Ursula Biemann studied art and cultural theory in Mexico and at the School of Visual Arts (BFA) and the Whitney ISP in New York. Her art and curatorial practice focuses is on the representation of minority identities and gender in the media and in post-urban zones, such as the US-Mexico border or the periphery of Istanbul. Videos: performing the border, on the gendered condition of the global digital industry, 1999; Writing Desire, on female sexuality and the bride market in cyberspace, 2000; and Remote Sensing, on the geography of the global sex trade, 2001. Her most recent publication: been there and back to nowhere - on gender in transnational spaces, b_books Berlin 2000.

Presentation at "meeting places" Sofia
Ursula Biemann

For many years now, my practice as an artist and as a curator has centered on questions of gender and globalization. Some of the earlier projects in Zurich or Istanbul were about migrant women who live and work there, the cultural place they form and inhabit, the representations made of them in the media and the strategies they develop when they represent themselves.

When dealing with questions of migrancy, we automatically enter undefined or suspended spaces in between cultures. And one of the strategies we saw as important was to claim this space in-between, this interstice, as a cultural location in its own right that needs to be visualized, named and legitimized. One of these projects is a photo-text book I made in collaboration with Latin American women in Zurich called "interespacios".

In the last few years, I have moved my focus from dealing with displaced identity, towards the question of how gender inscribes itself in the social and material fabric, particularly the urban fabric. The two videos I'm going to talk about now, locate gender in zones which are particularly marked by global processes: metropolitan peripheries, border areas, free trade zones. More specifically, they speak about the ways in which female bodies circulate in the transnational spaces of the global economy.

Space and location have become important categories in the gender discussion, because it allows us to think about the relation between subject, belonging, boundaries, transgressions and place. This notion of spatiality is not a geometric or geographic one, or let's say, the kind of geography I mean includes social and cultural factors. It is an understanding of geography as a metaphor, as a particular language, as a way to organize knowledge. I have become a geographer, and we can say that I shifted my interest from a concern with identity connected to a body with a migration history, to the moving, migrating body, with a gender and geography.

That this is not an entirely unpolitical framework shows the following piece. Performing the Border is a video I want to discuss in more detail here. It's a 43 min. video-essay from 1999 on the U.S. Mexico border where Mexican women work in the high-tech industry for the advanced world. Most of the workers come from the arid Mexican highland and move up to the Rio Grande to work in these assembly plants called maquiladoras. These very young women are the ones who produce the components for the Information Industry, for the medical-military complex, for space and satellite technologies. They make up the majority of the population of the border town. There are large desert areas where only women live in houses or shacks they have built themselves. They have created new living spaces, they have changed social structures and gender relations, and in doing so they are somehow rewriting the texts of their bodies and of their society.

This video is an attempt to take a geographic approach, in the sense that it looks at these things in a located, spatial and multi-layered way. In the course of the video, I try to unfold the many layers, also economic and psychosocial ones, in which gender relates to a particular place, in this case the border town Ciudad Juarez. Because Capitalism doesn't only create material landscapes, it produces complex social ones as well. "Performing the Border" looks at the working conditions in the digital industry, at the urban arrangement of the industrial parks, the border control, the sexualization of the border in prostitution and the entertainment industry and it takes a close look at the sexual violence in the public sphere because Ciudad Juarez has become the scene of a serial killing of 300 women over the last few years. All these things (border, sex, technology, and the killing) stand in a complicated and not always rational relationship to one another, is what I'm saying in the video. The narrative goes back and forth between the discursive, metaphoric, representational space of the border, i.e. we are listening to how the border is talked about, how it is represented in the media, and what it signifies, and the embodied, material space of the borderland inhabited by real women, putting in a 16 hour work day. It's an amalgamation of many voices and found video material from many sources. And through this continuous movement between the discursive and the material space, the video also performs a border, it doesn't merely document it.

******Video clip ****script:

Bertha In a way the border is always represented as this wound that has to be healed, that has to be closed, that has to be protected, from contanimation and from disease. Because where is AIDS coming from? From the border. Where is all this disease, poverty and contamination coming from? From the border. So we have to heal this wound through various systems of militarization, purification, cleansing. It's like a surgical place.

Angela It's a world of labor, there is no way to draw something from the soil because there is no water, there is no way to get anything from nature, no way to get anything from your environment, here you have TO MAKE.

Bertha In a way you do need the crossing for the border to become real otherwise you just have this discursive construction and that's what should really be clear about the border, there is nothing natural about it, in fact it's a highly constructed place that gets reconstituted and reproduced through the crossing of people, because without the crossing there is no border, right. It's just an imaginary line, it's a river or it's just a wall. So you need the crossing of bodies to produce the discursive space of the nation state and also to produce a type of a real place as a border. The border is a highly performative place.

Angela I have known Concha for about 5 years. I knew her when her house was here, made from what was left over from the maquiladora. At some point she found herself abandoned by her husband and she found out that in Juarez there was no work for pregnant women, there was no way to be 6 months pregnant and find work. So Concha found herself in this situation, I don't know if it was good or bad for her, where she met someone who told her that she could sell cigarettes to the U.S., when I say U.S. I mean El Paso. What Concha did was crossing to the other side, selling her cigarettes cheaper because she didn't pay taxes, went to buy merchandise over there, brought them here, took off the taxes and put them back into circulation there.

