Determination of Geographical Destiny in Art: One-Way Ticket
We have all been writing the same book. If life activity has a meaning, it will only occur if the actions of doing and writing follow each other unconditionally. All great poets/authors, and artists have built their works for a world that will come after them.
The story of humanity began with tragedy. Human, who believed in the lie whispered to his ear that he would reach the Divine power and be immortal, has been exiled from Heaven to Earth because he laid his hands on the forbidden apple. From the first moments of his story, human wants to find their eternal home, which is their only loss. Sometimes in a piece of land, sometimes in a thing or in love, human searches for a place or a person to overcome the homesickness that he feels deep inside. Humans will not be able to establish their world of meaning without turning to themselves, without knowing the corrosive effect of self-alienation, and will constantly vanish and become homeless.Hannah Arendt used the term "homelessness" to describe conditions that prevent one from having a place in a world where one is deemed human. With this term, she describes the drama of one having to abandon where one lives.One waves "a handkerchief swinging between existence and non-existence" from the window of a train or on a ship as one abandons where one lives without looking back. As one waves it, it bursts into flames and turns into a tamed ember within what is lost.
Walter Benjamin's One Way Street raises a Fire Alarm in terms of meaning. In his work, he seeks to draw people's attention to the possibility of salvation. He fears that the disasters he sees as a result of the struggle of the bourgeois society or the proletariat will destroy all humanity, so much so that he states that humanity is far from seeing the disaster before him and needs to raise the fire alarm.If Benjamin had thought that the Nazi persecution would also knock on his door one day throughout his life between two wars, Maybe he would not have stayed with Brecht in Denmark, where he went three times. Hungry, miserable, and exhausted during his journey to flee the Nazis, Benjamin could only make it as far as Portbou, which is at the foothills of a mountain in Spain. However, the border was closed the night he hoped to flee. He did not think for a moment about the possibility of turning back and ending his life right there because there was only one way for him, only one way. The police must have been affected by the suicide of a teenager because they reopened the border gates the next day, and his friends left Benjamin and passages that he could never finish near Portbou (Spain-France) and crossed the border.Every station, from Barcelona's Train Station to the border of France, houses different stories of tragic exiles. If you go to the border, you will see a signpost that reads," Walter Benjamin died here! "in the first apartment on a narrow street in a small, quiet seaside town.
One Way Ticket
Political, social, cultural, economic, religious, individual conflicts, and environmental factors force people to abandon where they live. Immigration arises from necessity and becomes a subject of literature, poetry, cinema, and art. Migration affects not only the fate and lifestyle of artists but also their artistic language and modes of production. The works of refugee artists are a synthesis arising from a natural exchange.
Jacob Lawrence, the son of a refugee family, reflects the phenomenon of migration with an artistic sensibility. Lawrence portrays a migration series of 60 pieces, half displayed at MOMA and the other half in the Philips Collection at DC. During and after the Second World War, approximately 6 million people migrated from the south to the industrial north due to racism, social inequality, and unemployment.
Lawrence's family is also a part of the phenomenon of migration. As a child of this significant immigration, Lawrence was born in New Jersey and was raised in Harlem. His art was inspired by the places where he grew up. He studied migration at libraries for months, interviewed numerous migrants, and began his journey as an author by writing about migration.
The entire series depicts train stations, wagons, waiting rooms, bags, colors, and passengers with a rhythm similar to the sound of a train.
"They left as if they were fleeing some curse," Scott writes in his scientific demographic work to describe migration. Dedicated to this statement, Jacob Lawrence's sixty-panel series opens with a train station where a chaotic crowd rushes towards three ticket windows marked CHICAGO, NEW YORK, and ST.
The first painting, "The Migration Gained in Momentum," contains geometric shapes and flat painted surfaces. In the picture, two groups of black people walk in the same direction from the upper- and lower-left corners to the upper-right corner. With a limited palette of colors, the painting depicts exhausted children and desperate people carrying things on their backs and in their hands.Lawrence's series consists of compositions of human figures that focus mainly on the Great Migration and the problems in the aftermath. He outlined black people, separating them from the surface, while he depicted white people in more detail. In this way, he reflects racism and emphasizes the unity of contrasts with the way he uses colors. Flattened and angular forms, strong diagonals, and light and shadow contrasts provided dynamism, and the issue was presented in a film-like manner with compositions and details. In a century when the art of painting moved away from narration, Lawrence was a master storyteller who recorded critical historical events. Human is essential in his works, which do not individualize people but portray them with collective characteristics.
