Narratives of Agency: Understanding the Refugee Experience through Paintings at the EU’s External Borders

Despite a burgeoning interest in the "visual" in migration and border research, refugees’ own perspectives of how they represent their experiences of struggles with/against borders through paintings remain underinvestigated. This paper seeks to fill this gap by providing a close and contextual understanding of refugees’ perceptions and their first-hand experiences of their struggles with borders with reference to critical studies on border and migration and visual approaches. Drawing on qualitative analysis of the paintings produced by en route refugee artists at the Hope Project on the Greek island of Lesvos, the paper dissects the emerging visual narratives and practices. The paper exposes three common narratives beyond time and space from the paintings regarding how the artists recount the perilous journeys of refugees from home toward the European Union (EU), their everyday life constrained in Lesvos, and their future aspirations in a tide of freedom and uncertainty. These common narratives illustrate a sense of continuity between the past, present, and future of refugees’ migratory and life trajectories interrupted by the European border(ing) regime. As the paper illustrates, the paintings reveal how refugees as socio-political agents challenge the state borders built against their mobilities and, in doing so, they also defy the symbolic borders fabricated against their identities. By presenting a bottom-up approach to understanding the implications of EU's borders for people who are affected the most, the paper unpacks how refugee artists become active citizens who challenge these borders in stark opposition to what the media and European decisionmakers depict of them as passive, destitute victims in need or villains posing threat to European society, identity, and security.