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Albums of no return:Ethnicity, displacement andrecognition in photographsof North African immigrantsin contemporary SpainParvati NairPublished online: 04 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Parvati Nair (2000) Albums of no return: Ethnicity,displacement and recognition in photographs of North African immigrantsin contemporary Spain, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 1:1, 59-73, DOI:10.1080/713683434

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Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2000

1463-6204 print/1469-9818 online/00/010059-15 © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

Albums of no return: ethnicity, displacement and recognitionin photographs of North African immigrants in contemporary Spain

PARVATI NAIR

The question of the self’s relation to the other, so central to concepts of identity ,is rendered visible through the ethnically diverse populations of the contemporaryWestern metropolis. In the shifting urban landscapes which ensue from suchmultiplicity, not only is the ‘national’ seen as plural, but the imagined edges ofthe nation are revealed as scattered and fragile. Following in the wake of Spain’stransition to democracy and entry into the European community have come thenorthward strivings of economic migrants from the African continent, bothMaghrebian and sub-Saharan. Spurred on by received images of Westernprosperity, they have been arriving in growing spurts since approximately 1985and making their uncertain way through rural and urban zones. While many ofthe sub-Saharan migrants are refugees, the majority of the Maghrebians, mostlyMoroccans, come for economic reasons. The increasingly visible presence ofthese migrant communities in the main Spanish cities turns the latter into amultiplicity of spaces and tempos, where there are no linear narratives which cansufficiently articulate the experiences of diaspora. It is impossible to ignore thepolitical economics surrounding migration as a feature of late capitalism. Formigrants, the political and social contexts within which ethnicity is firstlytransported and then enacted are coloured by the effects on the host nation ofeconomic and cultural globalization. However, while recognizing the importanceof such issues for future work (my own and that of others), I wish in this paper tofocus on narratives of ethnicity and cultural memory, problematizing the questionof recognition in relation to migrant communities.

Most of Spain’s Maghrebian communities come not from the larger towns orcities of Morocco, but from the Rif region and the south of Morocco. In an ironicecho of Spain’s own sudden leap into postmodernity, the Moroccan immigrantsleave behind the still predominantly pre-modern and oral contexts of their nativecommunities in order to stake a claim in the material prosperity of the West. Inso doing, they must also often find ways of transporting and relocating thehanded-down cultural memory that locates and organizes such predominantly oralcommunities. 1 What follows, therefore, are experiences of temporal and spatialdislocation, whereby the tenets of pre-modern communities no longer hold.Indeed, it is important to bear in mind that these tenets were disturbed prior totheir leaving: the dream of the West arises for the Moroccans largely from theidealized images relayed by satellite television which throw into relief theeconomic backwardness and lack of infrastructure in their own country. Withinthe framework of globalized late capitalism, the future becomes conceived inthose terms and images projected by the media, with the consequent displacementof traditional, more ‘organic’ values. The articulation of cultural identity is thus

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forced to confront contradiction, as temporal ruptures occur between present andfuture. As the ground for the shared experience of the present fractures, there areno pre-existing discourses which can serve to bind the constructions of a culturalpast reiterated through orally transmitted, memory-based narratives and a futureshot through with the capitalist dreams of postmodernity. Furthermore, culturalmemory, the basis on which ethnic identity reconstructs itself, must be enacted instrange and indeterminate places. With the spatial dislocation involved in the actof migration, cultural memories become unsettled by travel, even as theimmigrants strive in their new contexts for the means with which to recognizethemselves and thereby ask for recognition.

It is in this context that I consider the photographs of Moroccan immigrantsliving in Barcelona taken by the Catalan photographer, Núria Andreu Castellví.2

My aim is to consider the concepts of ethnicity and cultural memory as perceivedthrough Andreu’s photographs. I also wish to consider the role of photography inthe construction of cultural memory. I shall be concerned with the ways in whichthe ambivalence of these photographs allows for multiple readings for, whilstthey are clearly framed by the lens of a Catalan viewer on the ‘outside’ ofimmigrant experience, nevertheless these images of Moroccan cultural life inSpain raise questions with regard to remembered ethnic identity in the face ofdisplacement. Andreu’s avowed intentions are to exhibit cultural differences incontemporary Catalonia. Here it is necessary to consider the different ways inwhich different spectators — in a postmodern, cosmopolitan Barcelona — arelikely to process these images.

The theoretical framework for my analysis juxtaposes the late twentieth-century reassessment of the ethnographic task with Eduardo Cadava’s explorationof Walter Benjamin’s imagination of history through the language ofphotography. The ethnographers I draw on are George Marcus, who calls for ‘amulti-sited research imaginary in the midst of general transition’ (1998: 9); andElizabeth Edwards, who assesses the place of still photography in anthropology .Cadava probes Benjamin’s writings in order to uncover the convergencesbetween photography as a ‘flash of the past’ and historical understandings .

