Plazas of sovereignty: Curatorial imagination in times of expanded borders

Abstract

This article explores the dispersed geography of the so-called plazas of sovereignty, the Spanish strongholds formed by a group of rocks, islets and archipelagos, that stretch along the northern coast of Morocco, from a curatorial perspective. These territories, which have been occupied by Spain since the end of Middle Age, are today inaccessible to documented or undocumented citizens. My curatorial research Dispositifs of Touching has created a space for studying the enclaves through the activation of a methodology that has helped to approach and generate knowledge around their forbidden status. Their lack of accessibility has encouraged the development of a curatorial production that included site-visits, reading groups, public platforms for debate, documentary materials, artistic productions and installations. Beyond this, the study of the strongholds facilitates the configuration of a criticality (Rogoff, 2003) on terms that are fundamental for curatorial research and practice as much as for contemporary urgencies related to the contemporary migratory crisis between Africa and Europe.

Keywords

expanded borders migratory crisis sovereignty citizenship governance curatorial knowledge criticality museum

To study a forbidden place, a place that is not accessible, implies inquiring into what exactly study is and how it is produced. The plazas of sovereignty,¹ the strongholds that Spain occupies even today in the northern coast of Morocco are prohibited in their access, their surroundings are highly invigilated, and their history remains invisible. To bring them into the sphere of academic artistic research and in the particular role of a case study involves to invite a wide range of tools and disciplines in order to invent possible entries that provide a speculative access to their opacity. This calls for disciplines, practices, methodologies, concepts and sources configure the potentiality for study. The resulting knowledge leads to the production of what we could call curatorial imagination.²

This study rests on a particular colonial model of occupation, the plazas of sovereignty, the Spanish sovereign fortresses scattered along the north coast of Morocco, which since the end of medieval times have configured territorial exceptionality. My research focuses on uncovering this model of colonial reach, which is still physically inaccessible today to ordinary citizens, and which remains occupied and controlled by military forces with the intention of representing and protecting national sovereignty. In other words, I analyze the way in which these enclaves, currently populated exclusively by external sovereignty, empty and forbidden in their status, ultimately represent the cancellation of disagreement, the dissolution of popular will and the suspension of collectivity.³

In addition to the analysis and understanding of the plazas as diffuse metaphors of national sovereignty, I will examine their indeterminate condition that appears immersed in the current migration management of expanding borders beyond sovereign territories. In this sense, I will observe the regulatory void that surrounds the plazas and that activates the opaque parameters that allow the externalization of European borders in Africa (John Pickles, Sebastián Cobarrubias and Maribel Casas, 2011a, 2011b, 2015). This means, the way in which the imprecise status of these plazas, fosters a constant filtering of colonialism’s past abuses by including them in the contemporary classification of citizenship applied with respect to the migratory flow from Africa to Europe.

The complex history that sustains their exceptionality helps us to understand their opacity and inaccessibility. The historical context in which the term plazas de soberanía emerges coincides with the modern colonial project of the 19th century in Africa, when these specific territories had to be distinguished from other areas which were also targeted for occupation. Concretely, this distinction should be put into a wider perspective in order to understand the logic behind classifying the different periods of occupation in the area. I refer specifically to the distinction between the history of these medieval enclaves and those of modern colonial campaigns in the territories of Ifni (occupied in 1860), Western Sahara (occupied in 1884) and, the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco (established in 1912) in which these enclaves were situated. Moreover, it could be said that the distinction of the medieval settlements of the plazas, during the modern colonial enterprise of the 19th and 20th centuries in Africa, was executed with the simple strategy of renaming the plazas as plazas of sovereignty. This tactic could be understood as differentiating the historical framework in which the Spanish enclaves originated during the medieval era from the modern colonial campaigns undertaken during this new period. Likewise, this distinction should be acknowledged in relation to the way in which the colonial power managed to cross lines and borders, thereby inaugurating new dispositifs of control in order to govern life on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. For example, the plazas, having been reconstituted as sovereign, offered Spain an excuse for starting a colonial project on the continent of Africa in the years before the Berlin Conference. In this sense, the term plazas of sovereignty, which was heavily weighted with colonial interests, during the campaign of territorial expansion in the 19th and early 20th centuries, provided the needed didactics for clarifying the historical unbreakable bond between the enclaves and the formation of Spain as a sovereign nation during the 15th and 16th centuries.