Having described the process with the words "I worked very fast," Lawrence used fast-drying tempera paint and plywood in this series. He put all the panels together, drew the scenes first, and filled his sketches with a limited shade of color. "I had a straightforward palette. I went through all the panels painting yellows, greens, and blues, so they're all the same. I didn't mix colors. I left it pure because I wanted the series to be a unit. I consider it one work, not 60 works," he said (MoMA Audio + Guide, Jacob Lawrence).
African-Americans set out from South Carolina to Virginia and New York for work. Chicago received more refugees than any American city, and there developed as a cultural center of African-Americans. St. Louis was the end point of several rail lines from Missouri to Mississippi and underwent a drastic transformation due to migration. The migration of the new generation of poets, writers, artists, and activists in New York resulted in the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Lawrence internalized a story through his family and relatives that had been overlooked in American history. He noted the 30 years of the Great Migration as a part of American culture and experience. Having been explored by many poets, migration is also the theme of the poem "One-Way Ticket" by Langston Hughes. (1949).
Impressed by the Immigration panels, which depict people waiting in queues for hours to get on an outgoing train, Mr. Young, a professor at Emory University, stated that some of those trips took place for opportunity. Still, most of them were due to violence. He emphasized that the panel series depicts an epic story of America and the American dream.As the poet Warsan Shire says, "No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land." Migrants must choose between a place they are not tolerated or not accepted. Albeit for economic reasons, they choose between a hopeless life and a hopeful life for their children. They want to replace what is wrong with what is uncertain. We might also think about what we would do if we had to choose only through artistic and natural language.
In the post-twentieth century, in which the logic behind migration changes, people transmit their ancestors' survival instincts to future generations through colonies that they have exalted. In a world where everybody has to become a citizen of a country, refugees are homeless as they do not have a country to offer them a dignified and safe life.Zygmunt Bauman addresses the refugee problem in "Strangers at Our Door" and argues that refugees are considered a threat to the human rights of native populations rather than being defined as a vulnerable mass in need of the restoration of the human rights of which they have been violently robbed.
Not to drift away from any locality, some people, like land speculators, ignore that the earth they stand is going away from under their feet.
However, due to the changing world order and technological advances, there is nowhere new to discover nor a peaceful and quiet place. Because of the slippery sand and the ground, we are all on a constant migration and journey, just like Alfred Wangler's broken and floating rocks. Our borders get blurred in a mental Pangea. The stronger our sailing ship is, the less worried we are.
With an in-depth analysis of historical processes, intellectuals, thinkers, scientists, artists, philosophers, economists, educators, and politicians should come together under the umbrella of "Humanity" and raise a fire alarm for the present and the future of the world and humanity.It is not the immigration problem that cannot be solved in the modern world, but it is a problem of living humanely. As their only loss, human beings migrate from the world of meaning. With the culture of love replaced by fear, this is the sociological and ethical pollution of the human being who fearlessly pollutes nature.
Geography becomes a field of action for art when it is dangerous and mined. The West tried to provide social confrontation and reckoning by establishing museums on cultural and social issues. The concepts questioned in terms of identity and homelessness are transformed into a grotesque game in a region where humanitarian needs are not satisfied.
Today, artists such as Hatoum, Azzam, Ji, Günsür, Lasky, Husain, Iudice, Fontaine Stockwell, and Kallat treat the forced migration of themselves or their families with a sense of experience to raise public awareness regarding social events. They have enabled us to see the emotional or traumatic meaning of forced migration, displacement due to war and conflict, and going away from, leaving, or abandoning somewhere, even if it is not forced. In a world of increasing conflicts, the refugee crisis, which is suppressed or overlooked, reveals our social fears and fragilities. We think that refugees bring the mysterious horror from which we hope to be far away. It is overlooked that, not much, just a few years or maybe a couple of weeks ago, they were sitting in their homes and feeling safe, just as we are now. The fact that they have been robbed of their families, possessions, comfort, essential security, and human rights is glossed over. Only the artistic and eternal language restores the right to respect and admission to refugees, which they deserve for self-esteem.