<nettime-ann> Ursula Biemann@Tekfestival / Geographies of the Migrant Bodies

[synner <synner@thething.it>]

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TEKFESTIVAL AND QWATZ PRESENT:

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URSULA BIEMANN, GEOGRAPHIES OF THE MIGRANT BODIES
May 5th-12th 2007 - Rome, Italy
http://www.tekfestival.it/
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*Agadez Chronicle / video-installation*
(Love&Dissent Gallery, opening May 5th h.6.30pm)

*3 video-essays *
- Performing the Border (1999)
- Writing Desire (2000)
- Europlex (2003)

(Cinema Farnese, May 6th/8th)

A workshop on migration and mobility
(1:1projects, May 7th/8th)

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   It all started in Ciudad Juarez, the Mexican city at the U.S. border 
grown around the industrial parks managed by multinational companies 
with the approval of the Mexican government. Here Ursula Biemann has 
filmed Performing the Border (1999) and started her journey exploring 
the darkest sides of globalization.

  To describe the border, the Chicano writer Gloria Anzaldua has used 
the metaphor of 'nepantla', a liminal and unstable space that discloses 
new ideas, encounters and a feeling of uneasiness. Living in this 
'tierra disconoscida' means to experience a state of unbelonging and 
change.
The women in Performing the Border perceive the frontier as a space of 
control and exploitation and, at the same time, as a space of 
transgression from an overbearing patriarchal structure. If gender 
identity is constituted through a series of negotiations and 
disciplinary rituals, by the same token the border is the result of the 
repetition of relations of belonging and exclusion that produce material 
and emotional effects.

  Drawing on the idea that âgender and border are performed 
simultaneously on the border under very specific economic and spatial 
conditions,â Ursula Biemann has realized a video-essay trilogy that, 
besides Performing the Border, comprises Writing Desire (2000) and 
Remote Sensing (2001) â a film presented at the Tekfestival 2006. The 
latter two films focus on the affective and sexual services offered in 
the global sex market after the end of the Cold War. Writing Desireâs 
aesthetics incorporates the graphic style of the Internet through a 
highly fragmented editing which simulates Internet browsing. Analyzing 
the bride traffic phenomenon and penpal relationships, the artist shows 
that the Internet is the ideal space for the marketing of desire.

  The contradictions of the European space â caught between the 
increasing circulation of goods and the closing down of the border â 
emerge in the last works of the Swiss artist, including Europlex (2003) 
and Agadez Chronicle that visualize the âmovements of lifeâ across the 
Mediterranean coasts. Biemannâs counter-geographies show the plurality 
of migrantsâ passages. The relationship between migrants and borders is 
always precarious, resulting from the constant conflict between state 
efforts to control mobility and the peopleâs desire to inhabit the 
possibilities opened up by globalization . Biemann is not interested in 
dealing with the romantic metaphor of nomadism. She prefers, instead, to 
highlight the ambivalence of migratory experiences. In her video-essay, 
often realized in collaboration with other artist, activists and 
scholars, the migrants are recognized as âpolitical subjectsâ who 
acquire a voice in their own right.

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  WOP/Ursula Biemann. Geographies of the migrant bodies is presented by 
Tekfestival and qwatz, a new artist-in-residency program in Rome, with 
the support of Province of Rome and the Swiss Institute in Rome. The 
project is realized in collaboration with 1:1projects and Love&Dissent.




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