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- Convenors:
-
Cathy Greenhalgh
(Independent)
Eni Bankole-Race (Royal College of Art)
Diana Young (University of Queensland)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-D289
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
The panel applies the term migratory aesthetics to subjectivities and journeys in anthropological practices. We welcome papers linking interdisciplinary border crossings between art, activism, ecology, media and anthropological critiques of practice.
Long Abstract:
This panel applies the term migratory aesthetics, developed by cultural theorist and video-artist Mieke Bal to anthropological critiques and practices. Anthropology has attended to a 'world of movement and migrating identity' for some time (Rapport and Dawson, 1998) whilst migration and displacement has become a staple subject matter for contemporary art.
For Bal her term has a double meaning. It is a traveling concept which 'promotes the migratory as a paradigm of our times', incorporating 'instability and productive tensions', (Bal and Hernandez-Navarro, 2011). Recent debates on the Anthropocene, climate change, neo-liberal economics and non-human agency (Tsing et al, 2016; Demos, 2011; and Haraway, 2016); and contemporary art, politics and ethics, (Bal and Hernandez-Navarro, 2011; Demos, 2016; Sholette et al, 2017); play into migratory aesthetics.
Papers might address and critique images from research with refugees or migrants that relate to questions of displacement, diaspora, memory, trauma or perceptions of travel, home and identity, mapping process or the temporalities of work between the present and archives. This may involve responses posed by exhibition, film, artwork, writing or performance which incorporates ethnographic research. These responses might observe agencies, narratives, epistemologies and materialities which derive from employing a migratory aesthetic. They may attend to migrating states of mind such as grief, recovery, catharsis, and to subjectivities and journeys in anthropological practices linked with interdisciplinary border crossings between art, activism, curating, ecology, and media.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
There are challenges to re-imagining anthropology museums for the 21st century. Migratory aesthetics assists with rethinking the exhibition curation of such materials. Incongruous juxtapositions, multiple temporalities and disrupted narratives enable these things to find their humanity again.
Paper long abstract:
There are challenges to re-imagining anthropology or ethnographic museums for the 21st century. Thomas (2016) suggests that museums are 'creative technologies that enable us to remake things anew in the present'. In what ways could this be achieved? These ethnographic things are with us now in the present. They cannot be made to travel backwards in time to become purified and re ascribed to their state of origin to give them meaning.
The world is replete with these collections held in state museums and in universities all over Europe, the Americas and Australasia. In Australia such colonial era collections are not enjoying a moment of recognition. The prevailing academic, if not national, sentiment does not attribute value, agency or power to these collections but relegates them mainly to a polluted 'not art' category that is of little interest. In much contemporary writing in the anthropology of art and in curatorial studies, and despite the turn to ethnography in art practice, the subject of the ethnographic museum is largely avoided in favour of examples from a 'contemporary art' category.
This paper considers how Bal's concept of migratory aesthetics might assist with rethinking the exhibition curation of materials in ethnographic collections. Instead of assuming museum objects as static and awaiting classification, I argue that incongruous juxtapositions, multiple temporalities and disrupted narratives enable these things to find their humanity again. The paper draws on examples from the exhibition program of the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum during the last 7 years.
Paper short abstract:
In a previous research project, investigating the everyday life of mobilized people at nodes alongside the pan-European road corridors, we strengthened the normality of their movements. With the intense wave of (forced) migration in autumn 2015 already abandoned infrastructures were reactivated.
Paper long abstract:
Passengers travel from node to node—so do refugees and migrants. In a previous research project, investigating the everyday life of mobilized people at nodes alongside the pan-European road corridors, we strengthened the normality of their movements. The most common (historic) places related to the first time of arrival of migrants are (at least in Central Europe) railway stations and coach terminals. Their certain infrastructural-aesthetics still trigger memories and make people frequent these places, gather here and sustain their social networks.
But in the course of every event new nodes establish, or old nodes are reactivated. In 2015, at the interim phase of our research project, Vienna had indeed faced an intense wave of (forced) migration, which unexpectedly made our research focus politically hot and timely. To manage the 'wave of refugees' in autumn 2015, the Austrian-Hungarian border station of Nickelsdorf was reactivated as a hotspot and busses became a means for the mobilization of refugees as well. This situation we translated into an animated graphic novel. In contrast to the frozen images of photos, maps, and drawings, animation is perfectly suited for the representation of dynamic movement, rhythms of flow, starts and stops, but also for zooming in and out, for scaling up and down fluidly between a macro and micro-political perception of routes and nodes, while the grade of abstraction defuses several legal-ethical issues related to the photographic or video (mis)representation of people.