Nevertheless, the timeless character of the term, plazas of sovereignty, that is, its untimely irruption during the colonial expansion of the 19th century, but even the current anachronism within the context of today’s policies of migration, when that name is hardly heard colloquially, makes it possible for us to understand the conditions of exceptionality that these small territories have held throughout the history of Spanish occupation in Africa. Furthermore, we could even consider that these enclaves are exceptional territories not only spatially, but also temporally, through their decisive role during the colonial occupation of the 19th and 20th centuries as well as their perpetuation during the decolonization period and in our postcolonial present.

However, it is important to bear in mind that not all the enclaves belong to the same colonial period of occupation. Originally, there were 5 plazas, and they were divided into major plazas: Melilla (occupied in 1497) and Ceuta (in 1580) and minor plazas: Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera (1508), the Al Hoceima Islands (1663) and the Chafarinas Islands (1848). Even so, the historical context of the plazas varies. Some of them were enclaves conquered by European kingdoms during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries like Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera (Badis for the Moroccans and the only plaza connected by land to Morocco) or the case of the Al Hoceima Islands (a small archipelago made up of three islands, one of which is the Rock, located 700 m from Morocco, and the other two, Isla de Tierra and Isla de Mar, located only 50 m from the coast). In contrast to these two enclaves, the occupation of the Chafarinas Islands corresponds to a different historical background. This other small archipelago, again consisting of three islands, Isabel II, Congreso and Rey Francisco, is located 27 miles from Melilla and was occupied by Spain during the French occupation of Algeria that began in 1830. However, even though the colonial status of the Chafarinas Islands corresponds to the modern colonization period, its status as a plaza of sovereignty remains unquestioned, at least in the Spanish context and consequently its relinquishment was not considered during the period of decolonization.

During the process of decolonization, the dissolution of the colonial borders between Spain and Morocco conflicted with the demand for keeping the plazas as sovereign territories and not as colonially occupied areas that could face decolonization. In fact, when Spain relinquished the area, after recognizing Morocco’s independence in 1956, it did not surrender the major and minor plazas. Spain’s rationale was based on the same logic that introduced colonialism in the territory during the modern period: that Spain had held the plazas well before the establishment of The Protectorate of Morocco and therefore they didn’t belong administratively (Rivas, 2015). As a result, the plazas of sovereignty continue to be part of Spain today and, consequently, also part of the European Union and the Schengen Area. In fact, “they are governed by an administrative empty space controlled from Madrid” (Cembrero, 2012).⁴

As previously mentioned, historically, a distinction was made between the so-called major plazas, referring to the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, and the minor ones, made up of the rest of the smaller enclaves formed by the mentioned islets. Since 1995, when the cities of Ceuta and Melilla were granted the status of autonomous cities, the term plazas of sovereignty began to be used exclusively in relation to the enclaves of the Chafarinas Islands, the islands of Al Hoceima and the Rock of Vélez de la Gomera. However, since 2002, after the hyper-mediatized military operation against the occupation of Perejil Island by 6 Moroccan naval cadets, who were captured without offering any resistance, the term likewise began to be applied to this islet. This uninhabited place, “newly opened as a plaza of sovereignty” by the conflict, is situated near the city of Ceuta and 200 m from the Moroccan coast. As of today, it is still monitored by both countries in order to maintain its status quo ante, i.e., its status as terra nullius.⁵

This term, terra nullius (no man’s land) is mentioned in the context of a secret agreement that Spanish diplomacy called the Spirit of Barajas, and which was allegedly signed by Francisco Franco and Hassan II at Barajas airport in 1963. The contents of the agreement comprised four pacts: the first was related to the Spanish occupation of the province of Ifni, through which Morocco obtained its liberation by Spain in 1969. The second was aimed at a solution for the Spanish Sahara and to this end, Spain asked Morocco to cease its claims to the territory for several years. The third included Morocco’s renunciation of Ceuta and Melilla forever. Finally, the fourth concerned Perejil Island, agreeing that it should be considered terra nullius or, rather, a territory that was neither part of Spain, nor of Morocco, therefore, allowing both countries to have a permanent civilian or military presence (Bermejo García, 2002).

