In-Formation

How have infographics shaped our perception of migrants? Harun Farocki’s montage of pictograms, bar charts, and pie charts on migration—sourced from German newspapers, schoolbooks, and official publications—reveals that this seemingly neutral information is full of one-dimensional clichés rooted in a nineteenth-century political worldview.

The graphics depict migrants with stereotypical attributes or reduce them to row upon row of faceless black figures, flanked by arrows representing inflows and outflows. Using these symbols, Farocki reconstructs the history of migration in the Federal Republic of Germany. The terminology also shifted during this period, with references to poor countries, guest workers, migrants, stateless foreigners, asylum seekers, refugees, and displaced persons.

This silent image collage is derived from Farocki’s single-channel video installation Aufstellung, which was included in the 2005 Projekt Migration exhibition in Cologne. It critically exposes a new layer of meaning, showing that people cannot be reduced to mere abstractions.