifested in shattering devices like phones, which might be used to record evidence. 

In this context, activists can generate what Davies, Isakjee and Obradovic-Wochnik call “‘epistemic friction,’ by refusing to silence the testimony of pushback survivors.” “Panta Rei” exists in this space of epistemic friction, a space of exposing visitors to narratives beyond the state’s through the “testimony” offered by the objects. 

The power to name 

Alongside the physical objects, the exhibit places a heavy emphasis on testimonies from people who have traveled the route. These testimonies move the viewer far beyond any limited public discourse about migrants, toward what Saccora calls “auto-narrations.”

In the passport section, for example, Clementi points out how European travel agency ads for “exotic” locations in the Middle East contrast with videos posted on social media by people from those same countries along the route. In a seemingly thriving internet subculture, migrants post their escapades crossing borders, complete with the sort of internet slang and emoji use you might expect from an Instagram meme page. Migrants post themselves climbing over border fences, traveling by holding on beneath trucks and offer Google Maps instructions of ideal crossing points. This is a sort of pushback, a way of saying “‘Go fuck yourself, I did it’ to the authorities,” in Saccora’s estimation.

“The migrant” does not just appear here as a figure to be easily pitied or photographed looking sad for the sake of some nongovernmental organization’s fundraising flyers. Instead, the viewer is left to confront the fact that people are, in fact, people: fully fledged human beings proud of their exploits, not cowed caricatures, with motivations outside whatever narrow range of reasons might be deemed humanitarian and therefore legitimate. 

Clementi says this was one of the exhibit’s explicit intentions. It was important to her and Saccora to not separate out the category of economic migrants, to not act as if those deemed sympathetic enough to fit the public image of a sympathetic “refugee” are the only humans traveling the route. 

In the exhibition text, Clementi and Saccora note that how migrants are labeled is a distinctly political phenomenon, one shaped by power. “The hegemonic part of the world,” they write, “determines the possibilities of movement of people and the different nominal categories, and the consequent treatments, that derive from them: depending on where one arrives and where one leaves, one becomes a refugee, an expatriate, a ‘brain drain,’ an asylum seeker, a student, a worker.” 

The discourse of migration shaped by power collides with the reality of human life, one where Clementi and Saccora note that “anyone can potentially call themselves a migrant,” for motivations ranging from escaping from war, looking for a job, or “chasing love” and “simply looking for a better life, [or] perhaps just [a] different [one].” 

If the exhibit can move us beyond the “Balkan Route” as a discursive construct, then we also find ourselves moved beyond the original conception of the Balkan Route in 2015-16 as a “humanitarian corridor.” The humanitarian corridor was a legal pathway for migrants through the Balkans into Central Europe declared at the peak of migration from Syria in summer 2015. But as the activist collective Moving Europe argued in 2016, while the corridor provided safety to some migrants, it also subjected them to increased state control and “led to people being treated like goods, with strong controls over who can come and who cannot.” 

Through intense engagement with stories that go beyond either anti-migrant rage bait or sob-story humanitarian appeals, you begin to understand how, as scholar William Walters identifies in his work on the “humanitarian border,” the very designation of a cause as humanitarian can reinforce border logics and epistemic violence. 

In the case of the humanitarian corridor, for example, there was an intense politics to who was deemed worthy of assistance and whose claims of need were believed, enforced by the border’s material infrastructure. As Moving Europe recounted, “states started to segregate between ‘real’ refugees — Syrian, Iraqis and Afghanis — and the rest,” a process “used to legitimate the building of fences and the further militarisation of the corridor.” This was done through “a segregation process done on a very questionable basis through translators and racial profiling.” 

In line with going beyond easy humanitarian-isms, standing at the end of the exhibit, Clementi tells me she and Saccora wanted to avoid the shallow “imagine you are a refugee” empathy exercises that pervade much pedagogy around migration in Western Europe. Rather than making some false equivalency between themselves and migrants, visitors are challenged to question their very concept of self: If I think of myself as a “citizen,” legally part of a certain state’s in-group, what violence might that identity be doing to those deemed outside? If I imagine myself to be straightforwardly “human,” how should I grapple with the far from straightforward political process by which people are humanized and dehumanized? 

This self-questioning is symbolized in the exhibit by two mirrors, one at the entrance and one at the very end. The first mirror appears with a piece of paper asking the viewer “Who am I?” while the latter is shattered beneath an EU flag and asks “Who was I?” Saccora says this is a question the EU must ask itself. But this final mirror also offers something to the viewer as an individual, a moment to take stock of how your sense of self may have changed or been challenged through thinking about migration. 

This is where the exhibit leaves you then, shattered but with the sense that there is possibility in this brokenness, possibility that lies beyond the limited imagination imposed by borders. Near the “Who Was I?” mirror there is a collection of posters and materials from anti-border and human rights campaigns across Europe, a practical cross-linguistic and transnational display of new visions of solidarity. From this space of questioning public discourse about European identity, Saccora says we can realize one vital fact, a fact demonstrated in the very ability to go beyond official narratives of life along the Balkan Route: “Another Europe is already here.” 

Feature image: David Chmielewski / K2.0.

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