My knowledge of Andreu’s work and intentions stems largely from herstatements to me in an interview in January 1999, and also from the views on herphotographs expressed by members of Ciutat Vella’s immigrant community.Andreu’s work focuses on the Moroccan inhabitants of Ciutat Vella, near theRamblas in Barcelona, in order to portray aspects of their social and communallives in the Catalan capital. In particular, she attempts to put forward visibleexpressions of ethnic identity which serve to differentiate the immigrantcommunity from the surrounding cultural and social contexts. The overallprofessed aim of her work is to inform the local Catalan community about thenature of the Moroccan ethnicity now in their midst, in order to secure a strongerneighbourhood understanding. Thus nearly all of her photographs on this subjectseek out those cultural signs, events and actions which apparently connect thecommunity with their native contexts. This presumably marks out the migrants’otherness to Spanish viewers, conversely implying the latter’s otherness to them,and thus doubly affirming the ‘other’ that inhabits the ‘self’.

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After training in photography, Andreu started her professional career in 1992,through her collaboration with the organization S.O.S. Racism in former EastGermany. This collaboration was triggered by a wave of racist attacks on refugeecamps sheltering Kurds, and consisted in a series of photographs of immigrantrefugee camps and of anti-racist events in various German cities. The followingyear she moved to Madrid and, through S.O.S. Racism’s office there, wasintroduced to ATIME (Asociación de Trabajadores Inmigrantes Marroquíes enEspaña) whose organized protests against the 1996 Ley de Extranjería shephotographed. Since 1996, Andreu has been undertaking photographic coverageof the Moroccan population in Ciutat Vella as part of her collaboration in an on-going long-term social project called Xenofília. This project has been set up byfive non-governmental organisations based in Barcelona (Associació per l’Estudii la Promoció del Desenvolupament Comunitari, Cooperacció, Entrepobles, Món3 Universitaris per al Tercer Món, and Sodepau), funded in part by the Spanishgovernment in accordance with European Union directives on the integration ofimmigrants, and in part by the Generalitat de Catalunya and local municipalcouncils. The Xenofília project is in line with Barcelona’s overall drive towardsmaking local communities responsible for the well-being of their localitiesthrough positive neighbourhood practices. Its aim is ‘la solidaritat e integració depersones immigrades i autòctones al barri de Ciutat Vella’ (Andreu 1998b). It isclear that the participating NGOs view Xenofília as playing an important socialfunction by promoting cultural awareness in the indigenous community, thushopefully creating strong neighbourhood ties. As Andreu’s words below imply,the project assumes a clear borderline between immigrant and local communities:a borderline which some might question.3 This is further evidenced in the titleTrencant Fronteres of the photographic exhibition, organized as part of theXenofília project, which displayed Andreu’s photographs from 25 April-30 May1998 at the Sala Arpi in Barcelona (owned by the photographic equipmentcompany ARPI, who supply her with materials). In her introduction to theexhibition, Andreu describes the subject of her work, the locality of Ciutat Vella,as follows:

Un espai que compartit al centre de la ciutat, el barri de Ciutat Vella aBarcelona esta sotmès constantment als canvis urbanístics i socials. Comun cor que batega, al ritme del temps i de l’espai que li toca viure,s’expandeix en una atmosfera densa, a vegades difícil de comprendre.(1998b)

The boundaries that Andreu refers to are not merely those of ethnic differencebut also those of the enclosed space of Ciutat Vella, which has now become aspace of cultural and ethnic cross-overs. Andreu goes on to evoke the dialoguewith alterity that underlines her photographs — a dialogue based on the sharedtemporal and cultural experience of diversity:

El gest d’un moment que reivindica la seva presència solidaria en elnuestre entorn, el de tots. El contacte dels rostres amb l’aire que omple laplaça i els carrers, iguals o diferents a d’altres. Els nens continuen jugant,

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els joves parlant, les dones passen i desapareixen. Les imatges esrefereixen ja a un passat, evocant l’existencia d’aquest temps, que és elnostre. (1998 b)

Here, Andreu is attempting to address the confusion that she perceives asresulting from the presence of ethnic difference in the heart of Barcelona: aconfusion which is, in her own words, ‘difícil de comprendre’ and based on thecross-over of different temporal experiences lived by those in Ciutat Vella.

Andreu’s work evidently proceeds from an ideological position which alignsher with organizations seeking to advise and accommodate immigrants from theThird World in the West. During my interview with her, she stated that she is‘anti-racist’ and wishes to work for greater tolerance and for greater opportunitiesfor such minority groups. Her photography aims to counter traditional attitudesin Catalonia and the rest of Spain which view the nation as a closed space. Oneinevitably has to ask whether her work succeeds in its attempt to create a higherdegree of social and cultural equality: a perhaps illusory project given economicand political realities. The artistic efforts of her photography are matched by anethnographic intention.4 Her pictures aim primarily to construct a narrative ofidentity in terms of ‘realist’ photography: a narrative that is ideologically firedsince its aim is social change. The extent to which photography can be ‘realist’ is,of course, questionable. As Edwards (1997) makes clear, photography acts as abridge between chronicle and art. And, as previously mentioned, one mayquestion Andreu’s underlying assumption of a clearly delineated borderlinebetween communities. Nevertheless, in practice, the ambivalence generated byher photographs within the context in which they are produced undermines orcontradicts such certain foundations, as I hope to show.

