Immigration, grief
neurological
triggers
to the spirit

Angelina Brazzale's columbines refer to the nestboxes which the Etruscans used to provide for their pigeons in what is now modern Tuscany. They bespeak the utopia of all migrations: the possibility of a comfortably pillowed home to return to, the knowledge of always coming back to the same place, the surety of returning even as one departs. To populate an exhibition on immigration and grief with toy-like pigeons, baby goats (potential scapegoats) and boat people dolls is to affirm the centrality of journeying to the child’s games and play. Any toy taken up, takes one somewhere, and carries with it the implicit possibility of returning to play again, and again, and again. The seriality and repetition of play is repeated in the spirals of Klee angels on the walls of the exhibit, as in the spiral heartbeats sgraffitoed into the hundreds of ceramic boat people.

Scapeboats by Angelina Brazzale

Escapism is almost shocking when you consider the scapegoating to which 8,000 of the Australian population are now being subjected. At Maribyrnong, Woomera, Port Hedland, Villawood and Curtin people are held as prisoner for the crime of being without civic documentation. It is a crime not to be a citizen. Something might escape us. Among those 8000 are some 580 child prisoners. The least one can say about this is that it violates treaties; the Convention on the Rights of the Child, for instance, holds that 'in any decision regarding children the child's best interest must be a primary consideration' (article 3(1)). More directly, it violates people. 'Every mother I spoke to,' says Sydney lawyer Jacqui Everett, 'tells me the same thing about her children. They stop eating, they stop speaking, they lose weight, they don't sleep... It's all exactly the same symptom again and again.'

Is this the same symptom one detects in the Ministry of Immigration’s recently announced competition for the design of the new detention centre on Christmas Island? The competition, according to the Ministry’s 3 April press release, ‘provides an opportunity for architectural organisations participating in the design process to showcase their talents.’ Imagine working on such a project. Stop eating, stop speaking, lose weight, don’t sleep, you could 'potentially earn international recognition in an environment where the illegal movement of people around the world is a growing international problem.' What is this saying, if not that These are your dreams. Your horizons stop here, at a mandatory detention centre. You, like everyone of us, have an asylum prison inside you. Sew up your lips. And remember to shift the blame onto someone else, because that’s the way to survive. In self-loathing. The refusal to grieve.

There is something beautifully courageous in seeking to rescue the language of migration, refuge, journey, hope and return from the self-loathing of the current directors of public policy. This exhibit gives asylum to creativity, a utopianism of vital significance. For the refusal to assume a tragic posture in Brazzale’s work is the refusal to accept that our horizons end here, at the supposedly necessary sacrifice of someone else’s ideal homecoming. In this exhibit, the homecoming is ours, and it is a delicate one, as the hanging ceramic spines and commemorative pouring pots (the latter decalled with newsphrases: ‘War on Terror’; ‘Axis of Evil’; ‘September 11’), perhaps remind. Anything can break. To have spine, in a nation based on immigration—based, that is, on grief—is to assume custodianship for the hopes that drove us to this point. For the only way to grieve is to fall in love, once more, with what you lost on the way. An angel. A freakbowl. A flotilla of boat people dolls, with wide-eyes and lashes. A series of commemorative pouring pots, these scapeboats and spines. Pigeons. The beguilingly happy anonymity of lots of different little things. A thousand poems choosing their own endings. A way of being at home. A child.