Inno Delle Nazioni, Migrant Choir is an action in which recent migrants to Italy, and their supporters, sing the anthems of Italy, France, and The United Kingdom in front of these respective national pavilions at the 2015 Venice Biennale. This performance is a speech act, in which non-citizens claim their rights of citizenship while rendering the exclusionary nature of these anthems visible.

Wars, state repression, and poverty have forced an increasing number of migrants from Africa and the Middle East to risk their lives, travelling from Lybia to Italy by sea. They await hearings in welcome centers in Sicily, are stranded at Ventimiglia on the French border, and are encamped in Calais, awaiting entrance to Britain. The European response to this humanitarian crisis has been cynical at best. Internal dissent has defeated even the modest proposal of accepting 60,000 refugees across Europe and inspired a hardening of European borders and enforcement procedures. In the province of Veneto, violent demonstrations recently erupted against a plan to house recent migrants in Treviso. In response, the President of Veneto and Northern League member, Luca Zaia, declared “No more refugees will be arriving” as a direct rebuke to the request by the national government’s proposal to settle migrants across the country and not only in the southern provinces.

The paths these migrants follow across Africa, the Middle East and Europe, trace backward the vectors of colonization that began in the late 19th century during the “scramble for Africa.” Eritrea, whose repressive military state has provoked the movement of the most refugees entering Italy this year, was an Italian colony from 1889-1941. Libya, the staging ground for voyages to Europe, was Italy’s colony from 1912-1947. Somalia, the country with the second largest number of refugees heading to Italy, was divided between Italy and Britain for the first half of the 20th century. The other nations from which the most migrants are escaping, were colonized by either the British—Nigeria, Gambia, Sudan—or the French—Syria, Senegal, and Mali.11For the “Origin of migrants arriving in Italy by sea, Jan. to April 2015” see: “What’s Behind the Surge in Refugees Crossing the Mediterranean Sea”, New York Times, May 21, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/world/europe/surge-in-refugees-crossing-the-mediterranean-sea-maps.html. Syria, whose devastating civil war is source of the most global migrants today, was assigned to France as part of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which gave the French control over Syria until 1946.

Colonization played an essential part in the constitution of the modern capitalist economy. Throughout the long process of what Karl Marx called “so-called primitive accumulation”, during which capitalism was formed, three novel lines transformed the globe: the borders of European nation-states, the enclosure of peasant lands as private property, and the subdivision of the world beyond Europe into colonies.22See Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, Trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin books, 1990), 871-940. and Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, “Fabrica Mundi: Producing the World by Drawing Borders” in Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy, Issue 04: Currency, 4-19.These lines may seem like artifacts of history, but these they act as foundations for the intertwined divisions that organize our world today.

The Venice Biennale was founded in 1895 as a celebration of Italian national arts, but it evolved quickly into an international biennale. By 1914, at the zenith of European Imperialism, there were seven national pavilions in the Giardini: Italy (1895), Belgium (1907), Hungary (1909), Germany (1909), Great Britain (1909), France (1912), and Russia (1914). The plan of the Biennale grounds with its two axes—the original Italian pavilion at the end of one, Britain flanked by France and Germany at the end of the other—has been built as an evolving representation of the balance of hegemony between national and colonial powers. The biennale itself functioned for much of its history as a project to assert the collective cultural supremacy of Europe over the rest of the world.

Europe’s national anthems were written between the 18th and 19th centuries. They are nationalist hymns, deeply ideological compositions designed to inspire common people to risk their lives to defend newly invented states. Often these simple songs point to the pure race of the nation, or allude to the conquest of neighbouring territories, or far off lands. The French Anthem, “La Marseillaise” (1792), calls repeatedly in the chorus for the spilling of impure blood. The Italian Anthem, “Il Canto degli Italiani” (1847) glorifies Scipio Africanus, the Roman general who conquered Carthage in 202 BC, recalling the Latin conquest of North Africa. “God save the Queen” (1744), the anthem of the United Kingdom, threatens to “scatter her enemies… confound their politics, and frustrate their knavish tricks.” These songs are refrains. Singing them draws a boundary in song, a line separating citizens from non-citizens. In 1862, Guiseppe Verdi was commissioned to write an orchestral work for the London World’s Fair; in response he wrote the cantata “Inno Delle Nazioni” (“Hymn of Nations”). His composition was written to describe world solidarity, yet combined only three national songs, those of Britain, Italy and France. This curation, designed to inflate the importance of Italy within Europe, appears in hindsight as a strangely prescient combination in relation to today’s struggles over migration.

In the context of contemporary events, it seems appropriate to sing these songs together again, in opposition to their original meanings. The lines that demarcate the edges of the nation-states, were drawn alongside the lines that subdivided the nation into private properties, and the lines that carved the world into colonies. It is precisely these exclusionary lines that are reinforced by the lines of words and music that form these anthems. But the act of singing them is politically expressive in ways that exceed the meaning of their lyrics, and the intended emotional effect of their scores. Singing is a line, which has great power to create social connections and affective responses. When many people sing together these lines intermingle, resonate and amplify, to create a kind of superlinearity.33Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari use the word superlinearity to describe precisely this effect of voices. See A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 62.This effect can be mobilized to defend the nation, but it also can forge solidarities across national lines, or in resistance to the idea of the nation as a closed territory. Inno Delle Nazioni, Migrant Choir, is an affirmation of citizenship as an act of self-definition. Citizenship is defined here not by the exclusive membership in a given national group, but as the act of demanding “the right to have rights.”44See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962 [1951]), 298; and Engin Isin, “Citizenship after Orientalism” opendemocracy.net/engin-isin/citizenship-after-orientalism-introduction. But as migrants sing these songs their meanings self-implode and their exclusionary logics come undone.

The action is performed in solidarity with migrant rights organizations around the world.