The Xenofília project uses Andreu’s photographs in several of its publicityleaflets. Interestingly, it has used one of her pictures of Kurdish refugees inGermany for a leaflet informing Moroccan immigrants of help with findingaccommodation available in Ciutat Vella. The leaflet, printed in Arabic, Catalanand Spanish, does not state that the photograph is of Kurds nor does itacknowledge Andreu as the photographer. Andreu, however, showed me theleaflet as an example of the uses to which her work has been put. The assumptionseems to be that the photograph reveals no visible ethnic or racial differencebetween the Kurds who are represented and the Moroccans who are targeted,despite the fact that — apart from their diverse geographical and culturalprocedence — the former are political refugees in Germany and the lattereconomic migrants in Spain. This blurring of their positions, while perhapspolitically useful, seems problematic. If, on the one hand, organizations such asthose involved in the Xenofília project seek to counter racial prejudice andintolerance, on the other hand the constructed nature of their rhetoric, mirroringthe structural features of dominant discourses, becomes transparent once the useof the photograph out of context is known. The implication is that immigrantidentity can be expressed in the same terms regardless of location, levellingsubalternity by disregarding the particulars of place and time and by erasing thecultural specificities of each community. Neither Andreu nor the organizers of

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Xenofilia responsible for co-opting this photograph seem to be aware of theproblematic implications of this disregard for cultural differences betweendifferent immigrant groups and different locales of emigration, though one notesthat the photograph is not attributed to Andreu on the leaflet. At the same time,the photograph’s use out of context permits a fluid cross-over of projections ofidentity based on a degree of shared, if spatially fractured, experience. Thequestion that needs to be asked is whether this seemingly postmodern challengeto fixed identity is limited to the representation of ‘foreign’ migrants, thusreinforcing the boundary between Europeans and their ‘others’; or whether thatboundary too is shaken — an issue addresssed in the photographs I shall go on todiscuss.

Andreu’s representations of subaltern ethnic groups must be considered in thelight of her professional career development. Her photographs mark out aprofessional terrain and area of expertise, one where very few other Spanishphotographers have as yet ventured. She is highly regarded by ATIME5 and otherNGOs, who value her work for taking Moroccan immigrant identity into thesphere of public debate. Exhibition of her work, subsidized in part by ARPI,provides as much publicity for the company as for her subject matter, therebyhelping to promote their products by appealing to new clientele. It is thereforeimpossible to isolate Andreu’s ideological stance from the wider social, politicaland economic contexts which influence it and in which it is obviously implicated,with the attendant stress on social visibility and marketability. It is also importantto bear in mind Andreu’s relations with the subjects of her photographs. Shestates that, while many of the photographs were taken with the knowledge andconsent of the subjects, nevertheless some were taken without their awareness.Her photographs concentrate largely on the Moroccans’ public life, withparticular emphasis on their participation in events related to their inheritedethnicity. This is an arena that is predominantly male-dominated, given theadherence to Islam in the community and the predominance of men over womenamong the immigrant population. Andreu’s own position with regard to them asa woman, a non-Muslim and a Spaniard has, she states, placed constraints on herfreedom to photograph. Her photographic work, therefore, needs to be read as aconvergence of cultural text, social constraints and ethnographic intent.Furthermore, the photographs offer multiple readings that may or may not havebeen intended by Andreu or by the participating immigrants. From this thereemerge several questions pertinent to on-going debates in contemporaryethnography.

George Marcus’s essay ‘Requirements for ethnographies of late-twentieth-century modernity’ (1998: 57-78) is triggered by an article in Radical HistoryReview which problematizes ‘the question of who or what controls and definesthe identity of individuals, social groups, nations and cultures’ (1998: 58). As histitle suggests, Marcus attempts to reassess practices in realist ethnography whichcontinue to rely upon such framing concepts as ‘community, subculture ,traditions and practices’ (1998: 61). He does so by laying out a set of practiceswhich are based on a reassessment of the culture of late modernity andsubsequently require a break with some of the founding tropes of ethnography .

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Marcus probes the concept of the spatial in ethnography and asks for a break withtraditional understandings of community. He states that ‘culture has been mappedliterally onto locality to define one basic frame of reference orientingethnography’ (1998: 62). Cultural identity, he insists, is simultaneously producedin different places for different purposes and should be viewed as a ‘process ofdispersed identity’ (1998: 63). The latter, therefore, should always be viewed asmultiple and multi-sited. Marcus also probes the question of history andtemporality and asks for a break with the practice of historical determination inexplaining the ethnographic present. He notes that realist ethnography relies uponWestern historical metanarratives; instead he foregrounds the traces andexpressions of scattered memories as clues to the present. Furthermore, Marcusmoves away from a structuralist approach to cultural analysis towards aprivileging of the senses, whereby ethnography becomes more visible and sayablethrough overlapping sets of associations and experiences.