Later on, based on her facility to cross and avoid the US migration officers Concha passed as wet back. Her strategies have been many and varied in all her trajectories of crossing to the US. She was also confronted with the militarization of the border in 1994. When Silvestre Reyes closed the border to the US, the aggressiveness towards people who crossed was getting too much. Concha managed to pass them undercover and at a given moment in her life, without thinking about it, she started to cross people.
What Concha often does is to help pregnant women who want to give birth over there because they want to have American children thinking that at one point they can use them to obtain papers and benefit from the services over there. Concha has a "service for pregnant women." She leaves them at the public hospital to take care of them.

Bertha How are you crossing? Are you crossing in English, in Spanish, in Spanglish, with a US passport, jumping, as a tourist, as a migrant, as a middle-class woman, as a domestica. There are all these different ways of crossing and that's the way the border gets rearticulated through the power relationships that the crossing produces. Because it's not just this happy crossing.

Over twenty years ago, the US industry started to install their cheap-labor assembly plants called maquiladoras, the Golden Mills, south of the border. In the matter of a few years, they attracted thousands of new workers into the zone, making the borderline into borderland, a cultural corridor, an uncharted territory, inhabited by millions of people who vacillate between rural and urban, between a world of street vendors, streets of sand and the production of high-tech equipment for the information industry. Within a short time, a new technological culture of repetition, registration and controlling was introduced in the desert city.

Under the local logic now lies the great map of transnational operations, leanness, efficiency, competition

Cipriana So we arrived here to work at the maquiladoras. In the beginning there were only women working at the factory. That led to some changes in the cultural pattern that we have as Mexican women. Because the tradition in Mexico was that the woman stays at home to do the domestic work and the men, brothers, uncles, whatever man there was in the family would sustain the household.

A zone from which life emerges, nevertheless, an alien way of life: corporate culture in the morning, kneading el maiz at night. The rhythms of the barren highland giving way to optimized production modes. Life on the border teaches you to cope with contradictions, to shift out of habitual formations on a daily basis, to operate in a pluralistic mode, because flexibility is a matter of survival when you are among the extras on the set of corporate culture.

*****video clip finished*****

What moved more and more into the center of my concern here is the relation of gender and technology. The female workers get technologized in these robotic production modes. There is an entanglement between digital technologies and these economic, gendered, racialized bodies on the border. What is interesting, is that as a result of the installation of this industry and of the closing-down of the border, women perform a number of transgressions of definitions that had been taken for granted for a long time, for instance they transgress the boundaries between the organic and machinic body, between the public and the private sphere, between the productive and the reproductive, between the economic and the sexual, and between concepts of masculinity and femininity. They transgress these boundaries on a daily basis, which is perceived as a violent act. That's why I found the figure of Concha important because through her clandestine border passages, she finds wholes in the border fence and navigates around the border officials, she has no permanent home so she cannot be addressed by either State control systems. I like to theorize about her radical nomadism, although I have learned recently that she has given up her business and is working for a maquiladora now.

However, what becomes clear on the border, is that women enter prostitution in great numbers to complement their insufficient income from the assembly work. The proliferation of prostitution around free trade zones, outsourced production sites and military camps is an index of how women, in these geographies, are addressed by the global economy. We know the ratio of women who migrate has increased a great deal, but this is going a step further. They are addressed directly in their sexuality. For many women, this is the beginning of a long a sensitive negotiation of survival.

The next video I would like to introduce very briefly is a topography of the global sex trade. It's a 53 min. video called Remote Sensing, which I have just finished. This is a term taken from Geographic Information Systems and refers to satellite images and other technologies to monitor and visualize the Earth. The trafficking and migration of women into the sex industry has increased tremendously as a result of globalization processes. In the short segment I'm going to show now, you will hear about the changes that took place in the Mekong region, after the neighboring socialist countries opened their borders. Thailand which had been a sending country of women to Europe and North America, has become a transit country and even a receiving country. These movements are destabilizing the gender household of an entire region.

******video clip Mekong

Siriporn While Thai women have migrated to countries in Europe and North America, women from neighboring countries, like from Laos, Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia migrated to Thailand and part of these migrant women are victims of the transborder trafficking. Since the liberalization of socialist countries, Thailand has become a country of destination. And you can see that more and more women and girls from Burma are involved in forced prostitution, working in brothels in Thailand.

Siriporn The sex industry doesn't stop growing. So Thai women are promoted to the other echelon in the sex industry and for the lower class brothels there is a need to supply new women and children. So women from neighboring countries, from Burma, from Laos, Cambodia, are forced into the situation.

