View From Above

The camera’s gaze slowly pans over a model of a city while a man’s voice relates the fictional story of the Iraqi asylum applicant M. The conjunction highlights an ambivalence at the heart of the asylum procedure: when cities or countries are divided into safe and unsafe zones, eligibility for asylum is limited to those who have fled unsafe areas. An asylum seeker’s place of origin is often verified by testing his knowledge of the local topography, which an official compares to the information in a map. Applicants who know this can memorize geographical facts as they appear in the view from above; those who don’t may be rejected because they haven’t learned to see their first home from such a lofty vantage point.