[Nettime-nl] .IMP intervention #2: Eyal Sivan

[Florian Schneider <fls@kein.org>]

Imaginary property
INTERVENTION #2
http://imaginaryproperty.com/intervention2

Saturday 18 April 2009
14:00 - 19:00
Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht

Guest: Eyal Sivan

"Interventions" is a new series of events hosted by the Imaginary  
Property
(.imp) research group at Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht.
The second intervention will be delivered by filmmaker Eyal Sivan. He
will present "Towards a common archive: Manipulating the enemies
images". Eyal Sivan is a London based filmmaker, producer, essayist and
research professor in Media production at the school of social sciences,
media and cultural studies at the University of East London (UEL).

Sivan directed more then 10 worldwide awarded feature-length political
documentaries and produced many others. He is the founder and Chief
Editor of 'Cinema South Notebooks' in Israel - a journal of cinema and
Political critic, editor at the Paris based publishing house ‘La
Fabrique’ and member of the editorial board and columnist at the French
social studies journal 'De l'autre Côté'.

Among Sivan’s films: Aqabat-Jaber (1987 & 1994); Izkor, Slaves of Memory
(1991); The Specialist (1999); Route 181, fragments of a journey in
Palestine-Israel, (with Michel Khleifi 2003); Aus Liebe zum Volk / I
Love You all (2004 with Audrey Murion).

Currently he is finishing his film "Jaffa-story of a brand name" and
will show excerpts from this project.

Sivan will be presenting an intervention that deals with the project of
a "Common Archive":

As violence becomes more reasoned, as nationhood becomes more "global",
as the artifacts of memory become more manipulable, and as their
manufacture and dissemination becomes more ubiquitous –research and
theory in this field find themselves in constant lag of its
ever-changing objects.

As memory and trauma study literature and research grows in
acceleration, so grows the need for a robust theoretical paradigm for
social memory research. Such a paradigm does not exist today. Most
memory research does not extend comparatively beyond particular
geographies, historical periods and events. In the absence of a widely
agreed theoretical paradigm, most theoretical work done today on memory
and trauma falls within either one of two categories: either it is
highly event-specific, remaining too close to empirical ground level, or
it is highly philosophical and speculative, leaving actual research far
below its scope.

The wider task envisioned by the project is to theorize the fundamental
notion of Archive in such a manner as to provide a historiographic
paradigm both for the empirical recording of historical narrative data
and wide perspective theory building.

Building on notions such as Foucault's Status de Verite, Derrida's
Anarchive and Jean Piaget's Constancy and Conservation, we wish to forge
the Common Archive - a new archive format dedicated to bridging
dissociated, conflictual, or historically dispersed or geographically
distant historical narratives.

The Common Archive concept also aims to challenge and transcend the
binary oppositions constraining the structure of the traditional archive
as such, e.g. victims/perpetrators, dominating/domineer, male/female,
manager/employee, colonizer/colonized in order to propose ways of
creating common narratives, acknowledging that such a combination is the
base for future narrative and therefore a condition for a true
understanding of any conflict and further of potentially bridging
conflicts.

Going further than a mere new theoretical concept, the wider context of
this project aims to create a suitable methodology for constructing
Common Archives, as well as specifying the technical requirements for
what we term a Common Archive Data Architecture.

New York based media theorist Ted Byfield was the first guest in
"Interventions":
http://imaginaryproperty.com/intervention1

The next intervention  will feature Maurizio Lazzarato and Angela
Melitopoulos, in a symposium on Bakhtin on May 15th and 16th.

Imaginary Property, a research project of the Jan van Eyck Design
department, initiated by Florian Schneider, aspires to explore new
potentials for visual art and design practices across various registers.
The project is set up as a realm of experimentation at the intersections
of design-theory and image-production. It is a laboratory where emerging
concepts and terminologies are set to a series of tests. What challenges
emerge from the paradoxes that research into ‘imaginary property’ has
given rise to? How could these potentially generate new rules of
production, bearing in mind that property relations are constantly
exchanging meanings?

Jan van Eyck Academie
Academieplein 1
6211 KM Maastricht
The Netherlands

http://www.janvaneyck.nl
______________________________________________________
* Verspreid via nettime-nl. Commercieel gebruik niet
* toegestaan zonder toestemming. <nettime-nl> is een
* open en ongemodereerde mailinglist over net-kritiek.
* Meer info, archief & anderstalige edities:
* http://www.nettime.org/.
* Contact: Menno Grootveld (rabotnik@xs4all.nl).