Disappeared in America

28 juni 2005    Lees de reacties   

Sinds 9/11 zijn duizenden moslim-immigranten gedetineerd om veiligheidsredenen. Dat claimen de initaitiefnemers van het DISAPPEARED IN AMERICA project.

“In this, there are eerie parallels to past witch-hunts, including the 1919 detention of 10,000 immigrants after anarchists bombed the Attorney General’s home; the 1941 internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans; the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs; and the HUAC Black-listing under Senator Joseph McCarthy. While our work started in the American context, we have expanded to look at Europe, in recognition that anti-immigrant xenophobia, coupled with Islamophobia, is not a new or uniquely American phenomenon.

VISIBLE, is a collective of Muslim and other Artist-Activists, that created the DISAPPEARED is a walk-through installation that uses film, soundscape, images, installations and lectures to humanize the faces of post 9/11 “disappeared” Muslims. It is also a traveling, multimedia lecture that has been shown in Stuttgart (with Walid Raad/Atlas Group), London (with Otolith Group), Berlin (KunstWerke with Natasa Petresin), New York (Queens Museum of Art), Stockholm (Finnish Embassy), Belgrade and Helsinki (Kiasma Museum).

In November 2004, returning to New York City from a family visit to Rochester ( New York – upstate New York ), I am detained and interrogated by the police and the FBI for several hours at the Rochester International Airport . As my luggage is unpacked in front of me, I am baffled by what I had packed and by what I am shown (photographs, videotapes, essays and books, bank statements, etc), and by the circumstances that put me in this situation. This encounter is the diluted version of others, such those experienced by Khaled el-Masri, Maher Arar or Mamdouh Habib. Masri, for example, was kidnapped in 2003 by Macedonian police, drugged and shipped to Afghanistan where he was detained, tortured and interrogated by US intelligence officers and subsequently released to a German government that thinks he made it all up. This form of government sponsored kidnapping, known as rendition, began in the 1990’s by the CIA but has increased dramatically in the past four years.