Perejil Island is the first enclave I tried to visit with an artist as part of my doctoral research, although one could argue that strictly speaking this island should not be considered a plaza of sovereignty, as the two countries have disagreed throughout history over its ownership, occupation and liberation. However, the legal ambiguity of this islet within international law is what interested me most from the outset, namely its status as “land without an owner”, something that in my imagination excluded the colonial violence implicit in the origins of the term terra nullius. Land that is not owned projects the possibility for reassessing what ownership means and reexamining who controls how and when land is to be owned. However, within colonial history, the term has facilitated forced occupation of territory.

Studying the plazas of sovereignty from a curatorial perspective

How can one apprehend the complex geography of such plazas? How does one approach a prohibited space that has framed historically even our ways of understanding governance and citizenship? How can one imagine land beyond the codes of ownership and project a collectivity that responds to that status of not belonging through owning? Besides, if we are to study within a curatorial framework, what are the implications of these territories and their own relevance for curatorial practice? More precisely, how do they help to apprehend certain concepts that play a part in the language of curating such as for example dispositif (apparatus) and display? What do the plazas have to tell us about the museum today?

Questions like these allowed me to engage a study that called for speculative thought rather than concrete answers. This idea follows the spirit of Stefano Harney and Moten's, (2013) defense of grasping study as a speculative practice. For the authors, a speculative practice involves “a study in movement, a study that takes place between bodies, across space, across things” (Harney and Moten, 2013: 118). For them, “study is something that is done with other people”. (Harney and Moten, 2013: 119). In this respect, the study that I undertook on the plazas implied not only an archival and theoretical approach in order to understand their opaque conditions, but, also and very importantly, involved others in its process to configure a multi-layered perspective from which to project critical thinking. Following this line of argument, the study comprised different voices, positions and actions, including the participation of 5 artists in leading the sessions of the reading group and the production of documentary materials on the enclaves and their surroundings through several site-visits to the nearest accessible places around the plazas. These artists were Xabier Salaberria (Basque Country, Spain), Younès Rahmoun (Tetouan, Morocco), Heidi Vogels (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Marion Cruza Le Bihan (Basque Country, Spain) and Youssef El Yedidi (Tetouan, Morocco). Other modes of involvement included the critical input by the participants of the reading group that accompanied the study developed on site as part of my residency in Tetouan in 2015.⁶ Further contributions and references to artistic practices played also important role, like the body of work Maquetas-sin-cualidad (Models-without-quality) (1995-unfinished) by the artist Alejandra Riera (Paris, France), the painting and sculpture oeuvre by Mohamed Larbi Rahali (Tetouan, Morocco) and the study group Colonialismo Interno [Internal Colonialism] as part of the debate platform Península hosted by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain) from 2012 to 2017.⁷

This open study was aimed at the possibility of turning the plazas into a shared concern. As I have proposed earlier, the study was not directed at finding definitive answers to their problematic status, but, following Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011 work, making the enclaves visible as a common matter of concern⁸ and, therefore, demanding the configuration of a set of speculative ethics for the assemblage of what remains neglected, or in this case prohibited. A speculative exercise that in line with the author's suggestions also implied the need for care. The reading group that accompanied the study in Morocco for a period of 3 months helped to project the possibility forcollective life in this “applied study”, allowing a shared experience in contrast to the empty and forbidden enclaves through the construction of a common affective ground from where to study together. As Puig de la Bellacasa states: “care signifies: an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011: 90).⁹ The group created this space of care firstly through the practice of reading together that helped the development among us of certain commonly held notions. In other words, care was put into work through a growing collective awareness of the existence and conditions of these territories, and the way they drive an unethical catalog which sustains inequality of citizenship.

However, in the past, the plazas were not always forbidden, not always empty. There was life in the plazas of sovereignty. This is what a Moroccan fisherman named Amar Binauda recounts to Spanish journalists covering the incident in the Al Hoceima islands on 29^th of August 2012, when 19 sub-Saharan migrants crossed the short stretch of water that separates Morocco from Isla de Tierra in order to gain access to it and thus claim entry into Spanish territory. This event, accompanied by another brief episode in which 7 Moroccan activists from the Ceuta and Melilla Liberation Committee tried to occupy another Spanish enclave, namely Vélez de la Gomera, prompted the journalists to ask the old Moroccan fisherman about the collective life of these forbidden territories.

