Three bodies, the same border: Perspectives of time and existences in displacements through the global south

Abstract

This paper proposes a reflection on spaces and temporalities, based on the death of three children and an adult at the border crossings caused by forced displacement. The body images of Alan Kurdi, Mohammed Shohayet and Angie Valeria and her father Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez point us to the coexistence of space and temporalities from different borders. The analysis of this work crosses the borders of the Turkey with Greece, Myanmar with Bangladesh and the United States with Mexico, spaces where the deaths occurred. In this sense, it is proposed that the images echo other images from the same structure that leads to death people who risk themselves in search of a safe place to live. They are images that evoke the same vicissitudes faced daily by those who move in a forced way, especially when we are dealing with bodies of subjects from the global south, and that are reproduced within a mimesis that represents the same times and spaces and, also, other bodies. These images symbolize the era of forced displacements from the global south, in which borders are, in this sense, control devices that prevent safe journeys and that kill people. In contemporary times, there is a significant increase in forced displacements which, although they are a global problem, are a phenomenon that is catalyzed in the south, both in relation to the countries that force people to move to become refugees and the countries that welcome them. In this way, the forced displacements in recent years have brought us some reflections on visibility and images that intersect from a territoriality, whether instituted by the media experience as an event or by the experience of the bodies that inscribe their own narratives, their own images.