- Convenors:
-
Geoffrey Aung
(University of Vienna)
Manuela Ciotti (University of Vienna)
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- Discussant:
-
Stefan Tarnowski
(University of Cambridge)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 10 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel pushes transmedia studies beyond a strict focus on multi-media narratology. From metropolitan art worlds to urban landscapes and extractive infrastructures, we rethink transmedia practices as sedimented visions: historically layered, yet demonstrably forward-looking.
Long Abstract:
Examining the intersection of visual cultures, political struggle, and material worlds, this panel pushes transmedia studies beyond a strict focus on multi-media narratology. It brings together long-term research on metropolitan art worlds, changing built environments in the Global South, and the aesthetics and politics of extractive infrastructures. Distributed across these multiple settings—from the changing European metropole to the retro-modern postcolony, from dense urban landscapes to rural extractive frontiers—the panel reconsiders transmediality. We attend to transmedia practices that we conceptualize as sedimented visions: at once historically layered, yet also future-oriented. Whether addressing subaltern portraiture on social media, Romani artists reclaiming social futures, cement's social and material lives in contemporary Dakar, or Myanmar insurgents mapping pipelines and trade corridors, we find practices that present, while sometimes troubling, racialized imperial debris. At issue are ongoing ruinations of improvement, extraction, and abjection, as well as the alternative lifeworlds and imaginaries those ruinations so often provoke. At the same time, then, the practices that interest us tend also to be demonstrably forward-looking. We invite contributions, for instance, that might address how struggles against extraction take the form of collective self-fashioning; how artists strive to imagine and bring into being decolonial futures; and how urban residents anticipate a sociality that is more than a mirror of their concrete environs. At the crossroads of visual, political, and material cultural forms, we present transmedia practices that envision social worlds yet to come.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 10 March, 2023, -Geoffrey Aung (University of Vienna)
Paper short abstract:
Considering three sets of images from Myanmar's recent wars on terror, this paper argues that with very differing political implications, the Myanmar military, resistance forces, and human rights groups share a totalizing aesthetic politics.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers three sets of images. The first depicts a pipeline explosion along the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor; the second, a Rohingya village burned to the ground, captured by satellite; and the third, a black-site detention center in Yangon where detainees have detailed being tortured—also captured by satellite. Each set of images traces to Myanmar’s recent wars on terror, whether the Myanmar state’s violence against Rohingya Muslims—justified as a war on terror against Rohingya extremists—or, more contentiously, the mass “people’s war” against the new military junta, referred to by resistance fighters as a terrorist organization. The paper argues that, paradoxically, the junta, resistance forces, and human rights organizations share a totalizing aesthetic drive. Whereas the state closely controls its (in)visibility—by using black sites, internet cuts, communication controls, and emergency provisions—its critics seek to refuse and reveal the state’s dark geographies, hidden acts, and obscure power. Resistance fighters map and target logistics projects that finance the “terrorist” junta; human rights groups use satellite imagery to disclose state atrocities. Juxtaposing transparency and opacity, the paper reconsiders the forensic aesthetics used to investigate counter-terrorist violence elsewhere, from US empire to the occupation of Palestine. Contra the liberal politics of transparency that underwrites that aesthetic, I suggest that Myanmar resistance forces’ logistical mapping provides an alternate cartography of power. It is totalizing, too, but in a way that sets the junta’s totalitarianism within a broader imperial tableau, wherein another totalizing form—that of capital—looms large.
Pierre Wenzel (University of Vienna)
Paper short abstract:
The presentation explores archival photographs and plans of Dakar as (incomplete) mediators, allowing to grasp the historical urban landscape of Dakar. Focusing on cement, they are a visual entry point to understanding cementification as a sedimented process participating in shaping the city.
Paper long abstract:
When entering Dakar for the first time, the color grey catches the eye: under construction or unfinished buildings, cement bricks on the pavements, dust in the air. What does this color tell about the city? Dakar appears as the result of concrete historical sedimentations to be found in the urban palimpsest. Photographs and plans of Dakar, from the colonial period to nowadays, illustrate the prominent role of cement in the urban landscape, sometimes hidden behind white facades, glass or tiles. Sediments are always partial, and this contribution is a tentative reflection on my yet unfinished archival research. What are these photographs sharing about the historical materiality of the city? How did the social and historical life of cement contribute to shaping the city? Working with photographs aims to open new spaces to let the non-humans speak and retrace the cultural biography of cement in Dakar from the colonial city to the modern and changing post-colonial city. Photographs are fragments of the world providing a more intimate and visual understanding of urban development and transformations, considering that these archival photographs (and plans) contain information and views that help understand the evolving city and its cementification, here understood as a historical and forward-looking process. The presentation will also discuss the limits of these archival sources and their incompleteness as already framed and finished visuals. What are they missing? Materiality is relational, moving, and processual. Archival photographs might only be an entry point to understanding cementification as a sedimented and relational process.
