Derek (DJ) Harris
Art 309 – Migration and Visual Art
Greene
FINAL PAPER
For this paper I am choosing to do the theme of borders. The Alladeen web site and the film documentary Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night (2005, Gulati) are great examples of creating new world borders, as well as new world identities. Both of these use technology to help connect the world from one end to the other more easily. Along with both of these art pieces, I would also like to incorporate Mona Hatoum and her Marble World (1999 – 2007) piece and how it also uses borders and a vehicle.
Globalization is a big part of today’s world and is becoming more recognized as the way of the future every day. It has been around for a long time but it is just now starting to come more into focus. We read an article about a man that used a large number of satellite dishes to get channels from all over the world and is now helping women in his town keep in touch with their home countries. We also learned about people who choose to move, or are exiled from their home countries. What is really interesting is how much the lifestyle does or doesn’t change when they move. People can move halfway across the world to a completely different country that speaks a different language and find out that its not that hard to settle in at all because things are becoming so similar. Everywhere we look countries are blending into one and it isn’t always that one country is taking on another ones beliefs, it’s more of a merging of two cultures into one. Now we even have companies with branches in other parts of the world so that they can run twenty four straight hours out of the day. When one country shuts down for the night, the other one picks up. These companies are something that I would like to discuss further through the Alladeen web site and Gulati’s film.
The Alladeen web site and the film Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night shows us, the viewer, what it is like to be one of these workers that work for a company halfway around the world. The film Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night shows us the whole operation on a global scale. Gulati is thrown off when someone can properly pronounce her name on the phone so she decides to figure out more of why this is. It turns out it was a girl from her native India doing work for an American company. She works the night shift in India doing this job because it pays extremely well and she can experiences a new side of the world. The Alladeen website interviews these workers on a much more personal level to help us, as a viewer, to understand and experience what it is like to bridge one side of the world to another. We hear about what it is like for an Indian, with a fake American persona, to interact with an actual American on a one on one level. The film takes us through the process of how this whole process works. We find out that many companies from different countries are grouped into different sections of the same building. People take vocal lessons (so that Americans can understand them) to work here just because of how well it pays. We also learn that people don’t stay in this job very long because of the wear it has on their personal life. These people really enjoy the experience and take a lot of new learnings away from it, but it is just too much on them.
This all has to do with borders because of how these people who work at these places transcend borders themselves. They work in a place we call Asia, but at the same time they are apparently working for companies in America. The companies force these people to no longer be identified as an Asian. Instead they are now the person on the other end of the phone that could be as close as the building next door. The inability to distinguish identity over the phone makes us feel as though they are in our country. Vocal lessons, American countries, and all these American accents make borders vanish. We are no longer Americans on the phone with a stranger from another land; instead we are two people who are linked by something that is much bigger than either of them could have ever anticipated.
The Alladeen web site helps to exemplify this for us. While the film showed us what the work was like on working level, we never really feel what the people are experiencing; We never really get to see what it’s like to bridge borders between multiple countries. This web site helps to fix that. Here we get to hear what several peoples’ experiences on a personal, one on one level. They all share their newly acquired wisdom from talking to people of a different culture that they might not ever experience otherwise. Each person goes through and says what they thought of Americans before they had this job and what they think of them now after working there sometime. Some may like Americans more, and others may like them less, but it is for certain that their perceptions have grown and changed. They also talked about some of their favorite experiences while on the phone with a stranger. Some of them were funnier than others but the shear ability to have that story of talking to a stranger from another world is something to talk about on its own.
The amazing fact with these interviews is that the American’s I’m referring to, aren’t just Americans to them. The job and the experiences that come along with it give the workers a new outlook on what it is like to not have borders. The borders blend into one because they are associating with the Americans much like they would if they were talking to a fellow Indian on the phone. Much like how I said before, the Americans have no idea where the worker they are talking to is from. The worker while aware of where the American is at, is forced to treat the American as a friend, as someone he or she would personally stick his or her neck out for. This lack of gap created makes these two separate parties treat each other as they would their own.
Mona Hatoum’s Marble World piece is another artistic way to show this. This is one of my favorite artworks I have seen in the past couple of years because of the thought process she gives to it. The time and attention to detail of placing every marble exactly where it needs to go in order for the world to take shape while she knows good and well that pieces will roll to new locations changing the shape of the art. The biggest part of the piece is that she wants this to happen. She wants marbles that belong to Africa to roll into the Oceania and she wants Russia to roll into South America. The first couple of times I wondered why she didn’t color coordinate each of the continents, but then I realized that I hadn’t fully understood the art. I know I still don’t even now, but I am a lot further along than before. The reason all the marbles are clear or white is because she wants there to be a lack of identity with the borders. You can’t tell where each country starts or ends because of the marbles being the same color. The same goes with the continents and they lose their original shape and gain a new one. She wants pieces of France to end up in Ghana. Her piece often makes me think of the World cup in how every team although they still keep their separate identities, they all inhabit the same country for one month every four years. They bridge the gap of borders and blend all nations into one for a single common purpose. Hatoum’s piece is much of the same in the gaze of globalization. Mona Hatoum’s marble world shows globalization, borders, as well as identities at its best form. The marbles represent the constant change the world is in.
Because of globalization, borders will disappear and reconstruct in new ways. Identity has a lot to do with this as similar identities group together to form new borders. Borders in themselves are not literal; they don’t physically exist in most cases and they are always meant to be broken. People are slowly learning about what globalization is and how to approach it realistically. In fact, I think we have been doing that for quite sometime. I wrote this paper as a hybrid of both identity and borders because you will not have one without some idea of the other.
Derek (DJ) Harris
Art 309 – Migration and Visual Art
Greene
WORKS CITED
(1) Sara Ahmed, “Uprootings/regroundings: qestions of home and migration. (New York: Berg, 2003) 60-80.
(2) Rosemary Betterton, An intimate distance: women, artists, and the body. (London: Routledge, 1996) 188-191.
(3) Alledeen Website
(4) Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night. Gulati. 2005
(5) Marble World. Mona Hatoum
(note for references with paper. Though I did not directly quote all of these authors, I did however use them as some sort of frame work for my own discussions. Due to page length I was unable to bring in quotes without directly adding onto large amounts of page length because of how I would like to properly explain them)
