Musafiri

The Arabic word musafir resonates with stunning phonetic consistency across languages and within strikingly different cultural spaces, from Romanian to Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, Swahili, Kazakh, and Uygur, among others, in a vast, uninterrupted geography. While the original meaning and in most of these languages the word denotes that of a ‘traveller’, in Turkish and Romanian it has come to designate a ‘guest’, a position that is special and most welcomed. In Romanian, in particular, musafir resonates with the privilege of the domestic realm, a word mostly reserved for those who are received into one’s home. The exhibition Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests is thus rooted in efforts to make possible a world where travellers arrive and are received as guests. It follows worlds as they have been braided by intrepid travellers and unwillingly displaced individuals and communities in history, to the intensifying migratory movements of today. The exhibition traverses the worlds that open when one leaves the familiar confines of their corner of the world, and the many artistic conversations that are born on the cusps of these encounters.

Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests speaks from the present moment, taking into account current manifestations of much older tensions around who is welcomed and who is not, which perspectives are welcomed and which are not, and who decides on these limits. Public conversations and contemporary politics in many contexts, with Germany among the starkest examples, have become increasingly filled with anxiety over perceived threats to established (and often hegemonic) ways of seeing the world from those respective local contexts. As such, the exhibition constitutes an urgent plea to acknowledge and assert the polyphonic worlds brought together by the experience of those who have moved past their points of origin.

To get there, the exhibition needs to make a few detours (an experience familiar to many travellers)—through time rather than geography. Journeys and quests have been fundamental in the imagination of personal becoming, as many enduring stories as well as debates in the field of narratology point out to. But while embarking on a wandering quest might be decisive for the composition of one’s sense of self, so it might also be for developing a coherent imagination of the world. One such detour is through the long tradition of imagining a universality developed outside the project of the European Enlightenment. This detour looks to how exactly this appeared through the perspectives of people who have left their worlds of origin. It would be difficult for such a conversation not to take into account one of the most significant historical moments in this regard, Lourenço da Silva Mendonça’s 1684 winning case against slavery presented at the Vatican. A prince from the royal house of Ndongo (in present-day Angola), he was a remarkable traveller and universalist. But the truly historic dimension of his case lies in the arguments formulated by Mendonça in his plea, which relied on a notion of rights shared by all human beings, ‘Jews, pagans, or Christians on every land in the world’—a century prior to the white abolitionist movement and predating the political upheavals of the late eighteenth century. With this knowledge established, what route should be taken in the questioning of notions previously attributed to the European Enlightenment, including the rightfully challenged notion of ‘human rights’, often criminally instrumentalized under the US-American consensus, knowing that it was first uttered by a prince from Ndongo in 1684, when he spoke on behalf of all humanity?

With macro histories ever present as a backdrop, Musafiri: Travellers and Guests primarily concerns itself with micro stories, with many works focusing on individuals who have embarked on travels across the world or realized projects that gather encyclopaedic knowledge from across cultural contexts and perspectives. The exhibition considers periods and individuals that predate or fall outside of modern colonial eras, overshadowed as they have been by Eurocentric historiography and the liberal myth of the heroic individual and the ethos of the traveller as a devourer of worlds. In considering the aforementioned examples of pre-modern universalities, the challenge of devising an apparatus able to do historic justice to the majority of anonymous travellers who, through their toil and labour, have built and sustain the world of global capital, is taken up. These travellers are the enslaved individuals of the Great Crossing, indentured labourers from India, China, Indonesia  who went to the Americas, as well as the Indian and Pacific Oceans. These travellers are the migrants of today; not just those still moving towards imperial cores, but also those set on trajectories opened up by changing economic geographies, from South Asia towards the Gulf region, from South East Asia towards East Asia, from across the African continent (and Southern Europe) towards Southern Africa, from the Andes to Brazil, and from Venezuela towards the rest of Latin America.

Many communities of musafiri have been re-enforced and further bound together by the circulation of shared references of popular culture. Some of these references, in addition to several historical tracings, are pointed at in the exhibition: from the current moment of K-pop, which is remaking taste, identification, beauty standards, or ideas of race across Asia and other continents, to the earlier moment of global entanglements that formed around the lambada craze of the 1990s, which in turn came on the heels of the cultural and sonic universes born on both sides of the Black Atlantic that have fundamentally reshaped the very idea of global pop culture. The exhibition is further interested in other spaces around which diasporas have been built, in communal spaces of identification—where travellers can feel like guests, even if just to each other—in the geographies of arrival for many musafiri. Often intertwined with but separate from spaces designed for tourists (those other travellers of the modern era), these are markets, nail and hair salons, and cafes—spaces where communities of support flourish and self-narrate.

Long before popular culture spread, culture and ideas still travelled widely, transforming the very routes they circulated upon. If the first voyages followed the pull of desire for commodities, knowledge, beliefs, and aesthetics accompanied them. An example of these processes can be seen in textiles, which weave together historical layers, social relations, and economic structures that assigned value to their making and fuelled demand for their production and circulation. The pluricontinental and often dark histories of indigo or cochineal dyes, for example, reflect these histories as well as the aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual systems that made them objects to be read and understood, to be received in awe or delight—all while reflecting the subjective and unique voice of their makers.

It would be difficult, however, to surpass the movements and circulations that have been facilitated by religion. It is also within these systems that most visions of universalism have been assembled. Consequently, many of the individual travellers featured in the exhibition followed the routes afforded by religious kinship, while borrowing their systems of making sense of the world. In the process, many of them have shaped them further or even left them behind, as a result of encountering the complexities of the world as it actually appeared to them along the way. Works in the exhibition trace several such themes, for example allusions to the journeys made by itinerant Sufi saints.

Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests calls attention to those stories rendered invisible in the ‘underside’ of globalization, namely those of migrant workers—the anonymous builders of infrastructure, the logistics workers, and the ‘essential workers’ (to use recent pandemic verbiage), either in the far away cities of their own countries (such as the tens of millions of internal migrants who have left rural areas for the Chinese metropolises), in the newly developed regional axes of migration, or along the more historical imperial routes. The works in the exhibition similarly give voice to the stories of people who ensure these very flows, such as the Overseas Filipino Workers who form around a third of the total staff of the entire shipping world. Finally, the exhibition traces the journeys of those who have been forced, by sheer coercion or circumstances, to leave their homes and take up arms in faraway places under foreign flags, from the millions who fought for colonial empires in world wars, to the Nepalis currently engaged by Russia to fight in Ukraine.

But this global capitalist distribution of labour—with its exploitation of racialized bodies and networks of infrastructure that propel the movements of migrant labourers who are being integrated into its production machinery and trade—also excludes individuals and groups for whom borders of many kinds preclude journeys of many kinds. In this global map, drawn from the composite imagination of those under the management of flows of labour—who find themselves caught between endless shifts, chronic unemployment, or an often permanent state of in-between—there is another world aspired to by individuals who have never left their villages but have sustained the flow of global commerce through their hands and dreams (the dynamics of which are to be found in Europe as well).

Through all these questions, we might finally arrive at perhaps the most important one of all, which speaks of many quests and struggles, and that is whether we can still hope that the musafiri will one day, somewhere, encounter a world where the power of a host to decide who is a perpetual musafir is shattered and confined to a chronicle of times passed.