Nothing is Missing (the installation)

Bertien van Manen

Introduction: Facing Migration

All over the world, and in your own living room: are we able to consider, experience and value these two locations and the ensuing positions at the same time? As I began working on this chapter, Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen (1942–) had an exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Her answer was a loud and clear yes! Van Manen is known for her radical documentary photography in which she combines intimacy with the people in the image with an awareness of their specific situation – visual diaries that travel the world. And although mostly she is herself not in the image, her presence in the depicted situation, her relationship of the people whose languages she even learnt, and her respect for them are strongly visible. Proximity and respect for their differences. She shows the possibility of intimacy in a globalised situation. The question of that possibility brings us back to the question of universality (Chapter 3).

Here I will zoom in on an issue that challenges attempts to impose as well as to discard universalisms, for it is easier criticised than avoided. One of the most tenacious instances of universalism – the belief in the universality of something, a phenomenon and its value for human life – is motherhood. This is also, doubtless, the most intimate, hence, local of relationships. The current state of the allegedly globalised world makes this universalism both urgently necessary and deeply problematic. This chapter is inspired by this ambivalence. I focus on the concept of facing in order to develop a vision of art that foregrounds both the global and the local, the universal and the intimate.

First of all, we must shed the problematic binary between universalism and relativism that has so long dominated our thinking about intercultural issues. Thinking of motherhood as a universal usefully counters a problematic relativising. For example, relativising the horror of losing a child by alleging that, in some severely underprivileged countries, losing a child to illness, hunger or violence occurs so frequently that it is ‘normal’, would be a dreadful condescendence and a scandalous acceptance of the unacceptable.