Just as Marcus urges ethnographers to look beyond the discipline’s traditionalboundaries, so Elizabeth Edwards (1997) reassesses the role of still photographyin visual anthropology by looking beyond the disciplinary edges to widerphotographic discourse. According to Edwards, visual anthropology in generalprivileges film as the main visual medium with ‘political, structural or expressivepossibilities ’ (1997: 53). The photograph, states Edwards, has usually beenrelegated to documentary archives, since the assumption is that it freezes andframes time, experience and history. In particular, Edwards writes against thetraditional use of still photography as a realist medium. In place of anoppositional conception of visual production, where the realist is in polaropposition to the expressive and the anthropological document is seen as in polaropposition to art, Edwards argues for a dialectic which seeks the ‘interaction ofanthropology and still photography on and beyond the discipline boundary’(1997: 53). Thus, for Edwards, the still photograph frames the confluence ofanthropology with other forms of articulation and expression. It is consequently amulti-dimensional and ambivalent site of fluidity which invites questions andoffers perspectives rather than providing closure. Photographs are thus filled withpossibilities that open up the anthropological boundary. In this sense,photographs directly challenge anthropology’s traditional encapsulation of the‘other’, decentering and repositioning traditional concepts of history, experienceand identity. The dimensions of historical experience, central to cultural identity ,coalesce in the spatial and temporal intersections of photography, making themrevealing yet also ambiguous.

Marcus and Edwards coincide in their efforts to travel beyond the confines oftraditional anthropological discourse in their search for new forms ofinterpretation and understanding. While Marcus examines conventional practicesand assumptions or tropes, Edwards explores the possibilities of constructing newmeanings from photographs. Both problematize the textual production ofethnographic knowledge. If ethnography’s role is to analyse culture, then it mustalso take into account its own procedural implication in the latter. As Marcusstates (1986: 168), ‘the ethnographic position of authority’ on culture must giveway to an awareness of incompleteness and ambivalence. This point is of

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relevance to Andreu’s photographs. If her aim has been to portray her subjectsrealistically in order to produce an ethnographic document of immigrant culturalidentity, then the resulting incompleteness of her efforts opens up furtherpossibilities. Her photographs may therefore be considered for the questions theypose, rather than for any certainties they appear to offer. One must rememberhere her photographic training and material indebtedness to ARPI, who housedher exhibition as significant of photographic potential in its many dimensions,artistic and otherwise. Similarly, ensuing from anthropology’s implications inlarger cultural contexts is the reminder that cultural studies — which Marcus(1998: 4) sees as up against the anthropological boundary — also operates withinmultiple sites and tempos. The interdisciplinary dimensions of cultural studiesrender any cultural analysis incomplete and open to further questions. Thus anyattempt, such as this, to analyse critically Andreu’s ethnographic attempts shouldbe viewed in the interrogative rather than in the affirmative.

The photographs I wish to examine in detail were presented to me by Andreuin the course of my meeting with her. When showing me the photographs, sheordered them into sets of sequences (by implication replicating the course ofevents as witnessed by her), each set being based on a common location and time.Nevertheless, when I first arrived, the photographs were not arranged in anyobvious order but were picked out of a pile of other examples of her work, allrelating to Moroccans in Barcelona. Any reading of the photographs thereforewill depend, firstly, on Andreu’s sequencing of them in terms of the narrativesthey are intended to contain, and in turn on my own arrangement of them. WhileI do not discuss here all the photographs that Andreu showed me, I do endeavourto maintain the internal order of each sequence as constructed by Andreu. It isalso clear that several of the sequences reveal a logical narrative progression intheir ordering. The photographs discussed here were all part of the TrencantFronteres exhibition. They depend to a great extent on general preconceptionsand understandings of Islam among the viewers, since the predominant visiblemarkers of ethnicity are based on religious affiliation rather than ‘race’ ornational identity.

It is important here to distinguish between the different types of spectators forthe exhibition. Barcelona’s cosmopolitan population comprises not just urbanCatalans but also immigrants from other parts of Spain and abroad. Theexhibition would thus have been viewed by first- and second-generationimmigrants from rural parts of Spain as well as Moroccan immigrants and othernationals. The reception of the photographs would differ according to therespective cultural contexts of each group or individual .

