Description
The images of intercepted boats and anonymous bodies populate the daily press, and have become almost interchangeable from one day to another. They participate in the reproduction of an imaginary of invasion that in turn justifies the deployment by states of exceptional means to combat it. Images and images practices may also be embedded in the very practices of border control – think only of the surveillance cameras that populate the fences of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla or of the video of deterrence produced by the International Organization for Migration that seeks to erect in the minds of migrants the borders states fail to control on land. However artists and filmmakers have long sought to produce alternative representations of migration, and to intervene directly in the field of the politics of migration through their aesthetic practice. Their image practices and objects may intervene in multiple ways within the field of the politics of migration: from the very presence of their bodies and the relations they establish during the production of images, to the production of images that serve as evidence of migrants’ rights violations. The aesthetic field that is an intrinsic part of the migration regime is thus an embattled terrain, but also an ambivalent one, in which images circulate and are used in different and at times antithetical ways, and thus demand careful positioning by aesthetic practitioners. A series of films and presentations that exemplify modes of intervention in the aesthetic and political field are screened and discussed amongst aesthetic practitioners, theorists and activists. They reflect collectively on the role of aesthetic practices within the currents deadly migration regime and how they can be mobilized to contest it. “Moving Pictures, Mobile Subjects” is curated by Charles Heller and Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt in collaboration with Andreas Liebmann.| Period | 13 May 2016 → 14 May 2016 |
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| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Zürich, SwitzerlandShow on map |
Keywords
- aesthetics of migration, subjection, forensic architecture, representation
