Immigrants to go

IMMIGRANTS TO GO ALONSO GALUÉ

There's going to be a time when we all are going to be foreigners, mobile subjects, for ourselves. Julia Kristeva said:” Weirdly, the foreigner inhabits on us: he is the hidden face of our identities, the space in between, the time where the agreement and sympathy goes deep. If we face that, we won’t allow us to forgive the fact that we hate them.” Foreigners, others, that come from unknown places.

Others, migrants, displaced, invaders, hidden, insecure mass of people who trespass the border in silence of the common existence. Erase from the social statements of citizenships, they don't have any right or benefit, and at the time that we accept them and recognize them, we will be losing our independence as a society and at the origin of interculturality itself. Right now, we can't deny the unstoppable reality of the displaced in the whole world, and even more in front of the dynamic process that globalization has made, worn economies, and democracies of other lands that have forced the human movement that we are witnessing.

This misunderstanding is treated by defensive and restrictive politics that an immigrant faces in political, social, and cultural silence. An in and out, without voice or presence, that needs the reflection, that eventually will drive us from outside to the inside of the consciousness with the intention of reconciling, developing: “ a description of what has been lived from the outside. Drawing the experience of the body, the space, the limits of will, the presence of the other”. The migrant.

Reflection that puts together the voices of time, of the deepness, of us with the foreigner that inhabits us and the limits of the others presence as a hidden trajectory supporting the metaphorized wellbeing in fast food. The to-go food filled with meaning generating a narrative of the other, the migrant, in the visual work of ALONSO GALUE (Merida-Venezuela, 1994- ) who intentionally used the food wrapping as evidence of the one who uphold the system with his absence, the one with no rights like a consequence of the brittleness of his existence, that even so, makes the legal citizen enjoy his own, who has access to all the benefits of a consumer society.

Society that doesn’t see in the displacement of immigrants their instability or survival, because the only way it lives is through consumption. GALUE proposes in the process of food, the limitations of the fenced swallowed other, so in a labor space, insecure, as in the non-presence as the one that hidden, appears as food in the space of human handling.

IMMIGRANTS TO GO make us notice the presence of the other, the one that we don’t love, the one that we don’t want to recognize because we wouln’t forgive ourselves understanding why

he is there or his forced displacement to a new territory. Land that allegedly would offer a better quality of life perhaps, at the same time, limits immigrants bodies, their spaces and the limits of their will as their unpersonified existence. Labor immigrants, disposable existences swallowed by a social system and seasonal jobs.

GALUE has experience himself this way of living, knowing himself as the other, finding the brittleness of the labor system experiencing the immigrant perception. An existence that resignifies an environment consuming daily millions of anonymous people, within societies enjoying the pleasure of to-go services.

ELIZABETH MARIN
PHD IN CONTEMPORARY ARTS

~ In 2021 Alonso became a member of Agitator.