Imaging Migrants: CMRB & Matrix Seminar Series at UEL

Imaging Migrants

a seminar series jointly organised by CMRB and Matrix

All seminars take place on Thursdays at 6-8pm in Room EB 1.37, Matrix, University of East London, Docklands Campus   

On ‘the right to have rights’ over refugees’ and migrants’ images - Eyal Sivan

Thursday 25 February

Refugees, migrants and other survivors – like many other socially displaced persons – are among the favourite classical, as well as contemporary, figures of documentary moving image practice. Thus, despite the ongoing practice involving documenting, filming, producing and distributing refugees’ images, issues of ‘representation rights’ and ‘images appropriation’ are rarely raised among practitioners and media activists. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s classical article ‘We Refugees’ (1943), in which she develops the idea of ‘the right to have rights’, and on Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Arendt’s article, this seminar will reflect on the ethical and methodological questions raised by the ongoing practice involving the filming of migrants and refugees. Articulated around a series of recent documentary experiences, this seminar will address the question of the functionality – within western societies – of refugees’, migrants’ and asylum seekers’ images as a fundamental, contemporary documentary media practice.

State of Play: critique, diaspora and digital archives - Roshini Kempadoo

Thursday 25 March

The seminar will present a selection of my photographs and recent digital artworks including State of Play(2010) within the context of artworks from digital online databases, including those developed by Autograph ABP, Diaspora Artists and Iniva. It becomes a way to explore artists’ work that have been differentiated and defined within the confines of ‘identity’ terminologies and politics. Cultural definitions of artists and their work, ranging from: black Britishness; BAMEs; multiculturalism; transnational blackness; culturally diverse forms; and art of the diaspora, have variously been used – particularly since the ‘critical decade’ of the 1980s (Hall & Bailey, 1992). My interest lies in the practice of self-definition, criticality and positionality that have been instrumental to this process of defining difference and belonging. The presentation will also explore the way in which such artworks are currently being digitally archived by institutions, their curators, and funders. The archive as a ‘force field’ (Stoler, 2009) in this sense is crafted and layered. In re-contextualising and digitising the artworks as the online ‘archive’ (in the way that Derrida describes the archive as the site of ‘house arrest’), how may the criticality of the work be adequately evoked and continue to be perceived as creative intervention, interstitial, or counter-narrative?

Two Theses on the Afghan Woman: Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf Filming Agheleh Farahmand - Haim Bresheeth

Thursday 8 April

This talk is based on an article by the same title, that I have completed for Third Text, to be published in March 2010.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have created a huge number of refugees, or as the UN now wishes them to called, internally displaced persons. Those two terrifying upheavals have not yet been attended to by many filmmakers – the Iraqi one is yet to be represented on film, and the Afghani one has indeed been so represented, but not by an Afghani filmmaker.

The appearance, in 2003, of two films made by two sisters of the famous Makhmalbaf cinematic clan, have marked another first for this unusual group. At Five in the Afternoon, a feminist feature film shot in Afghanistan a short time after the Allies invasion, by the elder sister Samira, has been closely followed byJoy of Madness, a feature length documentary by her 13 year old sister, Hanna. That Hanna’s film was a ‘making of’ film of her sister¹s movie production, does not begin to describe it. At the heart of both films stands the figure of the main lead of the feature, who is the central character of both. The struggle between the temperamental director and her intended star, ending in the agreement to participate, is presenting us with a complex picture of power relations and negotiation, between the darling of festival circles, Samira, and her penniless, but astute and independent young teacher from Afghanistan. Joy of Madness carries a genuine and disturbing message of the colonial power relations between the three women, and the acid test of their different feminist agendas.

Journeys of Identity and Place - Jill Daniels

Thursday 22 April

In this seminar I will explore the representation of identity and place in exile and loss, in my documentary filmNext Year in Lerin (2000).I will discuss, as Henk Slager points out in his article Art and Method (2009), how ‘the artist compels us to see the world in a different way… images do not replace reality, but reveal novel visibilities’. The film reflects on social structures, ethnicity and the concept of rootedness. Place is offered as a metaphorical space bounded by the subjects’ voices and the manipulation of sound and image.

The subjects are Macedonians, who as children were taken without their mothers from northern Greece by the Greek Communist Party during the Greek civil war (1943-1948). They are not allowed by the Greek State to return to Greece.I will analyse my access as outsider, addressing my subject position of both observing and participating in documentary making, in gaining an intimate space in order to interact with the subjects (David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema; 1998).

I will extend the discussion through a comparison of this film with my later film Lost in Gainesville (2005), where subjects from the Mexican diaspora are located in a small town in Georgia in the south of the US.Racist hostility emanates from the original population of the town leading to the geographical division of place.

I reflect on the way film may be used in the debate around minoritarian discourse. Next Year in Lerin has been used by the Macedonian diaspora and Greek nationalists as a tool for their political debates. I give particular attention to my Q&A on YouTube posted by the film festival after a screening of the film in the US in 2009, and the subsequent comments. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWw4o9QkAA.

Simone Weil's The Need for Roots and the Soul of Migration - Dr Anat Pick

Thursday 6 May

This seminar draws on Simone Weil's book The Need for Roots (1943), written during the final year of Weil's life, working in London for the Free French. The Need for Roots offered a blueprint for the reconstruction of France after Liberation. It reflects the culmination of Weil's theologico-political thinking. The central themes of rootedness (as a ‘need of the soul’) and uprootedness (as a modern malaise) are especially important for thinking about ideas of national identity, diaspora and exile. They are particularly resonant in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in light of Weil's ‘anti-Judaism’. The discussion will address Weil's contemporary relevance as a major post-secular thinker with reference to Ori Kleiner’s documentary filmRecognized (2006).