“The collective life of the empty plazas”. This impossible present image, which was offered in the article entitled “Los cascotes del imperio” [The Last Remains of The Spanish Empire] by Mónica Ceberio, Ignacio Cembrero and Miguel Ángel González (2012) in the summer of 2012, projected itself as a possible path to follow and from which to articulate study as a speculative practice-a type of collective exercise of the imagination and knowledge production around the obscure enclaves. A ‘collective life’ that was once comprised of postal employees, border patrolmen, schoolteachers and lighthouse-keepers…’ (Ceberio, Cembrero and Gónzalez, 2012). A forgotten life that had to be approached by a study that uncovered the contemporary conditions that prohibits a common open space for community sharing.

Furthermore, the intention of working and studying these inaccessible sites has raised also questions about how their status ultimately affects the forms under which we are governed. Such an interest in the plazas of sovereignty is also complicit with the proposition that Étienne Balibar (2004) poses in his essay, acknowledging ‘border areas not as marginal and peripheral territories to the constitution of a public sphere, but, on the contrary, as central fields from where to articulate it’ (Balibar, 2004: 1). This argument supports the potentiality that lies in considering the empty Spanish strongholds in northern Morocco as productive tools for imagining new productions of the public sphere. This proposition can also help to critically think about sovereignty beyond the perimeters in which it allegedly seems entrapped. In other words, to reflect on the notion of sovereignty, not just within the enclosed framework of the nation-state, but also in broader contexts. For example, in relation to the current practices of externalization and dematerialization of borders within the context of migration control.¹⁰ Also, in relation to redefining governing and being governed as we rethink the modes under which we are being governed. This idea presents an opportunity to reflect on the ways that these empty enclaves impose sovereign power over the processes of touching among subjects, objects, lives and imaginaries existing on both sides of the border.

The plazas as dispositifs of touching

To study the plazas from a speculative curatorial attempt implies adjusting to their actual conditions of inaccessibility, that is, to only get nearby them, never inside, never within them. Despite this restriction, the plazas have functioned not only as a case study, but also as the site in which to locate the idea of study. This perspective involves configuring study as if we could, at least virtually, inhabit the plazas, as if we could approach them and, from their neglected stance, look back at the way a complex network of relations operates in the world organizing and controlling life. In this respect, the plazas were approached under the imaginative term “dispositifs of touching” thus stimulating other possible ethical concerns, pertaining to future affective practices. The plazas as dispositifs of touching suggest a way of thinking of them not only as sites, but also as virtual apparatuses through which to examine their inner conditions. In this imaginative optic, they are an apparatus from which to analyze reality as much as to explore their actual status. They are sensorial devices that produce knowledge and sense. They are virtual places of a queering phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006), from where to apply decolonial sense that could help us rethink the abusive logics that sustain their inaccessibility and injustice. They are a dispositif that requires looking outside and touching inside. In short, they enable turning back and unveiling their own mechanism of producing reality. However, in order to activate this turn, we should first understand the logic of the conceptualization of this imaginative term for the plazas, arising out of two highly loaded concepts: dispositif and touching.

The concept dispositif shares, in fact, two distinct fields. On the one hand, there is much attention paid to this notion in the curatorial field, so to say, in the practice of curating exhibitions. On the other, it has important implications in the socio-political study of the tension and conflict on the border between Europe and Africa. These two distinct fields of research and practice come together through the analysis of this term. This confluence occurs through the consideration of three different interrelated connotations of the term (Deleuze, 1992; Agamben, 2009; Foucault, 1980). Firstly, the dispositif may be interpreted as a network that establishes order and control among the elements. For example, Deleuze (1992) claims to approach the term dispositif as a cartographer would navigate unknown territories, that is, drawing a mental image out of the experience of the encounter with the term. This reference helps to situate Deleuze’s contribution to the concept of dispositif in relation to Foucault’s own use of the term, thus establishing a difference in perspective between both authors. More concretely for Foucault dispositif means the idea of action and efficacy in the repression and control and Deleuze stresses the prevalence of the assemblages of desire over the assemblages of power (Lazzarato, 2006). Deleuze focuses his attention on the unexpected nature of the dispositif, (claimed by Foucault), as a way of emphasizing the way the dispositif works as a machine that makes one see and speak (Deleuze 1992: 160). In this sense, Deleuze’s perspective on the term places the question of the dispositif within the terrain of the virtual, in other words, in relation to the imagined and the desired, something that for the philosopher is also to be controlled by the apparatuses.

