A Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints)

2017

10min

We were huddled in front of the thin light of a fire in an abandoned house on a cold January night in Calais. X was making another cup of very sugary tea. Y, stirring the kindling, yelled as he accidentally grabbed a burning twig. “are you trying to clean your fingerprints?” laughed X. ‘A Rough History’ is a performance lecture, installation and 16mm film following several visits to Calais, that considers a practice by migrants entering the EU of destroying their fingerprints to avoid detection by the Eurodac system, alongside other histories of fingerprinting and fingerprint erasures. It sees the fingerprint as a scaled down landscape, looking at the circulation of the image of the fingerprint, and the different lives and journeys of the migrants whose hands produce such images.