The Eid el Kebir sequence marks the observation of this major Islamic holyday in Barcelona. The sacrificial ritual begins with the feeding of the sheep bythe children of the family. Here, in the first photograph, they are seen in a largefield on the outskirts of Barcelona, Prat de Llobregat. Implicit is the distancebetween this field and where they actually live, Ciutat Vella. The viewer wouldunderstand that they have had to come here in order to fulfill this religiousobligation, since there are no provisions for carrying it out near their homes. Theisolated location of Prat de Llobregat away from the centre of Barcelona acts as a

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metaphor for the immigrants’ position in society and the alienness of theircultural inheritance within the new cultural contexts which they now inhabit. Inthe background, other groups of Moroccans can be seen as they unpack from vansand set up the equipment for the ritual slaughter. The picture suggests a camp,which can be dismantled after use, signalling deracination. The wind that catchesthe little child’s hair further speaks of impermanence, although the children areseen to comply with tradition. The second photograph shows men trying to catcha sheep. Behind them is the farmhouse from which the sheep were purchased.They appear to enjoy the attempts to capture the sheep. Inevitably, a range ofattitudes to the slaughter of animals is likely to be held by different groups ofspectators. Thus immigrants to Catalonia from rural areas elsewhere in Spainmay find that the celebration strikes chords with the practice of the matanza(normally of a pig, the eating of pork being prohibited by Islam of course) in theirvillage of origin. Non-Moroccan Muslim immigrants (such as many of the sub-Saharan Africans or Pakistanis who populate Ciutat Vella) may discern both theirshared cultural heritage with the Moroccans together with the explicit features ofdisplacement and also specific cultural distinctions which distinguish one groupof Muslims from another. Yet others, such as urban Catalans or Latin Americans,may read the photographs as visions of cultural and ethnic ‘otherness’, and mayindeed be shocked by the ritual slaughter. Thus Andreu’s photographs show heralliance with the immigrant cultural events while also emphasizing their‘strangeness’ to Catalonia. Here Marcus’s notion of culture as ‘a process ofdispersed identity’ comes to mind. While the photographs frame and so attempt tofreeze identity, they also elicit multiple and multi-sited readings. This invites areading in terms of Edwards’s view of the photograph as a site of fluidity that issimultaneously revealing and ambiguous.

The third photograph shows a whole family engaged in cleaning the carcass.Andreu has no photographs of the slaughter itself, which follows the sacrificialprayer led by an imam. This is firstly because Islam forbids pictures or images inthe context of prayer and, secondly, because only men take part in this religiousact. Thus only the ‘social’ aspects of the holy day could be framed by Andreu.The fourth photograph in this series underlines the larger social and politicalcontexts within which this Islamic act must occur (Figure 1): as the men clean thecarcasses, the Spanish police watch from a discreet distance and a plane signalsthe proximity of the airport. Implied in the police presence is the asking ofpermission to use the field for these purposes, itself symbolic of the immigrants’disadvantaged social position. Also in evidence is the monitoring of communalactivities and the hint of threat as members of the establishment survey theoutsiders within their territories. The police presence also speaks of expectationsof unruliness or disorderly behaviour from the immigrants, confirmingcommonplace stereotypes attached to foreigners and any economic underclass.By the same token, the practice of Islam is rendered somewhat subversive, as if indefiance of established norms. The fifth photograph shows the carcasses beingstrung up on racks to bleed and to be disembowelled by the butcher. The beardedman stands by with a carrier bag which bears the name of a local supermarketin Ciutat Vella, likely to be familiar to many viewers. The simultaneous cleansing

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Figure 1. Núria Andreu, Trencat Fronteres, 1998: ‘Laid K’bir. Prat de Llobregat’.

of several sheep implies the presence of several families who must all share onespace and forego individual distinctions, viewing themselves as one community.The sixth photograph shows a Moroccan woman video-recording the events ofthe day, while another police van watches in the distance. The role of the videocamera in identity constructions has been explored from various angles.6 Forexample, Sherman (1998) and Planell (1998) stress the importance of video inconstructing and reflecting back upon projections of identity. In the context ofthe Moroccans, who are economic migrants, the video camera speaks veryevidently of the acquisition of material objects associated with the West. Here,Andreu’s photograph not only records a cultural event, but also records theturning of the cultural event into a cultural text by the performers of the event.The video-recording of the holy day confirms at once the adherence to Moroccantraditions and the shift to a European standard and way of living (television andvideo). It echoes Andreu’s photographic act in that it suggests the transportabilit yof the Eid el Kebir event from the margins of Barcelona to countless otherlocations, including back to those left behind in Morocco. This representation ofthe technical means of representation underlines the facility with whichtechnology disseminates cultural products across spatial and temporal frames,locating the ceremony within postmodernity. The final photograph in this seriesmarks the end of a successful day, as the kebabs made from the sheep are shownoff to the camera. The majority of those photographed are below forty — areminder that most immigrants in Spain are of working age.