To access the animation: www.researchcatalogue.net/view/330596/330597
Paper short abstract:
This paper interrogates the non-linearity of cloth, customs and culture/language among the Yoruba and particularly investigates the evolution of folded cloth in Yoruba diasporic life/usage.
Paper long abstract:
This paper interrogates the non-linearity of cloth, customs and culture/language among the Yoruba and particularly investigates the evolution of folded cloth in Yoruba diasporic life/usage.
Culture must be vigorous to survive. It must possess an inherent dynamism and flexibility to withstand the vagaries of time, dislocations and dispossession as well as an ability to incorporate the natural evolution of new and/or imposed knowledge and inevitable progress in the context of a globalised aesthetic.
'Fold over folds: such is the status of the two modes of perception, or of microscopic and macroscopic processes. That is why the unfolded surface is never the opposite of the fold, but rather the movement that goes from some to the others.
(Deleuze, Gilles)
I analogise folded cloth, the prototypical mode of wearing cloth among the Yoruba with the complex 'inner wisdom' of Yoruba language usage - the multi-layered meanings of ostensibly everyday speech.
Whether the intimate folds of an iro preparatory to its tucking in on the appropriate side, the symbolism of the act of 'setting' an agbada 'sleeve' or the origami intricacies of a gele, the Yoruba have traditionally used the art of folded cloth to express sensibilities and opposition.
How does this understanding translate in the translocation - Stories/cloth with meanings within meanings/ a need to hold on to one's heritage while participating robustly in (and possibly influencing) the aesthetic milieu to which migration has transported one.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from Hannah Arendt's analysis of statelessness as a symptomatic experience of the modern era, this article explores migration and mobility from Turkey to Europe and its role in the making of transnational identities through art.
Paper long abstract:
Recent years have witnessed the emergence of art produced by a number of artists who travel widely to create and exhibit their work, much of which derives from their experiences of homeland, migration, and encounter. Drawing from Hannah Arendt's analysis of statelessness as a symptomatic experience of the modern era, this article explores migration from Turkey to Europe and its role in the making of transnational identities. It specifically investigates the articulation and dynamics of hyphenated European-Turkish identities through migratory aesthetics, and new forms of European and diasporic citizenship through the work and biographies of contemporary visual artists originally from Turkey who have left their "home" for various reasons (education or artist residencies) and have consciously chosen to migrate as adults. What makes these artists particularly pertinent for an investigation of new forms of identity, citizenship-making, and "belonging" in contemporary Europe is that their art could be considered to some extent "homeless": it neither belongs fully in Europe nor in Turkey, nor can it exist without these two. Concentrating on their art as "snapshots," this paper focuses on the politics of belonging through an investigation of how these artistic trajectories are mapped in a transnational context through the cities of Amsterdam, Berlin, and Istanbul.
Paper short abstract:
To what extent can the academic and literary practices truly converge and fuse into new genres? I explore the trans-genre contamination as a congenial form for interrogating contamination as a subject - the purity/impurity discourse; creolization- with South Africa as my principal case.
Paper long abstract:
To what extent do the academic and literary practices truly converge? Is it even desirable that they fuse into new genres? These are questions that I have struggled with the last decade in my double capacity as literary writer and academic researcher. I am currently exploring a cross-genre that I at first, for lack of a better term, called ethnographic fiction (Hemer 2015; 2017). I have however lately decided to opt for the term contamination, based on the tradition outlined by Appiah (2006), going from Roman playwright Publius Terentius Afer, whose fusions of comedy and tragedy were called contaminations, to Salman Rushdie, the supposedly foremost contemporary successor. Appiah does however not present a more specific definition of this tradition of contamination; in fact, Terence and Rushdie are the only names mentioned. I take it as an open and intriguing suggestion for a trans-genre in the borderland of art and academia, in which I inscribe my own work.
Contamination as a genre is a congenial form for exploration of contamination as a subject - the purity/impurity discourse (Douglas 1966); creolization (Glissant 1990; 1997; Hannerz 1986; 1996; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2015; Erasmus 2017) - with South Africa as my principal case (Hemer 2012). I think a "migratory aesthetics" may fit well to frame my work in progress, which I would be happy to present to this panel.
