Tag Archives: migration
2011 | 7 prints, diasec, each 33 x 44 cm
Photo © J.L. Diehl
The series of seven photos shows details from abandoned clothing, furniture and other household articles. These personal chattels are located in an industrial building in Tivoli, Italy, which has long been empty. The images document one small part of the disintegrating former paper factory where discursive personal narratives of place, time and intention intersect with the more general categories of history, migration and homelessness. Who left these things here? Who regarded the space as a refuge and under what conditions did they leave? Despite the wealth of detail provided by the images, the series raises more questions that it can answer. They are evidence without explanation, a story with an open end. Read More…
Matters of Fact, 2011 · Category: Photo
Tags: biography, deindustrialisation, homelessness, migration, ruins
2004 | CD ROM /Web Project
ImagiNative is a joint web/CD project with Lisl Ponger commissioned by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt for The Black Atlantic exhibition in 2004. We were interested in exploring how images are crucial in forming attitudes and identities in our society and in constructing the identities—imagined, imposed, resisted—of Others. ImagiNative was made in order to contextualize our work, to allow direct insight into the work process itself. As such, it is a sort of ‘reverse engineering’ project which collects together materials from various areas which touch on many of the issues with which we are concerned. These include the production of stereotypes, orientalism, ethnology (and notions such as authentic and inauthentic artefacts and customs), migration, travel and tourism (who travels, and why), racism (and associated pseudo-sciences) and the role of image-making in all of this.
The project is available online in English and German at http://imaginative.lislponger.com/
ImagiNative: Research as Artistic Strategy, 2004 · Category: Texts/CD/DVD-R
Tags: art, ethnology, migration, orientalism, racism, research, stereotypes, tourism, travel
1996 | 16mm film and video (PAL) | black and white | stereo | 2min 40sec
Made as a contribution to FilmArt Takes Position: Alien/Nation.
While Casablanca has much to do with male power and friendships, propaganda morality and adventure, Dar-el-Beida concerns the harried feelings of being a refugee/outsider, the experiences of those in the background of the Hollywood film. They exist in an atmosphere of threat, always on the move but never getting anywhere; their identity is violated and their nationality arbitrarily changed. In short they are the powerless, dependent on chance, corruption or sexual favours to save them. In Dar-el-Beida (the Latinised Arab name for Casablanca), Bogie asks, “do you want my advice?” His cynical answer (in Casablanca) is the unspoken reality of Dar-el-Beida. Read More…