Refugee’s life and work: image as experience of the look from a painting by Escher

Abstract

Life and work on the refugee journey are among the latest contemporary challenges that instigate to look and to research. In order to enhance the discussion, it was considered pertinent to pay attention to the experience of looking at the image. We took the woodcut Day and Night, art by Maurits Cornelius Escher, which alludes to the migratory movement of birds, because it also provokes the look, given the characteristics that the artist imprints on it. The concepts of smooth and striated space, by Deleuze and Guattari, imbricated in a reference regarding the refugee situation, were taken as the theoretical basis for the discussion. The conversation between image and theory broadened the look beyond bureaucratic, legal and statistical issues, often associated with studies about refugees and allowed pointing out relationships of continuity and coexistence in their ways of living and working. It is understood that, by provoking the experience of the look, the image can be captured, cut, reduced, enlarged, twisted, in an effort of meaning not necessarily obvious.

Keywords:
look; image; refugee; smooth; striated