Imagine a gallery looking like a living room, where visiting is like a social call. The image is a portrait, bust only, of a woman speaking to someone else (apart from a short introductory sequence that sets up the situation). In some cases, we hear the voice of the interlocutor, in others we hear nothing but the women speaking. Every once in while, one of them falls silent, as if she were listening to the others. The women are from various countries—for example, Gordana Jelenic from Serbia, Massaouda Tayeb Mehdi from Tunisia, Ümmühan Armagan from Turkey. They all live in their home country and all saw a child leave for Western Europe. They speak to someone else; the speech situation is personal. Their interlocutors are people close to them, intimates; but the relationship with them has been interrupted due to the migration of their child. If we are to understand and value the contribution of migrant cultures to the European scene, we must first of all realize the enormity of the consequences involved and the changes in the souls of individuals taking this drastic step. We must wonder, that is, why people think they must leave behind their affective ties, relatives, friends, and habits—in short, everything we take for granted to constitute everyday life. As I argue here, a first step to contemplating these questions is a triple act of facing. Facing sums up the aesthetic and political principle of my long-term (2006-2011) video work Nothing is Missing that is an attempt to reflect on this severance and its consequences. Through this installation, I attempt to shift laterally both the notion of an individual autonomy of a vulgarized Cartesian cogito, and that of a subjecting passivity derived from the principle of Bishop Berkeley’s “to be is to be perceived.” The former slogan has done damage in ruling out the participation of the body and the emotions in rational thought. The latter, recognizable in the Lacanian as well as a certain Bakhtinian traditions, has sometimes over-extended passivity and coerciveness into a denial of political agency and hence, responsibility. I try to shift these views in favor of an intercultural, “relational” aesthetic. In order to elaborate such an alternative I have concentrated this installation on the bond between speech and face. Speech, not just in terms of “giving voice,” but also as listening, and answering, all in multiple meanings; and the face, turning the classical “window of the soul” into an “inter-face.” Between speech and facing lies a realm of intermediality. The medium of video, the medium of the moving image in, again, many different senses, is, I claim, eminently suitable to elaborate that bond in ways that return to aesthetics its old meaning of sense-based binding. Between “moving” as a multiple quality of the video image, and “binding” as a specific conception of aesthetics, I wish to articulate the concept of migratory aesthetics. Facing, taken “at face value” is three things, or acts, at once. Literally, facing is, first, the act of looking someone else in the face. It is also, in second place coming to terms with something that is difficult to live down, by looking it in the face, instead of denying or repressing it. Thirdly, it is making contact, placing the emphasis on the second person, and acknowledging the need of that contact in order, simply, to be able to sustain life. Instead of “to be is to be perceived” and “I think, therefore I am,” facing proposes, “I face (you), hence, we are.” For this reason, facing is my proposal for an emblematic instance of …