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“Saint Bernard, Paris, 23 août 1996” Anne-Marie Schneider Anne-Marie Schneider’s drawings document and comment on the events in Paris in 1996, when three hundred Africans, without papers, occupied the Saint-Ambroise church on March 18th, and the Saint-Bernard church in July. This occupation has developed into one of the most important social movements, that of the “Sans Papiers,” which put the illegalization of migrants in Europe on the agenda for the first time. The occupations in Paris had been a part of a struggle over regularizing their residence that was lasting for years. On August 12th, the police entered the Saint-Bernard church and cleared it. When the migrants returned to the church a short while later, their situation became widely discussed by the public. On August 23rd, the police once more stormed the church. Ten Africans were deported immediately; the courts later released the others. Anne-Marie Schneider, a former musician, now mainly a producer of animation films, concentrates the drawings, turning them into emblems of assaults, violence and deportation. The established sequence of the images follows the succession of events and the police strategy of intensifying the violence. Some drawings are interspersed, which comment on the global living and working conditions: among others, increasing flexibility – a picture, in which a black colour surface pours into various buckets with white paint, refers to the Maastricht treaty, one of the landmarks of the Europeanization of migration policy; another one shows sewing machines which emit cheap fakes of branded articles – in this case, a crocodile is affixed to them; or simply words like “monde” that are written on tins and are scattered by multiple reflections. A real object on a chair takes up this word again: the Coke tin as a symbol of globalisation thus connects the “world” of the viewers with the installation. Artist, born 1962, lives and works in Paris. |
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