Secondly, there is a way of understanding the techniques behind the dispositif in terms of molding, classifying and reproducing subjectivity (Deleuze, 1992; Mezzadra and Rahola, 2008; Casas et al., 2011b). In Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Louis Althusser (2001) develops a study of the reproduction of the conditions of capitalist production. He uses the expression of apparatus (dispositif) as an ideological conceptual device for reproducing such conditions. To the hypothesis that every ideology interpellates individuals as subjects, Althusser alludes to the rituals of recognizing ideology as an essential condition for the individual, concrete and irreplaceable subject. A trivial image of how a policeman interpellates an individual with a simple ‘Hey, you there’ is used by Althusser to point out the structures and systems that conform and reaffirm subjectivity through the ideological recognition of authority (through the repressive State apparatuses, as he calls them) over the individual. Moreover, Althusser proposes this production of subjectivity be located, not just within the public, but also within the private domain. In this sense, for the author, the family, the school, culture and media are also apparatuses that punish, select and discipline subjectivity in order to reproduce the structure of capitalist power.

Thirdly, I wish to consider the notion of the dispositif in relation to the influence it executes towards the production of truth (Deleuze, 1992; Althusser; 1984; Foucault, 2010). If we critically consider these three connotations for the notion of the dispositif from the double perspective of curating and the study of the conflict zone of the borders between Europe and Africa, interesting cross-reflections emerge. For example, a critical reflection toward the idea of interpreting the exhibition dispositif in terms of the network established between the exhibited objects. This could entail perceiving the exhibition separately from repetitive protocols in order to allow other modes of agency between the objects and subjects implied in the process of making an exhibition (namely, the artist and the curator, but also the audience); with the intention of exercising new collective processes of subjectivation towards the construction of meaning. With respect to understanding the border (or the plazas of sovereignty) as a dispositif of control that establishes power relations between subjects, objects, realities, a critical concern may emerge in relation to the judicial definition of “legal” and “illegal” citizens, things, realities. Awareness of these pitfalls could promote a way to find alternative collective processes of subjectivation that deviate from this abusive and hierarchical ordering between subjects and things.

The notion of touching in correlation with the term dispositif adds a new angle from which to apprehend such plazas in order to grasp our understanding of citizenship. I wish to distinguish this approach from the theoretical work of Jean-Luc Nancy (2000) and the way Jacques Derrida (2005) highlights his contribution placing touch as a relational configuration. In other words, an ordering that operates within a relational context such as the border division. Following Nancy’s proposal, Derrida offers touching as a spatial operation in which relations between things, subjects, realities get generated as much as division and separation emerges among other things and other realities. Jacques Derrida introduces us to this interpretation of Nancy’s notion of touching, when he analyses its complexities by focusing on the particular interruptive experience of the syncope, a concern that, he explains, runs throughout Nancy’s work (Derrida, 2005). Derrida deploys the term syncopation, understood as a general term for a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow or rhythm, as a metaphor for highlighting how Nancy claims ‘partition or even a partaking (partage) of spacing’ that occurs within the act of touching (Derrida, 2005). Touching, in this sense, allows union as much as division, or even better, union within division and division within union. On the other hand, Nancy claims that touching does not necessarily imply a direct contact between elements; instead, he argues that it may also involve a control of that experience in which subjects, objects, processes, etc. get into contact with each other, whereas others remain divided and apart. In sum, the attention that Derrida pays to the notion of the syncope in relation to the act of touching problematizes the non-mediated proximity that tactility may promise within the context of perception as much as within the projection of any form of being-together. Therefore, for Derrida, the syncope separates and interrupts within the actual place of contact ‘occurring at the origin of the mere act of touching’, even though it is a direct ‘act of parting and sharing out of spacing’ (Derrida, 2005: 129). Following both authors, we can think that where we assume direct contact we may find division, and where we presuppose division, we may also uncover touching.