European understandings of Muslim immigrant ethnic identity are oftendetermined by a focus on the practices of Islam — assumed to be rigidly anduniformly applied — irrespective of whether the people concerned areMoroccans, Algerians, Kurds, etc.7 European spectators may thus be surprised bythe absence of traditional Islamic clothing in the photographs. Nowhere is thereevidence of the veils that non-Muslims may have expected to be worn at such

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religious ceremonies, nor indeed of the djellabas that are traditional in exoticizedvisions of North African culture. All the men and children photographed are incasual Western clothes, while the women appear to make a concession to‘tradition’ by wearing headscarves. If those unfamiliar with contemporaryMorocco may regard the lack of ‘otherness’ in the dress worn for this ritualoccasion as a departure from Moroccan practice ‘at home’ and thus as a sign ofadaptation to life in Europe, Moroccan spectators will find such clothing‘normal’.8 However, other aspects of these photographs are likely to draw theattention of Moroccan viewers to the improvized nature of such rites, required bytheir performance in a new context. Either way, the photographs function as areminder that Islamic culture is not fixed and static. Traditional Islamic practicestipulates that a sheep should be bought and fed in the family home for a monthprior to the sacrifice, a norm that is generally followed. In Barcelona, the sheepwere bought from a farmer who was paid to house them until the day of theslaughter. While the latter normally takes place in the family home, the open,unprotected stretches of Prat de Llobregat poignantly pose a question markaround the issue of home. This is reiterated in the last picture, where the meat isshown to have been grilled on skewers, suggesting an open fire. While inMorocco the sheep would be cooked whole, the skewered meat is furthersuggestive of the contextual flexibility of remembered ethnicity. In this context,Mohamed Derdabi of ATIME spoke of the pride of the Moroccan people athaving their religious festival photographed and exhibited to the public inBarcelona. Multiple spatial and temporal connections emerge from thisexhibition. Not only is a ‘marginal’ immigrant event centralized by its location ina gallery, but Islam is firmly placed in the here and now. For both Moroccan andEuropean spectators, although in different ways, the perception is simultaneouslyof sameness and difference. While the photographed events arise from thecultural memory of the immigrants as they attempt to reconstruct rememberedidentity, their efforts also establish the temporal rupture of displacement.Andreu’s presence at the Eid el Kebir celebrations was welcomed by those takingpart and she told me that she was asked to join them in the meal: the publicityprovided by her camera obviously allowed the immigrants to view her as a meansof social travel. Like the actions of the day themselves, the photographs act astangible artefacts or documents of cultural memory, and yet, at the same time,these same texts serve the ARPI gallery by promoting it as ‘different’ from othercompetitors in the market. Thus the issue of ethnicity and cultural memorybecomes embroiled with capitalist expansion.

Multiple dimensions of space and time are again highlighted in a set of threephotographs taken inside the home of a Moroccan woman in Ciutat Vella duringthe fasting month of Ramadan. The first picture shows a corner table withvarious objects, such as a vase, some glasses and a framed photograph. On theshelf below are further objects and a telephone. Hanging on the wall next to thistable is the calendar for Ramadan, stating the times at which the fast should bestarted and broken each day. Ethnic identity is suggested by more than thecalendar: the glasses on the top shelf bring to mind the sweet black tea so familiarto Moroccan daily life. Paul Rabinow states that tea was introduced to Morocco

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only in the eighteenth century by the English and did not become popular untilthe mid-nineteenth, yet ‘tea and sugar have a tyrannical and obsessive centralityin Morocco’ (Rabinow 1977: 35). The next photograph focuses on another wallof the living-room, this time a wall cabinet with more objects and a televisionscreen showing a family seated in yet another living-room around a meal laid outin front of them. The photograph made little sense to me beyond the image of animage until Andreu explained the context to me: the television screen wasrelaying images of the Ramadan fast being broken on Algerian television.9

Although Moroccan, the owner of the flat was watching the Algerian broadcast ofthe breaking of the fast, presumably because Algeria is reminiscent of ‘home’through shared religious practices, thus showing how national boundaries crossand dissolve in and through cultural practice. Above the screen is a photographof the owner of the flat when she was younger. The third photograph (Figure 2)completes the set with the owner and her two daughters breaking their own fast atthe same time as the family on Algerian television. Behind them on the wall is abasketball net, suggesting the multiple uses of the limited space they inhabit:living room, dining room and playroom all at once. A local newspaper (Andreutold me that it was in Catalan) lies on the table next to the large plate from whichall three eat in the Moroccan way, illustrating cultural and linguistic hybridity .Similarly, the family’s location in Spain overlaps with that of North Africathrough the shared temporal experience which, nevertheless, also raises issues ofdisplacement as ethnic identity must rely upon technology for expression. Theprojection of ethnicity is a gesture of loss as much as of affirmation. Thecramped, foldable table at which the woman and her children eat in the companyof the ‘imagined ethnic community’ on television suggests a future dismantling.Like the Eid el Kebir scenes, once again ethnic identity and cultural memoryappear as constructs or performances which could be removed or replaced in thesame way as the television could be switched off.

Figure 2. Núria Andreu, Trencant Fronteres, 1998: ‘Couscous familiar de Ramadán’.

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Figure 3. Núria Andreu, Trencant Fronteres, 1998: ‘Escuela Cervantes’.

