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                           Direct Provision Centres, 2012-2014

‘The Absences of the Asylum Archive: Making Reflective Space’
Charlotte McIvor

In a brief Facebook reflection on participating in a panel ‘Communities of Disenfranchisement in Precarious Times’ at the American Conference for Irish Studies in May 2014, the creator of the Asylum Archive asked, ‘How can then asylum seekers be less strangers (Bauman; 1991) in a privatized strangerhood, which is a direct provision (Bauman; 1991)?’[1] Through this statement, they articulate the representational bind of asylum seekers as theoretically stateless subjects seeking to be known within a society that has not given them a right to be recognized as belonging within the nation-state. 
It is this predicament that is the primary focus of the Asylum Archive. In this liminal state of deliberation, asylum seekers are habitually beholden to conventions of self-representation in the asylum interview process and everyday experience of the waiting period for a decision.  These conventions compel the continual re-telling of ‘the “right” kind of refugee story in which complexities are smoothed out to create a simple linear narrative of individual crisis and flight.’[2]  The Asylum Archive resists this convention of storytelling. Instead this online archive of photographs, essays, interviews, reports and ephemera related to the lived experience of asylum in Ireland foregrounds a visual aesthetic based around absence. Primarily the work of one creator who remains anonymous at the time of writing, the photographs (which form the bulk of the archive’s content) are devoid of people to emphasize the dual burdens of visibility and invisibility experienced by those seeking asylum in Ireland as a psychological, social and legislative process. 
Those seeking asylum in Ireland must live within the direct provision system where individuals cannot work or access third-level education.  They are provided with ‘the provision of a bed and three meals per day’ but cannot cook their own food and ‘may be required to share their bedroom and bathroom facilities with other residents.’  In addition, they receive a ‘a weekly direct provision allowance of €19.10 per adult and €9.60 per child.’[3]  At present, ‘Asylum seekers spend an average of three years and seven months in the system. More than 1,600 have spent five or more years, and more than 600 have spent in excess of seven years here.’[4]  
‘Originally started as a coping mechanism’ for the creator ‘while seeking political asylum in Ireland,’[5] the Asylum Archive highlights absence as its most recurrent aesthetic trope as images of individuals seeking asylum do not appear in the creator’s photographs. Instead, the images taken by the creator predominantly feature landscape, architecture and found objects but not people.  This tactical use of images decentres focus on the individual asylum seeker and the particulars of their case.  This visual strategy resists the dramaturgy of classic humanitarian campaigns which may ‘ask the public to recognize “the human face” of specific asylum-seekers, assuring us that “close-up,” they are “just like us”’ through the use of for example ‘photographic close-ups of asylum-seekers’ faces and first-person accounts of asylum.’[6] The images on the Asylum Archive instead force focus onto the material infrastructures (i.e. buildings) within which asylum seekers experience Direct Provision centres.
Visitors to the Asylum Archive navigate between tabs titled ‘Direct Provision Centres,’ ‘Asylum,’ ‘Found Objects,’ ‘Interviews,’ ‘Contribute,’ ‘Publications’ and ‘Biography.’  The first three tabs feature only images while ‘Interviews’ holds both textual and video materials, and ‘Publications’ only text.  The layout suggests that both the visual and textual/oral evidence based on research and direct testimony by asylum seekers and other advocates hold equal weight in this online archive.  The Asylum Archive provides a visual mapping of Direct Provision accommodation centres throughout Ireland as its first port of entry under ‘Direct Provision Centres’ and then moves to more specific studies of experiences (‘Asylum’) and objects (‘Found Objects’), but even the more general category of asylum features mostly found objects and landscapes in the images.
The found objects are presented by the creator throughout the Asylum Archive as art objects such the ‘Talking Ball’ described as a ‘found object in Railway Hostel grounds, displayed in a glass box, 37 cm L x 37 cm W x 37 cm H, 2011.’ It is a child’s toy ball with interactive panels, muddied with dirt, and resting on one side.  Contained within the glass box, the ball’s functionality as a ‘little smart press and play ball’ is inconsequential, its aborted abilities a bleak comment on the state of childhood within direct provision. This presentation of objects such as this as art objects extends the logic of Marchel Duchamp’s readymades that have since the appearance of Fountain in 1917 ‘become the central hurdle over which any attempt to define art must leap.’[7]  Unlike Duchamp’s readymades, however, the Asylum Archive’s ‘readymades’ are defined by their former situation within the misé-en-scene of the Direct Provision accommodation centre, rather than by their status as generic objects made meaningful through their classification as art within an art space of exhibition.  These objects become art objects through the framing of the creator’s shots of the pieces as well, but they are still ultimately selected for inclusion because they are ephemera of the asylum seeker’s experiences.  The preservation of these images of ephemera through the Asylum Archive not only asks viewers to consider what counts as ‘art’ but to evaluate how the ability make art freely is contingent on basic political and social rights.
By framing the isolating experience of Direct Provision as an opportunity for aesthetic intervention and creation, the creator counters the bleakness of the images they present with an assertion of the creative capacity of asylum seekers living in these circumstances.  They highlight both the constrained nature of their living circumstances and their ability to improvise within these inhumane conditions.  They also force viewers to look at and judge not the individual asylum seekers within this system but rather the material architectures (the exterior of the buildings or individual rooms) that demonstrate the deprivations of the Direct Provision system in Ireland. Directing the viewer’s gaze to buildings and empty lived-in rooms encourages a structural rather than subjective engagement with the subject of the work. This in in turn may enable different political capacities to develop through the act of viewing, namely a critical focus on structural inequalities of the Irish state rather than individual biographies. 
Recalling performance scholar Diana Taylor’s seminal formulation of the archive and the repertoire as necessarily interlinking categories of analysis, the creator activates the archive of physical objects and spaces they represent visually as a repertoire where the absence of human bodies is a performative presence.  Their ghostly absence is a haunting critique on the limits on unmediated self-representation that characterize the experience of those registered as asylum seekers within the Direct Provision system (or incarcerated within other national systems of processing asylum seekers).  Because of their limited ability to represent themselves, the absence of those seeking asylum must perform. As the creator asserts, ‘The asylum system functions as a closed and confined space far from the rest of society’ which leads to a situation where ‘the direct provision hostels and their residents don’t seem to have physicality.’[8] The Asylum Archive is not then an archive of traceable or verifiable information, but rather one primarily of absence, of traces, of ghosts.  It is an archive that invites projection rather than providing tangible evidence or bodies to be assessed. 
Avery Gordon offers that ‘haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities.’  She continues: ‘The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.’[9] The human presences absent from these frames seethe at their edges. Their inability to be seen however is not just an act of forced disappearance, but a defiant dissipation. By haunting rather than inhabiting, the asylum seekers not pictured in these frames refuse to perform from familiar repertoires of the bureaucratic performance of refugeeness.  Diana Taylor elaborates that her ‘view of performance rests on the notion of ghosting, that visualization that continues to act politically even as it exceeds the live.’[10] The asylum-seeker continues to function in Giorgio Agamben’s formulation as the ‘limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation-state from the birth-nation to the man-citizen link.’[11] Therefore, individuals seeking asylum at the edge of these images can perhaps act more politically when they exceed the live and evade ‘close-up technologies’ that aim primarily to ‘move the’ citizen ‘in ways that will enable “us” to identify with “the victims” of repressive asylum laws’ instead of questioning structural inequalities.[12] Instead, those seeking asylum remain at the centre of the Asylum Archive through not only their seething absence but their contributions of lived space, objects and testimony that have made this archive possible.  The creator has forcefully observed that:
In my mind, the direct provision centres cannot be perceived only as the sites of incarceration, social exclusion or extreme poverty. They are also the sites of collectivity and resistance towards the national policy. Direct provision centres are the sites where different nationalities and ethnic groups exist(ed) and persist(ed) the confinement created by the State.[13]
The Asylum Archive preserves fragments of this ongoing legacy and promotes new reflective spaces in relation to the experience of asylum and the infrastructures that sustain the Irish Direct Provision system.