Nancy also understands touching not only as a disposition among things, but also as the processes of making sense out of the world. He uses the notion of sense instead of truth to highlight the constant process of producing meaning through an ongoing sensorial relationship between the body and the different elements of the world (Nancy, 1997). Within this line of understanding of touching, beyond considering it, as argued before, in reference to the dynamics of encouraging relation as well as division between the elements, Nancy offers a new connotation within the logic of restoring the common production of meaning, an experience that takes place between bodies-objects-environments deriving from it sense as knowledge. In other words, a mode of understanding reality gets produced by a constant touch between each other.

Conceiving the plazas of sovereignty through the notion of “dispositifs of touching” places us within a virtual perspective from which to acknowledge their own mechanisms of control. Devices that not only execute power on their immediate surroundings, but, furthermore, mold our understanding of governing and being governed. The plazas as “dispositifs of touching” can be employed as virtual devices from which to look back at the way our social existence is conceived and produced. In this sense, they can be seen as virtual lens through which analyze the way social life is constructed. However, we can also propose the plazas as “dispositifs of touching” in another way. That is, to offer them as a virtual machinery that helps to understand the logics of display. The plazas as “dispositifs of touching” could therefore not only expose how life is constructed, unveil its relational logics, its divisions and separations, its unjust inequalities. Moreover, they can also help to understand how display operates by unfolding the visual strategies for rendering something visible. In sum, they can reveal how display functions as an optical operation, disclosing the mode certain realities become visible and others remain invisible. Nevertheless, what lies beyond vision? Can display involve other senses? What does display disclose about the division of the senses?

Displaying the dispositif. Nothing to do in sight. There is no sense of touch

The term display derives etymologically from the Latin displicare (originally ‘scatter’ or ‘disperse’, but later, in medieval times, it means to ‘unfold’ or ‘explain’). In Middle English, display meant to unfurl or unfold. Following these etymological roots, we can argue that a display can be understood as an ‘unfolding’ of elements – materials rendered visible – that implies a certain act of unwrapping. In this line of interpretation, the practice of this unfurling of objects in the exhibition space can be compared to the logic of theatre, in which objects, props and subjects unfold themselves within the stage set. In some instances, the exhibit is built on a small scale and remains protected by a display case as if it were an architectural model. On other occasions, its construction is on a large scale, creating a broader setting that invites the viewers/actors to experience it through their own bodies. In both cases, this unfolding, however concise or expanded it may be, implies ideological lines, a structure that represents in three dimensions, the rules and strata of an institution and, in this sense, an organization that develops into a specific form, an unfolding that reveals the spatial rules that construct the exhibition as a dispositif. Following this line of conceptualization on the notion of display, we expect that an exhibition dispositif employs display, it executes display as its main intention. Nevertheless, can a dispositif be displayed? What happens when this occurs? What gets unfolded, what gets revealed? Moreover, is the field of vision the only possible stance for unfolding? What are the implications of sight over touching? How can touching reveal in fact a limited access within vision?

Nadia Seremetakis (1994) in her text The Memory of the Sense: Historical Perception, Commensal, Exchange and Modernity writes about how the numbing and erasure of sensory realities are crucial moments in the socio-cultural transformations of the museum. In her opinion, these are moments of deletion that have framed the construction of the idea of the museum. What has been neglected can only be glimpsed obliquely and at the margins, as its visibility requires an immersion into interrupted sensory memory and displaced affections. Seremetakis pays attention to the organization of the museum display, which prioritizes sight over other senses. She introduces the logic of the museum within the division of the senses that in fact will mediate “the modern perceptual experience of culture-bond sensory alterity” (Seremetakis, 1994: 224). Besides, she gives account of a reciprocal influence that proceeds from the museum strategies of display to the organization of the fieldwork and the knowledge abstracted from there. She explains that:

In the first decades of the 20th century, fieldwork and ethnography were informed by the impulse to exit from spaces of epistemological, textual, and artifactual containments, such as the academic study and the ethnological museum-sites that were cultural variants of the parlor. These spatializing grids were reinforced by parlor-like sensory orientations and homogenizing representational strategies that privileged vision-centered consumption of ethnographic experience, the reductive mapping of cultural traits, and the narrative genre of static ethnographic present. This flattening of cross-cultural sensory experience into visual diagrams and atemporal spatial metaphors exported the parlor to the field site and transformed the latter into an open-air museum (Seremetakis, 1994: 225).

