Liquid Homes - A Critical Approach To Migrant Civil Rights Through Postmodern Social Science Theory And Their Representation Through Films Produced During The European Migrant Crisis
Abstract:
Liquid Homes is a study about migration based on social sciences theories, contemporary films, and my personal experiences. Within this understanding of migration, the concept of Home is identified as a physical and imaginary place pertaining to all individual of society, to which civil rights and urbanism are related, and which is in constant tension in a global system because of the processes of modernity, the development of industrialisation and capitalism. In this text an analysis of contemporary migration is proposed throughout films produced during the European migrant crisis (2015- ), to do a critical analysis about the approach and representation in films of the migrant population and to suggest recognition, humanism and familiarity with migrant communities and their civil rights. It was my last evening in Lisbon crossing the Tejo river in a ferry going to the other side of the city. We came over the second floor and sat down on the chairs with the windows facing the sunset. She was looking at messages on her mobile phone, while I was looking at the colour and shadows projected on her face. Suddenly she surprised and said: A bomb has exploded in the main harbour of Beirut. It is when this story about Liquid Homes started. Until this moment I had not any mental map of Lebanon, I knew it was part of the „Middle East” region with an Arabic culture. She told me she has some friends in Beirut because she was doing her field based research thesis in a Palestinian Refugee Camp called Shatila. I guess that the mixture of feelings between her and me at that moment have impressed in my memory the need to understand Shatila. Feelings about the beginning and the finishing of new stages of our lives, moving again of (from/to) homes, in different non-established houses, around different people, different languages and geographies. In my case, feelings of coming back to a place with legal rules made to make it the hardest for foreigners and for their establishment of a normal life, a hostile place in an economic way, where you are not welcome if you are not coming to produce or give money to the society. With the time I have understood that Shatila is a “Liquid Home” for its inhabitants. As a “new city” is for migrants. A “Liquid Home” is a place for waiting - for the return or for continuing towards the desired land and the desired lifestyle, with the difference that for people in Shatila and their parents before them were born there, but they do not have legal right over the land nor over pretty much anything in the place they inhabit. I identify a liquid home as the space constructed to be easily changed according to political international movements, according to the economic profit of international relationships under the flagship of solidarity. An artificial urbanization made with modular materials to be easily moved and articulated, where the architecture of the houses, of the streets, of the daily human relations can be withdrawn from their users as an expropriation not just of their houses but as well of their civil rights. As a nobody, who occupy the territory, liquid homes are a result of liquid societies, a modernisation of the urban lifestyle understood within Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis of the late modernity, where the reality of the inhabitants of the society is made to allow constant and contrasting changes. The objective of this writing is to describe how the phenomenon of migration, cities and citizenship have been told in cinema from 2015 until now, and to analyse different approaches, methods of research and filming migration and the noncitizenship, using cinema as a cultural expression that reflects the modern thinking and troubles of a migration society. I will also use personal notes as an ethnographic research method, reflecting my experience as a foreigner and all that not having a citizenship in the place where I live has meant.
Citación recomendada (normas APA)
Camilo Bravo Molano, "Liquid Homes - A Critical Approach To Migrant Civil Rights Through Postmodern Social Science Theory And Their Representation Through Films Produced During The European Migrant Crisis", Europa:-, 2022. Consultado en línea en la Biblioteca Digital de Bogotá (https://www.bibliotecadigitaldebogota.gov.co/resources/3711695/), el día 2025-05-12.