SHE GETS PAID BY CLIENTS
IN CONDOM WRAPPERS
SHE NEVER SEES CASH

*****clip finished****

Again, I'm not interested in a human rights approach to the issue of trafficking and forced prostitution. I decided to take a geographic approach to the global movement of these mobile, female geobodies in the Age of digital images. I'm tracing the routes of women in the global flow of information and capital, because I see a need to invent new images of women who migrate from the poverty and boredom of rural areas to a riche and more modern lifestyle in the cities and abroad. At the same time, there is no point in generating positive, happy, empowered images of women, without elaborating with precision on the various structural reasons for their condition. But to be critical still doesn't meant to make depressing images. If anything, we need to enlarge the cultural imaginary about femininity and propose a variety of different positions that women can occupy in the area of migration, desire and strategies of survival.

There are two different ways to conceptualize globalization visually: from above and from below. The first positions itself from a birds perspective, the omnicient, universal eye. From up there, all specificities are erased and abstracted. The complex global sphere seems simple and comprehensible. The movement of people, money, and information seems free and steady. The second perspective looks from a ground level and from a local perspective. From this angle, not everything is flowing so easily. Movements are disrupted, entangled with boundaries and distinctions, separating people, offending bodies.

****video segment about Europe and the German-Czech border.****

Uber 50% der Frauen kommen aus Osteuropa, das war in den 80er Jahren nicht der Fall. D.h. die politischen, okonomischen, die sozialen Umwalzungen, in den 80er Jahren Beispielsweise, aber auch die Veranderungen in den Ziellandern Europa, bz die Schweiz. Das kann die Migrationspolitik sein, die Abschottungspolitik Europas. Und diese zwei Aspekte sind naturlich grundlegende Aspekte, die den Frauenhandel fordern oder eindammen konnen. Die Realitat ist aber, dass die Frauenhandelstrukturen und die Frauenhandelausbeutung eindeutig zunimmt durch diese Umwalzung und durch diese Reaktion Europas.

Diesbezuglich finde ich es ironisch, dass man daruber spricht, dass die Frauen zum sog. Ausstieg aus dem Sexgewerbe unterstutzt werden sollen und andererseits der Staat an den Strukturen festhalt, wo die Frau schliesslich als Cabarettanzerin uberhaupt nicht in einem anderen Bereich arbeiten kann. Also in welcher Form ist der Staat uberhaupt daran interessiert, den Frauenhandel einzudammen?

Migration laws regulate the flow of people and define their status under national rules. The automatic channeling of migrant women into sex work speaks of the place of sex in that national space. These laws protect the flourishing sexual life of male citizens as privilege and source of power. Powerful players will always create a sexuality that eroticizes hierarchy.

Remotely gazed from the orbital perspective,
transnational sexuality comes into full sight.
In these topographies of the global sex trade,
the female bodies get sensed and identified,
evaluated and re-routed

*****video clip finished******

The type of visual relation I am concerned with in Remote Sensing deals with technologically produced imagery that visualize a particular kind of globality. I want to fill these neutral scientific images with gendered meaning and with the particular lifeworlds of women who move across the globe in search for work in the sex industry. I want to describe their counter-geographies, border activities and illegal transactions to make the simple representations more complicated and less ture. Because images don't merely describe existing facts, they also help producing them. Before you can control something, you need to open up a discourse about it, then you have to find images for it so it becomes imaginable and tangible and then you can prepare the visual and discursive field for interventions. Most of the time, these interventions are economic in nature. This moment of visualization is an extremely important one. And it happens to be the moment of artistic intervention as well. If it is in the vision that power resides, it will also be the place where we can make our appearance to reinterpret and recode the meaning of the images.

When all of my videos to date elaborate on the relations of gender, technology and transnational capitalism, Remote Sensing engages maybe most explicitly in a critique of visualizing technologies. Geographic information systems propose an abstract and highly accurate view of the world but the evaluation of the millions of geospatial data, which are being collected by the image satellites currently in the orbit, are based on binary computer languages. Feminist scientists criticize them for using binary categories for selecting data because they are unable to hold conflicting information, they are unable to reveal the gendered meaning of data or to think in relational terms. Needless to say that these information technologies are developed to mainly by the military and space research labs and I want to make a link here to the implication of the military institution in rise and increase of prostitution and trafficking worldwide.

Thailand and the Philippines have not become epicenters of sex tourism and trafficking because of the type of women who live there. These two countries have been the major bases for the U.S. army during the war in Vietnam and Korea with huge prostitution camps around them. When the army left after the war, they transformed these redlight districts with the thousands of bars and dancers, into tourist resorts for male clients. The built military entertainment structures could only be used for a similar purpose. I visited Angeles City during the shoot, it's one of these zones in the Philippines.

Many of the women who work there were tricked into the situation. But of course not every prostitute is being forced to work in the sex trade. It would be too reductive to make a distinction between those who are forced and those who choose, there are many shades and grey zones inbetween.

this last bit is a girl I interviewed in a slum in Manila about her job in Hong Kong.

*****video clip******

I go to work in Hong Kong. Where I'm working is a Bunny Club(laughs). Why you're taping me?

Simin: because we want to know the stories that lead women to go abroad and to come back)

Hong Kong is a very nice place. But maybe sometimes I'm lonely, because my job is very difficult. Before eight I go to bar and then I dance, I dance full night and then I entertain the customer and then if I want to, I go back only lunch.