Chafarinas Island, the small archipelago, controlled by Spain since 1847 that comprises three islands (Isla del Congreso, Isla Isabel II and Isla del Rey) is situated at 2 miles from the Moroccan town of Ras el Ma (in the Province of Nador and at just 7.4 miles from the border with Algeria) and 27 miles from the city of Melilla. Recent multidisciplinary research has determined that the first settlement of the islands dates from 6500 years ago. The so-called Zafrín archaeological site undertaken in Isla del Congreso included this region into the scientific debate on the origin and evolution of its Neolithic past, on the contacts with the Iberian Peninsula through the Strait of Gibraltar, as well as on the documentation of ways of life, habitation structures and economic strategies’ (Gibaja et al., 2012: 3095–3140). Out of the three islands, Isla Isabel II was the only one to be inhabited during the Spanish occupation, reaching a peak population of almost one thousand people. The island, that in total has an area of 15 hectares, came to have a hospital, a church, a school, a post office and a casino. The last family to live on the island left in 1986. Today, it is occupied only by a military garrison from the Regulares section and by some staff from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment of the Spanish Government. During summer, some archaeologists visit the island to work at the site of Zafrín.

The History-Archaeology and Ethnographic Museums of Melilla are placed within the 16th century walled enclosure, in the Plaza de la Maestranza or Plaza de los Aljibes. The old warehouses of the Peñuelas built in 1781 were extensively restored to recover their original appearance and adapted as a museum in 2007. The museum comprises two areas: one dedicated to the historical-archaeological artifacts that includes archaeological finds, historical objects, models or plans aimed at narrating the history of Melilla for more than 10,000 years; the other the ethnographic museum which houses two parts: one dedicated to the Judeo-Sephardic community and the other to the Amazigh community. The historical-archaeological section displays a staging of the Neolithic shack excavated in the Zafrín archaeological site of the Chafarinas and also includes some of the ceramic fragments found during the research. In the same area, on the highest point of the old quarter, The Military History Museum of Melilla is in the Baluarte de la Concepción. The building that hosts the museum was built in the 16^th century as a defensive bastion until its reconversion in 1953 into the Municipal Museum. Before then, it was a gunpowder store, a prison, a meteorological office and home. As part of the museum compendium and with the transfer to the Archaeological Museum to the area, the Municipal Museum became a Military Museum and opened its doors in 1997, on the 5^th centenary of Melilla’s Spanish presence.¹¹ From that same location, at the entrance of the museum, looking towards the sea, on sunny days, one can see in the horizon the Chafarinas archipelago.

The opening of the Military History Museum of Melilla coincides with the inauguration of a new art museum model, the global museum, incorporated by the new Guggenheim Museum Bilbao which opened its doors the same year. This new model had substantial changes that ended up affecting and even heightening concerns about what had been understood until then as an art institution. The urban and economic transformation that accompanied the new model raised questions about the boundaries of a museum pertaining to the economy of opposites: outside inside, open closed, firm flexible, collective individual, global local blown apart. From then all meanings changed. The role of the museum projected over urban reconversion played also importantly in the coming decades. Each city, everywhere in the world aimed for the “Bilbao effect” i.e. to transform reality into a new economy, new landscape, even a new life. Several sharp critiques followed, reflected in numerous debates, texts, articles, discussions, meetings, artistic productions and exhibitions at local, national and international levels. These critiques seen today as a documentation represent these changes that ran parallel to the transformations, recording the systematic changes wrought by the new model. Consequently, the critical space also got finally affected, progressively narrowing its space of influence, recuperating its own attempts of resistance. However, these attempts can help us now to continue with our virtual stance from where to divert our look and wonder about the display logics of the museums of Melilla. From this imaginative stand, from the Chafarinas toward the Military History Museum of Melilla, opens a virtual approach that helps us once again to critically reflect on the museum and its social role, to ponder the decolonial urges and their implications.