Evgenija Filova (University of Vienna)
Paper short abstract:
The use of the racialized figure of “g*psy” in regional and diasporic art spaces excludes Romani artists from artistic discourse and art history. I interrogate how the formulation of “the artist as a g*psy” reproduces racialized tropes of poverty that uphold and justify anti-Roma racism.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of my paper is to unveil a particular kind of antigypsyism circulating in spaces of art in regions that were formerly part of Yugoslavia, by artists from that region, often in diaspora. I argue that there is a persistent use of the racialized figure of “the g*psy” by gadjo (non-Roma) artists both in the Balkans and in diaspora, while Romani artists from the region are excluded from the regional artistic discourse and art history. I analyze examples of two prominent gadje, non-Roma, artists who use the performative figure of “the g*psy” to produce the identity of the post-Yugoslav artist. I also discuss the critical work of Selma Selman, a performance and visual artist from the region and also Roma herself. In the paper I Interrogate how the formulation of “the artist as a g*psy” reproduces racialized tropes of poverty and helplessness that uphold and justify anti-Roma racism and negate the existence of Roma in Yugoslavia, Roma art, and Roma migration. I use scholarly work from representation, processes of othering, postcolonial and decolonial studies, as well as feminist work and black studies, to theorize critical art making today. Contemporary Romani artists and culture workers have over the last decades built a thick network of exhibitions, festivals, museums, archives, educational and platforms for networking and facilitation of the label Roma art—at the forefront of contemporary decolonial practices of art making and artistic production.
Kalyani Kalyani (Azim Premji University, Bengaluru)
Paper short abstract:
The anti-caste musical platforms is a form of 'sonic-counterpublics', and the musical production at these sites has encouraged the voices from the caste-margins to speak about their identity and culture. The 'political' nature of anti-caste music explains how it destabilizes existing caste hegemony.
Paper long abstract:
The paper will discuss the intersection of Resistance discourse with cultural parameters like music. Popular music is not purely aesthetics or humanist but it is also 'political', as it redistributes power through the very ‘practice’ of such popular forms. Like effervescence, music is part of everydayness and it is constituted within the micro-structures of society. The dimension of resistance in music can be seen as a ‘semiotic resistance’ in which refusal of dominant meanings and re-construction of meaning becomes the political device to question the existing hegemonic order. Thus ‘resistance’ is the significant way in which culture moves, is formed, and re-formed. The rise of music-of-resistance was witnessed during the Civil Rights movement in the USA with the emblematic poetry of Martin Luther King's ‘We Shall Overcome’. Within the subaltern communities in India, the efforts like Casteless Collective, Kabir Kala Manch, Youth for Buddhist India, etc. too establish a subculture of musical traditions. Through a case-study of anti-caste musical platforms, the paper aims to develop how music has shaped the political and anti-caste ethics in India. The paper will establish the socio-political-cultural context of such musical performances and how the musical production has encouraged the voices from the margins to speak about their identity and culture. Through the conceptual framework of ‘sonic counterpublics’ the paper aims to explore how anti-caste music has intersected with the political sphere and how it has destabilized the existing dominant caste narratives, if so.
Manuela Ciotti (University of Vienna)
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that the spread of social media has given birth to a self-portraiture genre among Dalits that simultaneously enhances possibilities for image production of victims of violence but also multiplies representation to include novel aesthetics, style and affect.
Paper long abstract:
The image repertoire for subaltern communities in India, in particular Dalits, is variously framed by colonial taxonomies, indentured labour records, and more prominently, representations of violence against them – while self-representation has remained largely absent from this layered history. In more recent decades, this repertoire has been dominated by standardised visual-material artefacts mainly political in their subject matter. Widely-circulated renditions of Dalit leaders have come to constitute the ideal mould for what stands as the ‘Dalit image’ and this has been actualised via the construction of monumental parks in their honour and the mass production of statues and images placed in public spaces and households. In 19th century India, the mass production of photographs saw ‘the quantitative turn[ing] into the qualitative – [while] the sheer velocity and intensification of representation produce[d] new social forms’ (Pinney 2008: 136) and made new aesthetics available to those who could afford them. Expanding on this set of interlocked changes, this paper contends that the spread of social media has given birth to a self-portraiture genre among Dalits that simultaneously enhances possibilities for image production of victims of violence but also multiplies representation to include novel aesthetics, style and affect. In the context of this newly-found representational freedom, Dalit self-portraiture also achieves something else. It brings to the fore intimate, composite and beyond-the-political worlds that textual, visual and material representations have been largely unable to capture. Examples from across social media platforms will be analysed through the categories of immediacy, leisure, and luminosity.