 Charlotte McIvor is Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at NUI Galway.  She is currently at work on her Irish Research Council funded project, ‘Interculturalism, Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland’ and completing a monograph Towards A New Interculturalism: Migration and Contemporary Irish Performance (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan). Her publications include Staging Intercultural Ireland: Plays and Practitioner Perspectives (co-edited with Matthew Spangler) and the forthcoming Devised Performance in Irish Theatre: Histories and Contemporary Practice (co-edited with Siobhán O’Gorman).  Her work has appeared in Modern Drama and Irish University Review among others and multiple edited collections including ‘That Was Us’ Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance.


Endnotes
[1] Asylum Archive, Facebook post, 12:37PM, 17 June 2014, https://www.facebook.com/asylum.archive?fref=ts, accessed 18 June 2014. 
[2] Alison Jeffers, Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities, (Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 46.
[3] Reception and Integration Agency, ‘Reception, Dispersal and Accommodation,’ http://www.ria.gov.ie/en/RIA/Pages/Reception_Dispersal_Accommodation, accessed 18 January 2015.
[4] Carl O’Brien, ‘More than 4,000 living in “direct provision” system,’ Irish Times, 9 August 2014, http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/more-than-4-000-living-in-direct-provision-system-1.1891353?page=2, accessed 18 January 2015.
[5] Asylum Archive, ‘Asylum Archive: Book,’ 2, https://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/235693467?access_key=key-L0PsoyS5PziyAvcKyKat&allow_share=false&escape=false&show_recommendations=false&view_mode=scroll, accessed 18 January 2015.
[6] Imogen Tyler, ‘“Welcome to Britain”: The Cultural Politics of Asylum,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (2006): 194.
[7] Steven Goldsmith, ‘The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp: The Ambiguities of an Aesthetic Revolution,’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42: 2 (Winter 1983), 197.
[8] Asylum Archive, ‘Asylum Archive: Book,’ 2, https://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/235693467?access_key=key-L0PsoyS5PziyAvcKyKat&allow_share=false&escape=false&show_recommendations=false&view_mode=scroll, accessed 18 January 2015.
[9] Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8. 
[10] Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, (Duke: Duke University Press, 2003), 143.
[11] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 134.
[12] Tyler, 194.
[13] Asylum Archive, Facebook post.