Unknown Migrants

Tania Bruguera

Alexandra Délnano Alonso

Camilo Godoy

Benjamin Nienass

For Unknown Migrants, four artists return to a 2012 performance at the 9/11 Memorial — where participants drew the engraved names up out of the bronze to spell, letter by letter, the words ‘unknown migrants’ — restaging it on the attacks’ 25th anniversary for the estimated 67 undocumented people who died that day and were never inscribed.

The history of remembrance has repeatedly returned to moments when the record ceases to be whole, when it obscures rather than honors. Memorials are built to fix the dead in place, to inscribe them and hold them steady against forgetting, yet certain names sink back into darkness even as others are carved into light. It is precisely in this unstable terrain, where presence and erasure trade places, that Unknown Migrants situates itself.

In September 2012, Immigrant Movement International, together with artists Tania Bruguera and Camilo Godoy and scholars Alexandra Délano Alonoso and Benjamin Nienass, gathered community members at the 9/11 Memorial for a performance of the same name. Participants made drawings by rubbing the engraved letters of the Memorial’s names on the bronze to spell, letter by letter, the words ‘unknown migrants’. From the fragments of the recognized, they composed the unrecognized. The gesture honored the undocumented people who died in the attacks of September 11 yet were never inscribed within the Memorial itself. According to the 9/11 Memorial Museum, of the 2,977 people killed that day, an estimated 67 were undocumented migrants, present in the loss, but many others are unknown and absent from the record.

This emphasis on the migrant as a figure caught between visibility and disappearance resonates with the condition of contemporary life, one increasingly defined by precarity, displacement, and exclusion. Like a form that flickers between figure and background, the undocumented person drifts across our shared history without fixed borders, porous to the nation that depends on their labor yet refuses their dignity and their actual names. The performance refused the hierarchy that sorts the mourned from the unmourned, the citizen from the migrant, insisting instead that all who were lost belong within the frame of remembrance.

For the 25th anniversary of September 11, Unknown Migrants draws attention to the role migrants have played in our shared history and to the ongoing erasure, distortion, and exclusion of migrants. The 2012 performance was restaged this summer and documented to create a short video gathering interviews with migrant organizers, artists, and scholars. Together, the video, drawings, and ephemera from the original 2012.

Contributors: Tania Bruguera, Alexandra Délano Alonoso, Camilo Godoy, and Benjamin Nienass, with María Canela, Isabella Cruz, Teresa García, Edith Hernández, Elisabeth Ingwersen Méndez, Joel Magallán, Verónica Ramírez, Juan Carlos Ruíz, and Laura Sáenz.