DESTIERRO

Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was built in 1998 to memorialise those lost in that country’s Dirty War. In 2017 the Park hosted an exhibition by the British artist Anish Kapoor, entitled Destierro. The work consisted of 100 tonnes of earth painted red, with a bright blue digger in-between the mounds. While the Park is dedicated to those lost through state persecution (it was built close to the military airport from where many dissidents were flown to be dropped over the Atlantic Ocean), Kapoor’s exhibition aimed to highlight those lost through neglect, engaging with a new sense of borders brought about by the refugee ‘crisis’. The curator of the show, Marcello Dantas, said, ‘The real borders of today’s world are no longer the ones that separate nations, but the borders that separate those that have some bit of ground to stand on and those who have none.’ Aurora Vergara-Figueroa says that the term destierro translates as ‘uprooting, deracination, exile, exodus, and banishment’ (Vergara-Figueroa 2018: 1). It captures historically complex processes which concepts such as forced displacement and forced migration are too limited to contain: ‘Their analytical scope is too narrow’ (Vergara-Figueroa 2018: xxvi).

A major aim of this project is to widen the concept of forced displacement so that it can better capture the range of people caught up in these complex processes of destierro. Part of this has to be to move away from a conception of a global order made up of nation states clearly demarcated by borders as incisive lines on the surface of the globe –states as pieces of a jigsaw that fit neatly together to take up all the space. Rather, what we have seen, especially through the experiences of Indigenous people dispossessed through development, is that there are borderlands and border zones, both on the peripheries of nation states and within them, where those states seek to impose control and identity on people who may resist them. These can be spaces of extreme violence, where people are constituted as wanted or unwanted by states, and people who have lived in their homes for generations can find themselves caught up in the processes of destierro.