The art to talk on immigration: a state of emergency

This paper intend to present the results of the state of emergency project. The project
started in 2014 with a simple question: how researchers that work in immigration can
communicate with civil society outside the traditional academic channels?
It is not only a matter of popularization of academic research, but mainly brings
researchers into society, far from the academic walls. The answer to this question was the
art and the spaces of culture. Art, and also cultural spaces have enormous potential, its
could bring together different social groups and help researchers to be in society, and
making their research accessible. In the society, debates on immigration are mostly
dominated by media and political representations, what is also polarizing societies
between solidarity and anti-immigration movement's. Therefore, the presence of
researchers to discuss the immigration issue in society has become urgent.
The state of emergency project had as a bases my research, “The borders of Nord-Pas-deCalais”
(2014), and brought together two dancers, two acrobats, a scene director and a
plastic artist. The project started from the assumption that art is a collective production,
but artistic intention started with the individual consciousness on the issue the artist is
focusing. It was adopted the artistic improvisation method to develop a spectacle and other
tolls. In order to incorporate research on immigration into artistic production it was
necessary to present and to appropriate the artists of basic concepts, but also carry out a
fieldwork, that was developed during a month at the French border (Calais city). The
methodology adopted by the artists consisted in a fieldwork.
The project took two years to be concluded. The result was a dance spectacle, “Dites a ma
mère que je suis la”, and a hybrid form of workshop that mixes the artistic and the
methods of immigration research. I contrast, I developed during the project a multi-sited
ethnography whit the artists. Where the main objective was to understand which impact
the scientific knowledge on the issue could produce in artist's way to see immigration, and
how this new approach could change the researcher and artist productions.