Affective diffusion between migrants and inhabitants : case of Lampedusa Island

The main objective of this essay is to consider Polish perception of the 21st-century European movement of migration and analyse the literary and artistic representations of this experience through the examples of Jarosław Mikołajewski’s A Great Surge, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Guests, Anna Konik’s In the Same City, Under the Same Sky and Margot Sputo’s Who Where?. I relate these works to the latest international art, including projects by Ai Weiwei, E. B. Itso, Giacomo Sferlazzo, and look for common denominators. I claim that the common feature of many artistic projects is the creation of a substitute for contact between the viewer and refugees, appealing to other senses than sight, especially to the sense of touch. These works do not attempt to represent the experience of migrants as individuals, but point to the experience of migration in its elemental aspect-matter and physical contact, exposure to destruction, dependence, intimacy, confrontation with others. What’s more, art based on migrant movement-referring to the imagined experience of direct contact with migrants or their belongings-bypasses the process of identification and empathy. Instead, it relies on affective transmission. I propose a category of affective diffusion as a process that can occur not only between sentient individuals but also as a result of the material aspect of art and the contact with the viewer. The inspiration to create the concept of affective diffusion is the relationship between migrants and inhabitants described by Jarosław Mikołajewski in his essay Wielki Przypływ [A Great Surge] which shows aspects of migration through Lampedusa Island. Many inhabitants who are asked about migrants show intensive emotions like anger, fear and xenophobia. But the testimonies of people who see the living and the dead day after day suggest that these emotions get weaker under the influence of physical contact. It seems that the moment of two bodies getting in touch undermines the frozen system of ideas and emotions, stimulates feelings, opens up a new, ambiguous potential for understanding. This is because expressive emotions lose their importance with the activation of affective transmission. This physical contact gives rise to changes in the economy of feeling, thinking and judging