The Freedom of the Migrant.

The Freedom of the Migrant
Published in association with Dunedin Public Art Gallery
2018
Edited and designed by Matthew Galloway; edition of 1500

The Freedom of the Migrant takes its starting point from a column published in the Business section of the New Zealand Herald on 26 March 2016, in which the columnist Fran O’Sullivan recounted remarks made by the then Prime Minister, Sir John Key, on his return from a meeting of the International Democrat Union—a network of centre-right parties of which Key was then chairperson. In O’Sullivan’s retelling, Key hypothesised that a single act of terror inserted amongst a group of refugees could destabilise Angela Merkel’s leadership and, with it, Germany’s leadership of Europe—and, working from that scenario, positioned Aotearoa New Zealand as an Asia-Pacific Switzerland, a wealthy and defensible bolthole for high-net-worth individuals seeking escape from an unstable world, a reading the page’s own pull-quote made explicit.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name (21 April – 12 August 2018), the newsprint publication takes up the discourse that a hypothesis of this kind enters into—the dominant political narratives constructed around terrorism and the refugee crisis, and the way they shape collective perceptions of border control, freedom of movement, and national identity—through three commissioned exchanges: Key’s Vision with Fran O’Sullivan, Unknown Knowns, or the Contemplation of Nightmares with Richard Jackson, and Imagined Communities with David Hall. It is a project about forecasts and connections—about freedom from terror recast as freedom from asylum seekers, and about a country sold, like a glasshouse, as air-tight and conditioned, able to sustain its own climate uninhibited by events outside.