Paper short abstract:
Using film / photographic research about global cotton manufacture, I make analogies between practices of filmmaking, fieldwork, writing and objects embodying metaphors of both contemporary migration events and notions of plurality and inter-disciplinarity.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I analyse a journey and dialogue between the cinematographic, the ethnographic and the essayistic, using film / photographic research, drawing on Mieke Bal's 'migratory aesthetics' and writing on art, anthropology and migration (Demos, Ingold, Mezzadra and Nielson, Nail, Schimanski and Wolfe). I make analogies between practices of filmmaking, fieldwork, writing and objects embodying metaphors of both contemporary migration events and notions of plurality and inter-disciplinarity. Cottonopolis (2019) is my feature essay / ethnographic documentary film which relates cotton textile manufacture in contemporary India with the migration historiography of declined former industrial mega-textile cities like Manchester. Nomadic groups can no longer cross borders where previously they carried textiles for barter, yet the global cotton trade uses migrant labour and does little to combat human trafficking. The film reveals materialities and memories of making ubiquitous cotton calico, denim and shoddy items (recycled waste textile): blankets, towels, sleeping bags for military, schools and refugees. Shuttles carry weft threads across loom warps, known as 'boat shuttles'; mirror shutters revolve inside movie cameras exposing film stock to light; (now data driven shuttle-less looms and digital sensors). This technical mediation crosses boundaries and borders, the etymology of both words emphasising travel back and forth and a continuous opening and closing. The moving image, the cloth textile and the multi-sited field ethnography are spaces of expression and mosaics of time travel across borders.
Paper short abstract:
Through the analysis of two installations of the artist Doris Salcedo, I discuss the term migratory aesthetics as paradigm of our times. I argue that one of its important features consists in the enactment of the effects of trauma and violence as forms of haunting and aberrant displacements.
Paper long abstract:
Through the analysis of the art installations Palimpsesto (Palimpset) and La Casa Viuda (The Widowed House) of the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, I study an example of what can be understood as migratory aesthetics. In La Casa Viuda, Salcedo created objects made with displaced parts of other objects, which describe uncanny spaces. Palimpsesto was inspired by the migrants that died in the Mediterranean Sea searching for a better life in Europe. In this work, the names of the dead are written in specially crafted stone and through them appear water droplets that merge to reveal the names of other victims. By the examination of these installations, their creation and exhibition processes, in this presentation, I discuss the term migratory aesthetics as paradigm of our times. I argue that one of its important features consists in the enactment of the effects of trauma and violence as forms of haunting and aberrant displacements.
Paper short abstract:
Calais Children: A Case to Answer is a film and live campaign by director Sue Clayton. The 62-minute film follows scandal of what happened to the 2000 lone children who were in the Calais Jungle as it burned down in late 2016 - most of whom had a legal case to be in the UK. www.calais.gebnet.co.uk
Paper long abstract:
Calais Children: A Case to Answer (UK, 2017) is a compelling 62 minute film by Sue Clayton, following the scandal the almost 2000 lone refugee children left abandoned in the Calais Jungle when it was destroyed in late 2016 - though most had a legal case to be in the UK. http://calais.gebnet.co.uk The film was submitted as her witness statement to the High Court challenge that she and human rights lawyers made to the UK government ("ZS versus the Secretary of State", 2018).
The first 15 minutes of the film will be shown during the panel (e-paper).
This is collaborative film practice supporting solidarity and resistance. The research used auto-ethnographic techniques related to the notion of migratory aesthetics- video diaries, testimonies, self-filming - with unaccompanied refugee minors. It uses a widescreen frame and drone cameras hover showing the proximity of sea, camp, and fences intercut with the grounded migrants point-of-view.
Sue Clayton is a journalist and a feature and documentary film maker. She has worked on various child and youth asylum projects over 15 years, and consults on news stories for BBC, ITV and Channel 4.
Her work is social-justice driven, but she is also concerned with the construction of the young migrant identity, and issues of 'bordering' and self-representation. To this end she is creating an archive of interviews with young asylum seekers in the UK - see www.bigjourneys.org and writes on identity issues in the co-edited book Unaccompanied Young Migrants: Identity, Care and Justice (Policy Press 2019).