Capsular

The Spanish enclave Ciudad Autonoma de Ceuta stands midway between a city and an autonomous community with a Parliament and president of its own. Formerly an administrative part of the Spanish province of Cadiz, Ceuta, situated along the coast of Morocco, is now fully part of the European Union. This vanguard of European neo-liberal and xenophobic refugee policy acts as a contemporary version of the ‘Iron Curtain’. As a tangible construction this ‘Wall’ between Europe and Africa is a precarious example of an extensive deportation annex security industry. As a symbolical line of fracture between North and South, between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, this enclave represents both the harsh reality of Africans looking for a brighter existence and the fantasy of Europeans beset and menaced by barbarism. With its ‘remote control’-policy Europe literally moves out its asylum problem: not only does it outsource the management of its borders to third parties, the Africans are also forced to participate in the fight against illegal immigration. The presence of asylum places bordering or even downright on African territory pushes the extent of the European borders far beyond their actual coordinates, turning the local authorities into watchdogs and hiding the migrant population from the view of the Western citizen. Capsular is a reflection on the relevance and irrelevance of images, on ‘the camp’ as a symbol, a symptom. In the footsteps of his previous video work Asselberghs goes on another quest for an approach which plays on mainstream media, commenting on them and countering them.