Bard College Berlin

The Skin of the Law

European Migration Regimes and their Global Realities

What counts as legal and as illegal migration is established in Germany’s law on residency, the official name of which is the “law to control and restrict immigration and to regulate the residence and integration of EU citizens and foreigners.” Based on this law, people get deported, people get imprisoned, people get permission or a right to stay, people are assigned to integration courses and provided with work permits. But these provisions don’t convey the full range of political and social realities. The nation states have built a European migration regime of which German law forms a part – a legal maze that has repercussions all around the globe.

The law mediates and moderates, it classifies and justifies. And it grows skin; beneath and above it, inside and around; to separate and to connect, to feel and to desensitize, to protect and to expose.

The students from this semester’s migration class IL/LEGAL have transposed their knowledge, experience and research on migration regimes of the present and the past into artistic projects. The multiplicity of their backgrounds, showing migration as the norm not as the exception, helps to reveal the arbitrariness of the regimes’ development, but also connections, correspondences and commonalities.

Instructors: Marion Detjen, Dorothea von Hantelmann

With contributions from: Jelizaveta Ostrovska, Anas Almaghrabi, Arianna Adabachi, Lena Kocutar, Idil Morsallioglu, Dachil Sado, Aryana Arian, Danny Dubner, Océanne Fry & Sara Mardini, Ameenah Sawan, Claire Dickson, Zoe Oro-Hahn, Julia Bohm, Estrella Frankenfeld

Supported by: the Mellon-funded Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education