This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On the 25th of June, as keynote speaker of the Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group Research Showcase of 2021, Professor Nuala Finnegan of University College Cork gave a plenary lecture entitled ‘Child-centred Art at the Mexico-U.S. Border: Ethical Questions and Imaginative Possibilities’.

Professor Finnegan began her lecture by showing an image of Donald Trump on the cover of Time magazine in June 2018, in which Trump is depicted looking down on a distressed child crying. This is a reconfiguration of a now infamous image, wherein this child is watching her mother being searched at the U.S.-Mexico border. This brought us to the child separation process of April 2018 during the Trump administration, and the inhumanity of this.

Professor Finnegan identified three primary tropes of representation of children at the border: children as dead, distressed, or imprisoned. She criticised the lack of integrity shown within the fields of journalism and politics regarding such representations, as the migrant child and their trauma has often been used for political photo opportunities, or as disaster pornography in humanitarian campaigns. Professor Finnegan therefore covered the faces of children and migrants in the images she used throughout the lecture to respect their privacy and agency. She considered what happens when other representations of children enter the fray, asking: how does this disrupt the narrative?

Professor Finnegan took us through various artworks, including the You Will Not Be Forgotten project completed by artist Sandy Rodriguez and the #nokidsincages campaign. She then introduced ‘Kikito’, a gigantic art installation by French artist JR, which was part of his wider ‘Giants’ art project. It is a blown up photograph of a child, Kikito, from Tijuana, Mexico, shown peering over the border looking towards the U.S.. A key aspect of the ‘Kikito’ artwork is that it plays with the traditional size and scale of the child, leading Professor Finnegan to detail the history of what she referred to as ‘giant baby art’, which stands in opposition to historically prettier and more innocent representations of children in medieval and renaissance art. She argued that playing with the size of the child in art implies notions of bodily autonomy, corruptibility and non-dependence hitherto not associated with the child figure. She identified a sense of creepiness arising from this, arguing that the notion of babies or children as being so autonomous, without a mother figure, counteracts normalcy.

What is also interesting about the wider context of the image is that it later came to light that Kikito’s family have no desire to cross the border, living happily in Tecate, Mexico. This contests notions of Mexican migration, or that everyone in Mexico seeks to leave across the border. There is also the element of the gaze that is played with in ‘Kikito’ – where mass surveillance of people and goods at the border would traditionally be considered as the predominant observer, Kikito is the one overlooking the border guards. His enlarged size now affords him dominance in this dynamic. For Professor Finnegan, ‘Kikito’ invites connection, serves to reimagine xenophobic stereotypes of Central American migrants, and links to earlier, less antagonistic border relations of the 19th century.

Giving greater context to ‘Kikito’, Professor Finnegan noted that the building of this art display coincided with the reversal of DACA, and a racially motivated mass shooting in El Paso, Texas soon followed in 2019. But she reminded us of the reality of children trying to cross the border, and the need to consider the nature of photography as a means of political intervention. That is to say, injustice still remains regardless of artworks such as ‘Kikito’. Real children are still being kept in cages, darker skinned children from Guatemala and Honduras still face cruelty and racism in both the U.S. andMexico, and structural violence and traditional politics remain unchanged.

Professor Finnegan quoted JR’s musings on the power of art. To paraphrase, he says that there is no such thing as art changing the world, but the fact that you tried is what matters. This signals the problematics surrounding grand claims about art’s power in society as a political tool. Professor Finnegan affirmed that the conversation is still ongoing, but that ‘Kikito’’s meaning may remain a ‘playful artifice’, all in all.

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this lecture as it gave me great insight into the nexus between politics and cultural production, and the inevitable challenges associated with this relationship. It gave me a new means of understanding issues of border politics through the lens of cultural responses, and I felt compelled to question the function and impact of art itself in such urgent contexts.

Report by Eleanor Gilmore, final-year undergraduate in Spanish and Portuguese