As ‘index and metaphor’: Migration and the Thermal Imaginary in Richard Mosse’s Incoming

This article approaches conceptual documentary-maker, Richard Mosse’s Incoming (2017) project which turns military-grade thermal imaging technology on migrants at Europe’s southern borders and asks ‘what does it mean to the epistemic figure of the refugee when a thermal imaginary is added to the technologies of bordering?’ It concludes that, although the thermal imaginary amplifies a wider biopolitical logic of dehumanization, it also provides vectors of perception – entropy, conductivity and intensity – which encourage us to re-examine Hannah Arendt’s old trinity of ‘state-territory-people’ that sustain the Westphalian construction of the refugee in relation to bounded territories. In focusing on heat as both index and metaphor, Mosse’s project alerts us to the thermal vectors that propel bodies towards borders, but also to the necessity of finding a place for heat within the tools available for imagining political responses to the challenges posed by a warming world. The thermal borders in Mosse’s project point us to a post-Westphalian redistribution of the sensible in which borders have become simultaneously technologies of separation and markers of proximity, intimacy and touch.