Migration management is evidently a crucial matter concerning and affecting the characteristics of life for all of us. Historically, currently increasingly in the future, migration played, plays and will play a pivotal role in the configuration of the global sociopolitical and socioeconomic framework, which determines the quality of our universal well-being.
Migration, influenced and caused by numerous, interdependent variables, unleashes since a vast range of reactions and causes an equally great spectrum of effects. Independent from being seen under humanitarian, economic, ethic or demographic aspects, the debate about, the appreciation of and the approach to migration has a strong value-orientation immanent and is commonly undertaken from a certain point of view.
Emotionally charged discussions often hinder the development of desperately needed, sustainable answers, supporting and ensuring humanitarian and socially compatibly solutions for a livable future in an egalitarian, accelerating world.
Migration, as the “orphan child of global institution architectures,” as termed by Goldin, Cameron and Balarajan in “Exceptional People - How migration shaped our world and will define our future in Exceptional People, needs to be pulled into the centre of political awareness and needs to be addressed by every single person interested in equal rights.
With “Possible Futures of Migration,” Time's Up will bring together a range of experts, practitioners, interested and affected people to sketch and develop possible visions of migration management and its effects to our everyday life. Not saying that we will be free of value-orientation!
Our interest in the complex subject of migration originates in, or rather co-develops with, our current work Mind the Map. Mind the Map looks at the appalling effects caused by current aspects of an European refugee, asylum and migration policy at the external borders of Europe. As an explorative installation, Mind The Map displays the “fictionalized status-quo” of thousands of people dying on their way to seek asylum in Europe. Mind the Map calls upon the responsibility of every singly European citizen. Mere ignorance or even worse, acceptance of these people dying, as one effect of a misguided, un-coordinated migration-policy, has to be ended.