The Military History Museum of Melilla is also loaded with a hard war history. Its main hall offers on display weapons, uniforms, models and other military artefacts. There is not much mediation, the objects speak by themselves through their heavy materiality, unfolding the military history of the region without questioning it, welcoming from a strange consensus any spontaneous encounter with the visitors. Why a museum about military history? Why in this place?

The display of the archaeological Zafrín site at the History and Anthropology Museum of Melilla in the same compendium of museums follows the procedures of arranging objects, props and fragments of pieces in order to stage a scientific hypothesis. Some of these protocols include the division between the viewer and the objects exhibited through glass cabinets, information signage and roped-off areas, which make visible the division between two zones: the exhibiting and the non-exhibiting. The movement of the spectator is reduced to getting closer to the exhibiting area and its resources: going closer to the glass cabinets, directing attention towards the signage, staying outside the roped-off area. The body movement is experienced as a smooth transition, which starts long before one arrives in that room dedicated to the Zafrín site. This movement begins when the spectator enters the old fortified area of Melilla, which, we can argue, has been rehabilitated as an entire open-air museum.

Throughout, the spectator’s movement is guided by the signage, getting closer or remaining distant according to these displays. However, from one of the top terraces of the fortified enclosure, the viewer can look backward, thus escaping the itinerary of the open-air museum and finding instead the city of Melilla and its surroundings. At the edge of the urban landscape where suburbia finishes, a straight-line marks two zones: the urban and the non-urban. This line corresponds to the Melilla border fence, the construction of which was begun in 1998, a year later from the opening of the Military History Museum. Like the Chafarinas Islands that remain hidden when the fog is thick and cannot be discerned from the standpoint of El Baluarte de la Concepción (the same location for the Military History Museum), Melilla´s border fence becomes invisible through the fog that emanates from the means of display employed in the old, fortified area. When this neglected view (denied as it remains out of the formal itinerary) becomes visible (outside of the marked route), an instant of displaying the dispositif takes place. A syncopated moment in which the invisible turns visible, revealing the forms of governance sustained by the fortified machinery of classifying touch as control-order between things, between spaces, between citizens. Outside and inside are well divided by the straight-line of the border of this geography. Further from here the boundaries have been dissolved, but they are still sustained by this sharp cut between here and there, between inside and outside. The opposite economy keeps active at this standpoint to allow its further dilution within neoliberal forms of life. From the inside, the museum becomes a guard. Within its showcases, it keeps the arms from the colonial wars in the region on view. The display sends a clear message: there is nothing to do in sight. There is no sense of touch.

Conclusion

Studying a forbidden place, a place that cannot be accessed, implies asking what exactly the practice of study consists of and how it is produced. The plazas of sovereignty, the historical term for the Spanish enclaves scattered along the coast of northern Morocco, are off-limits, their surroundings are militarily monitored, their history remains hidden. Bringing them into the sphere of curatorial research and specifically making them occupy the role of “case study” implies inviting a wide range of tools and disciplines in order to invent possible entrances that give speculative access to their opacity. This call for knowledge, practices, methodologies, concepts and sources configures the potential to think of curatorial study as an exercise in experimentation where everything is susceptible to being redefined, that is, not only that which surrounds us and the conditions that produce it, but also the position we occupy from the outset.

If we look closely at their indeterminate legal status immersed in the current migration management of extending borders beyond sovereign territories, we come face to face with the normative vacuum that surrounds these demarcated spaces and the obscure parameters that allow for the management of European borders in Africa. Their imprecise status encourages a constant filtering of past abuses of colonialism through the layers of historical time to fit them into a contemporary classification of citizenship as applied to the current migratory flow from Africa to Europe.

The notion of “dispositifs of touching” becomes a conceptual strategy to turn the plazas into virtual stances from where to analyze the way social life is constructed from division and separation and from where to critically revise the forms that govern our desires, imagination and conception of the world. The term also helps to unfold the division of the senses that are at the base of making the world visible, illuminating some aspects while obscuring others. Touching proposes here the display of the dispositifs that sustain such our current present social construction.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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