School of Creative Arts Performances and Visual Cultures summer term research seminar. - Dr Emma Cox (Royal Holloway, University of London).

Interceptive Aesthetics: Performing #SolidarityAndResistance at Sea

In January 2022, approximately 70 forced migrants who had taken precarious refuge on Shell’s Miskar oil platform, situated off the coast of Tunisia and within a European search and rescue (SAR) zone, were handed to Tunisian authorities and returned. As one more iteration of the EU’s biopolitical regime of Mediterranean interdiction and quasi-legalised boat turn-back, the incident was normative, but on this occasion a subsidiary group of people who had been drifting in waters near the oil rig were rescued by the MV Louise Michel, owned by British street artist Banksy. The boat features a spray-paint motif and the word RESCUE in lurid pink, along with a repurposed image of Banksy’s ‘Girl with Balloon’. The Louise Michel’s performative, publicised actions represent an explicit aestheticisation of rescue in a region where migrant trauma is already a mediatised spectacle. The Louise Michel’s first operation in 2020 attracted wide media coverage, but it had been held at port by authorities until 2022. The vessel is part of a European network of non-state rescue boats; despite the criminalisation of their work, these operations have increased substantially in recent years, entering a space of diminished EU response. Deploying the hashtags #SolidarityAndResistance and #AllBlackLivesMatter, NGO operations situate maritime rescue as affiliative, direct-action resistance to state power, contextualised by global anti-racism. This paper considers what kind of solidarity is enacted by NGOs like the Louise Michel and reflects on ways in which the interceptive aesthetics of their work might revise ideas about refugee-responsive performance as intervention.

Biographical Note

Emma Cox is Reader and Head of Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Performing Noncitizenship (2015), Theatre & Migration (2014), and editor of the play collection Staging Asylum (2013). Cox’s writing has been published in journals such as Theatre Journal and Theatre Research International. She is co-editor of the interdisciplinary volume, Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities (2020).

All attendees are welcome at a drinks reception following the lecture.