It’s difficult to comprehend the absences. This thought has been with me for a while now, in a steady crescendo. It’s likely propelled by multiplying absences in my life – people no longer there, places demolished and erased, and me gone from those places, and with that: the missing, the mourning, the longing, the disarming nostalgia. A common, ungratifying companion of “multi-sited” research. I feel like butter someone has spread too thinly across the Balkan route. And then the refugees, so ready to depart, so ephemeral in their “here-ness”, so acutely “inside” the forced displacement; which exposes the fragility of places we inhabit. The losses are double, codified by the precariousness of refugees’ life: the people are no longer there; the camps are no longer there. There is nowhere to return to, nothing to look back to but debris. Even in an average life, there are plenty of reminders of human transience; in refugee camps there’re more than plenty, way too many.
As the camps rot, turn into bushes and debris, people scatter across Europe, becoming barely known faces on a phone. A week ago one of the children, the ones I’ve been very close to, hid in a bathtub when her mother suggested talking to me (and it wasn’t the first time either, the bathtub refuge). She is pained by this weird transplantation of “me to there”, to Blackpool; her years in Greece seem to feel unreal, amputated. Apart from the pain, there’s confusion, lack of orientation. How to patch such a discordant life into a safe narrative? The first time she hid into a bathtub was actually following a night-time “dinghy pass” across a Channel. It was 7 in the morning, she was tired and shocked. But then –in June 2022 –I wasn’t a stranger. She had a momentary impulse to flee; minutes later she was out of a tub, dancing to Bananza, chuckling, trying out her British accent. Nowadays, despite the stability and the lasting safeness of her life, she stays in the tub. She doesn’t want to talk to me, I don’t think she should want to, I think her mother is wrong to insist, I think amputation is surely better than desperate reminiscence. And this seems to be an either-or; for how can an 8 year-old consciously live through such nuanced and ruptured life?
So, this feeling, “what to do with the gone things?”, has been louder and reached a sort of a peak before our walking seminar. I went to Athens for the weekend to see the refugee camps’ ruins. Camp Eleonas was one of my research sites, I spent roughly 6 months there until it closed in August 2022. I was there to witness the closure, I carried people’s bags, I held children’s hands as they chanted “Eleonas no close!” on a protest march, I saw people recalcitrantly persisting, unmovable, only to be extracted from their containers – homes of many years – by the armed forces. So, by all means, I should understand the camp’s closure. I should know it is no longer there: no more homes and no more people. But I couldn’t, I just couldn’t conceive of “not there” when it was “very much there” for so long.
It was a childish impulse really, “go check”, as if things only existed as I had seen them. But not only that, it was a farewell, a funeral of a sort. A friend came with me and as we were climbing the wall (the security was still there, guarding the main entrance to thevestiges), he asked me “Why?”, “Why are we doing this”; somewhat weary … “It’s now just a graveyard, no?”
“I guess you are right. I think to say goodbye. It is the last time I’m going.”
“Oh that’s good. I like to know when I’m last seeing someone.”
“Or somewhere.”
This last statement made him agitated, as if I were stating the obvious. Was somewhere even remotely important, if not for some-ones? Wasn’t I really saying goodbye to the memory of people once there? Wasn’t I only doing it to acknowledge – and acknowledge fully – their absence, for many months so tangible in my chest it almost felt like an organ with a sole purpose of desecrating sorrow? Wasn’t I trying to silence that, or feed it, or tame it?
From the outside, the camp looked normal, the containers were there. It almost felt as everyone suddenly went completely silent. From the inside, the emptiness was oppressive. We didn’t last long. We paced through. Returned the next day, to stay a bit longer. Paced through again – and got caught, and got escorted out …
I collected 2 things there: a football, a whistle; both connected to people I knew. And I took many photos.
And then came our seminar.
Both those impulses – “take things, take photos” – stayed with me. I didn’t question it much, until I’d forgotten “my” Bosnian beans’ can in Urša’s car. Why did I really need it? Why did I try to “have” it? Why take photos? Aren’t both just desperate attempts to capture the uncapturable, to grasp the essence of things imminently elusive? Isn’t it a cry-out to make time freeze, to make it submit to you, to own reality, a delusional hope for Things to transpire their previous meanings – into you, onto posterity.
So now I have the can, the broken phone, the ball and the whistle and also a teapot from a Bosnian squat and a tin plate. What now? Categorise the objects? Collect them further? Subdue their meanings to classification? Have them rot in Ig instead of Dragonja’s valley? (Maybe yes, look at the proposal).
So, days after I uncomfortably and hurriedly paced through Eleonas, taking distracted photos (almost as if I were in a museum); we walked through another refugee encampment, even more impermanent. The impulse seemed to have been the same. Record, “understand”, walk “through” the data, and then … very soon, leave. If there were people in any of those “camps” I (we) would have surely stayed longer. We would sit, become less of strangers to the spot, we would talk and get to know the stories – instead of making them up – we would exist in a place; maybe not with ease, but with the slowness of encountering new humans. But there was no one, neither in Eleonas, nor at Dragonja – a sort of loaded emptiness; the absence. Not a “no one was here”, but “someone was evidently here”, but “they no longer are ”. In Eleonas I was left with memories, here I was “left” (?) with predictions; guesses with different degrees of likelihood. What was the epilogue? Where were they? Pushed back by the police, now in Lipa camp, bare-footed, counting ticks and bruises? Made it to Milano, in fragile slumber on the street, in a thin sleeping bag, shivering … Made it to the Alps, somewhere in the snow, unaware of the threat of avalanches … Made it to Paris, taking a photo in front of the Eiffel tower, “Look mom, I made it, after all.” … In Calais, under a mouldy UNCHR blanket. In a German village, behind the white boards designating the space – for “you” – “lay your body here” – “shut up” – “wait, wait for a month or so”. In the Postojna detention centre, behind three closed doors, contemplating a hunger strike …
There were many other absences that followed. The Mill community. Irena that had laid Reka to sleep under acacias. Emil’s father’s stone bridge over Dragonja, “just by the big cherry tree”. A Kurdish girl crossing on her mother’s back. Her corpse, intertwined with the branches. The firefighters. The police. The salt families. And us. A land of absences, an absent land.
The thought that circulates through this – not a finished one, not a reliable one, but surely pointing into a direction – is “passing through” a way to engage with the absent? Is walking by, rendering oneself a mere passerby, a promising way forward in understanding, maybe even scientific understanding? Could it be? It seems very counter-intuitive, the opposite of meticulously studying a phenomenon, it’s merely glancing at it; spotting it and fleeing, making the encounter with the object itself brief, loose, flawed (or at least very exposed to chance). Could it be at least partially true; could objects/places/sites be approached in both ways – planned, rigid, dissecting way; but also fleeting, uncommitted, uncodified way? Is there a likelihood the “objects” (or remains or artefacts) and “emptied” places will “present themselves” as something different in each case; could there be a different knowledge of an absence built depending on researcher’s movements and stays? Is there value to merge with the absent land, become one of its things, moving through, but never settling, not claiming any land, not claiming any Things for oneself, just making oneself continuously absent from one place to another. (leave the absences be absent)
If valuable, this makes quite a case for walking seminars.
So what did the salt family do on a cloudy afternoon? Did children chase the not-yet-bucolic ducks? What did the passing refugees think? “Fuck, it’s a swamp, not here.”What did we talk about? The flamingos? The wind? “Flysch is not a stone, it’s a sequence.”
Do we even recall? Does it matter?
We are all equally no longer there.