The next sequence of photographs I wish to discuss shows examples of dailylife in Barcelona for the different members of the immigrant community. In thefirst photograph, some men are being trained in construction work, an areathat frequently employs immigrants as casual labour. The photograph atonce signifies their participation in Catalan society but also their subalternposition within the latter, given the often temporary and uncertain nature of thework. The second picture (Figure 3) shows a group of school children fromthe Ciutat Vella area. Racial diversity is evident in their faces, yet they form agroup that is clustered together. Ethnic differences do not seem to interfere intheir integration. However, the inner-city look of the building behind theplayground speaks again of economic subalternity, which thereby becomes adefining factor of their socio-ethnic identity. In the third picture, a Muslim man,wearing the traditional cap, enters what appears to be a disused shop in a run-down street. Over the entrance is a sign in Arabic that reads ‘masjid’ or mosque.Clearly, a shop interior has been converted for communal use as a mosque. The‘nerve of national identity’ (Cesarani and Fulbrook 1996: 60) is called intoquestion by the signs and symbols of Islamic ethnicity inscribed on the streets ofBarcelona. Catalan identity must thus be viewed as transnational and multi-dimensional, connected to other cultures and ethnicities through global networksof migration. This point is reinforced by the next picture, as the day of Sant Joanis celebrated in the neighbourhood of Ciutat Vella. Catalan women try out theMoroccan tea and musical instruments set up by Moroccan neighbours in thestreet festivities to celebrate the day. Overlapping the distinctly Catalan festivalare the tastes and sounds of ethnic alterity as remembered Catalan culturalexpression (the celebration of Sant Joan) explores new hybrid forms ofenunciation.

Different ethnographic narratives emerge from Andreu’s photographs. Whileher use of black and white aims to produce a realist ‘documentary’ portrayal of

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Moroccan immigrants, it can also be seen as an attempt at abstraction, whichheightens the elusiveness of ethnicity. While the photographs rely upon a generalunderstanding of Islam and Morocco, they reinscribe the latter through theexperiences of migration and relocation. Equally, the photographs shed lightupon the cultural fluxes of Catalan identity, as Barcelona is revisited throughmigrant lives. Perhaps Andreu’s photographs reveal more about present-dayCatalonia than about the Moroccans. They fragment immigrant experiences asmuch as they unite them, so that ethnicity appears as a patchwork that iscontextually assembled, reinvented or dismantled. In this sense, Andreu could besaid to avail herself of the immigrants in order to make ideologically motivatedstatements about present-day Catalonia. The inflection of space with time, orperhaps of spaces with times, destabilizes fixed notions of cultural memory andethnic identity reliant upon a single space and a single time-frame. Spatialboundaries and temporal linearity are thus eroded.

Marcus’s problematization of traditional ethnographic tenets aims to take intoaccount such spatial and temporal fractures. Both he and Edwards are concernedwith updating ethnography to a postcolonial mode which can function withinpostmodernity. Their focus on the expressive in ethnography, however, forces arelocation of history into the present. With the erasure of fixed borders comes theloss of temporal depth. The danger in a multi-sited approach to ethnography isthat the ambivalence and indeterminacy of ethnographic narratives can level outhistorical understanding. If, within postmodernity, culture has no location, thencultural memory and history become acutely problematic. Nevertheless, theimposition of a frame, and hence borders, onto a photograph cannot be ignored.The subjects of Andreu’s photographs are foregrounded by the spatial andtemporal demarcations that she imposes upon them. In this sense, the photographserves to catch and contain the dispersal of historical consciousness thataccompanies postmodern cultural dislocation.

In his Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (1997), EduardoCadava explores Walter Benjamin’s conception of history through the languageof photography.10 His point of departure is provided by the following quote fromBenjamin: ‘The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as animage which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seenagain’ (1998: 3). Cadava argues that the flashes and images of history asperceived by Benjamin provide a link with photography present throughout thelatter’s writings. The photograph is the space of multiple relations between, forexample, the image, reproduction, loss, memory, forgetting and mimesis. Cadavalikens this uncertain space to Benjamin’s conception of history as not just themovement of thoughts but also their arrest. The photograph, like history,becomes a caesura, a temporal fragment that projects dialectical constellations ofpast and future as ‘time becomes and disappears’ (1998: 61). In his ‘Theses on thephilosophy of history’, Benjamin famously states: ‘To articulate the pasthistorically does not mean to recognise it “as it really was”. It means to seize amemory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’ (1968: 225). That is to say:history, like the photograph, is that ‘flash of the moment’ before memory isforgotten. Photographs are thus the rescued memory traces of a history which

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eludes direct representation. In this sense, Andreu’s photographs are far morethan realist ‘documents’ of ‘events’.

