Nothing is Impossible Under the Sun
The book Nothing is Impossible Under the Sun by Alice Myers was conceived on journeys to Calais that Myers made over the course of two years. During this time she got to know and work closely with many of the people who for a myriad of reasons gathered there.
Myers' work challenges the mass media stereotype of undocumented people as an undefined mass of illegals. In the book we meet those who were claiming asylum in France, those who that were homeless while waiting for a chance to cross to the UK and those who smuggled them across the dividing waterway as well as those with no legal status or any plans to leave at all.
Myers work brings together fragments of material. It compiles, portraits, Facebook photographs, landscape imagery, handwriting, drawings and transcripts of conversations which collectively form a narrative about people who are legally invisible and the spaces they are confined to.
Our reason for publishing Myers’ project is that her work is a rare example of a functional involved social and collaborative practice. Not staged and not documentary, but a negotiated representation Nothing is Impossible Under the Sun succeeds to render visible the complex nuances of individual resistance to state apparatus and the politics of bare life.
Nothing is Impossible Under the Sun was launched at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow, and Breadfield in Malmö, with an accompanying exhibition No Outside Left with works from Tina Enghoff and Alice Myer
The book can be bought through us by emailing us or from Alice (who also has lovely special edition )
Standard Edition
Printing: Full Colour Offset
Binding: Singer Sewn
Trim size: 240x180mm
Extent: 52pp + 16pp text booklet + 2 loose prints
£24
The book was picked as one of 9 photo books that brought portfolios to life by Format 2017
No Outside Left
Refugee – Migrant, Undocumented – Illegal, Citizen – Alien, Freedom – Restriction
Exhibition and conversation with Alice Myers and Tina Enghoff'
In critical border studies, the binary terms that separate people who have had to seek refuge from people who own the rights of citizenship are examined and problematized. The studies show how the tension which is created in the judicial process forms a trap where the status of individual humanity is questioned, examined and judged. To be considered as evidence person's narrative about the reasons and the conditions for moving from one geographical area to another has to follow a certain pattern.
How does your particular story sound? Does it verify your right to protection? Is it contradictory or unambiguous? Where did you first arrive when you left your homeland?
The artists Alice Myers and Tina Enghoff works’ from Nothing is Impossible Under the Sun och Migrant Documents visualise conditions in the zones that are erected around those who according to the authorities do not have satisfying answers to these questions. The works that are shown in the exhibition are made in collaboration with individuals that people these permanently transitory formal and informal places. The work makes visual the instability of these zones and begs a reformulation of the questions beyond the judicial. The space outside, what is that? How does it work? What are its possibilities and impossibilities? How can a human being live there? All in order to arrive at the question, how can we be made to see the invisible within the frame of humanity?
Curated by Soap, Text written by Alice Myers and Nina Bacos