You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
‘When there is nowhere to go, nowhere is home.’
I begin with the film Human Flow by Ai Wei Wei, the Chinese artist, activist and film-maker known for his extraordinary large-scale art works and installations. Then I take up the Australian film, Sweet Country by Warwick Thornton, bringing the theme around to the indigenous areas of Central Australia and the existential challenges facing Aboriginal Australians and professionals involved in the complex circumstances of a region falling into anomie/no law.
Human Flow will no doubt be known to many who read this journal. The 2017 documentary is an account of the movement of the 65 million people around the world who have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war in the greatest human displacement since World War II, a movement taking place now. Ai Wei Wei’s team gathers visual accounts from twenty-three smitten lands including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, France, Greece, Germany, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Mexico and Turkey. The film is wide ranging in its sweep and precise in detail, characteristic of Ai’s creations. Images of human despair and resilience are interleaved with the themes of lost homelands, ‘nowhere to go’ and ‘no one to receive’.
Behind each individual and family we witness both the relentless pressure and hope that pushes people on and on. The motivations are complex, as are the responses. Whatever position you might take about sociopathic war, environmental destruction, economic imbalance, refugees and the spectrum of responses made to these complex situations, the fact remains that I/we as empathic and sometimes clear-headed practitioners, must find ourselves gazing at this shifting balance in the conditions of our fellow human beings, trying to line up some kind of response aligned, perhaps, with the pragmatic principles of eunomia or ‘good order’ in human relations, according to the humanitarian ethos of psychotherapy. (Eunomia, the daughter of Them