Benjamin’s imagination of history through the specular offers a convergenceof new technological media and historical understanding in the time of modernity.The global movements of postmodernity further complicate the problem ofhistory. For immigrants to major urban centres, such as the Moroccans of CiutatVella depicted in Andreu’s photographs, abrupt spatial and temporal shifts occurin the flows of a media-oriented late capitalism. The immigrants’ culturalmemory becomes all the more fragmented when caught up in the competingsynchronic signs and discourses of Spanish regional and national identities. AsSpain grapples with issues related to its own cultural and historicalmemory/amnesia, what becomes apparent is the emergence of competing multiplehistories caught up in the cross-currents of a splintered temporality. Culturalrecognition, reliant upon a shared cultural memory, can thus be only partial.Ethnicity — which sustains itself through cultural memory — can at best becaught in fleeting traces. Like the handful of snapshots here, such traces can beshuffled and displaced, to a greater or lesser extent detached from the context ofthe circumstances which gave rise to them and which necessarily enter intodialogue with the circumstances of the different categories of spectator in today’smulticultural Barcelona, as well as with Andreu’s own personal circumstances.While her position as a Catalan makes it virtually inevitable that she present an‘outsider’s vision’ of Moroccan immigrant culture, nevertheless her photographs,exhibited at the Trencant Fronteres exhibition with the Moroccans’ full backing,construct a narrative of cultural memory as it confronts postmodern dispersal.These cultural narratives — especially those whose subjects are self-consciouslyposing for the camera — allow the immigrants, within their disadvantagedsubaltern position, a certain measure of freedom to negotiate who they wish to bein their new context and how they wish to be perceived. Recognition, in thedouble sense of the process by which a community recognizes itself and thecultural platform through which it seeks recognition from others, is reliant uponthe ‘flashes of the moment’ afforded by such material traces.11

Notes1 My information on the origins of Moroccans in Spain comes from interviews with MohamedDerdabi, head of ATIME, Barcelona in January 1999, and with Juanjo of CEAIM, Jeréz de laFrontera in June 1998.2 I should like to express my thanks to Núria Andreu, not only for giving me her time, but also forher kind permission to print three of her photographs as illustrations to this article.3 See, for example, Bhabha’s critique of multiculturalism (1996) where he explores theinsufficiencies of social approaches that depend on viewing cultural identity as fixed.4 Andreu mentioned that she had tried to interest the Anthropology Department of the UniversitatAutònoma de Barcelona in her photographs, but they had not yet responded. She is happy for herwork to be circulated in academic circles.5 I originally contacted Mohamed Derdabi of ATIME to ask whether there were any Moroccanphotographers in Barcelona or Madrid, and it was he who put me in touch with Andreu.6 For a relevant exploration of video usage amongst migrants, see Olwig and Frostrup (1997: 86-100).7 See Blommaert and Verschueren (1998: 94-8)

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8 I am grateful to Dr Leila Ibnlfassi, of London Guildhall University, for her information on theuneven use of the veil in Morocco today. Previously worn by urban women as a dress of decency,the veil has now largely given way to the use of a headscarf. Conversely, rural women haveincreasingly adopted the use of the veil in a belated appropriation of urban fashion.9 Another forum for ethnic practices is provided by Radio Contrabanda, a radio station whichbroadcasts primarily for North-African immigrants.10 Caygill (1998) also presents Benjamin as a visual thinker, relating this to Kant’s concept ofexperience.11 It should be noted here that such cultural platforms are not necessarily grouped around the livedpractices of a single ethnic group: in fact, ATIME collaborates with the association of Dominicanimmigrants, VOMADE, to produce a magazine called En Diálogo: Revista Independiente de laInmigración. Shared immigrant positions thus provide a commonality in the face of the largersociopolitical context, despite differences of ethnicity.

Works citedAndreu Castellví, Núria (1998a) Trencant Fronteres (photographic exhibition).—— (1998b) Introduction to Trencant Fronteres (typed sheet).Benjamin, Walter (1968) Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken

Books).Bennett, David (1998) Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity (London:

Routledge).Bhabha, Homi (1996) ‘Culture’s in-between’, in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (eds),

Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage), 53-60.Blommaert, Jan and Jef Verschueren (1998) Debating Diversity (London: Routledge).Cadava, Eduardo (1997) Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (New

Jersey: Princeton University Press).Caygill, Howard (1998) Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London:

Routledge).Cesarani, David and Mary Fulbrook (eds) (1996) Citizenship, Nationality and Migration

in Europe (London: Routledge).Chambers, Iain (1994) Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge).Clifford, James and George Marcus (1986) Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of

California Press).Edwards, Elizabeth (1997) ‘Beyond the boundary: a consideration of the expressive in

photography and anthropology’, in Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy (eds),Rethinking Visual Anthropology (New Haven: Yale University Press), 53-80.

Marcus, George E. (1998) Ethnography Through Thick and Thin (New Jersey: PrincetonUniversity Press).

Olwig, Karen F. and Karen Hastrup (eds) (1997) Siting Culture: The ShiftingAnthropological Object (London: Routledge).

Planell, David (1998) Bazar (Jerez de la Frontera: Hogar Sur).Rabinow, Paul (1977) Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley: University of

California Press).Sherman, Sharon (1998) Documenting Ourselves (Kentucky: University Press of

Kentucky).

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