MIGRANT JOURNAL NO.4: DARK MATTERS

As you enter a dark space, your pupils dilate to allow more light to hit your retina, to allow you to see. If darkness is the absence of light, or the absorption of photons by a surface, it also constitutes a counterpoint that creates voids and leading lines. Darkness is what remains hidden. It can be ugliness, criminality, hatred, oppression, colonialism. Dark is the night, darker are the deeds. But darkness also embodies both beginning and infinity—a breeding ground for alternative thinking, dubious exchanges and non-normative pleasures. What starts as a shady business might soon turn into normality.

In this fourth issue, read about the migration of psychotropic mushroom across the deserts of California, the decolonisation of money, the use of artificial intelligence to determine asylum seekers origins, hear about centuries-old peoples from West Africa living deep in the forest of Suriname or the “kamikazis” smuggling petrol from Nigeria to Benin—and many other stories of darkness and migration.