[-empyre-] FW: Week 3: Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum seekers, or refugee?

[Renate Terese Ferro]

>Thanks especially to our Week I and Week 2 special guests: Irina Contreras, Babak Fakhamzadeh, Huub Dijstelbloem and Christina McPhee who have joined guest moderators Ana Valdes and Ricardo Dominguez.  It has been a lively discussion on a compelling topic.  Also thanks to our subscribers who have also been joining in.  We invite you all to continue with Ana and Ricardo as we introduce our Week 3 guests:  Ian Alan Paul, Robert McKee Irwin, Paula Delgado, Alba Moses and Grupo.  Their biographies are listed below. 
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>For those of you who want to see the archive of our discussion thus far you can go to http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/
>Where you can sort through by date, author, or thread. 
>
>Looking forward to more. 
>Best, 
>Renate
>
>Biographies: 
>
>Paula Delgado I was born and lived
>most of my life in Montevideo, Uruguay, now a 'mature student' doing an MA in
>London since last September. I am a bit of a weirdo: a visual artist and a
>feminist, with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and a Diploma in Gender and
>public policies. I got a Chevening scholarship to do an MA Culture Industry
>in Goldsmiths University.
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>Robert McKee Irwin is Chair of the Graduate Group in Cultural Studies and Professor in the
>Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Davis. He
>is also co-Principal Investigator, with Sunaina Maira, of the UC Davis's Mellon
>Initiative in Comparative Border Studies: Rights, Containment, Protest (http://borderstudies.ucdavis.edu/). His current work focuses on
>migration as a long process characterized by confrontations with many diverse
>borders, some of which can be crossed and others of which cannot; it focuses on
>the particular context of migration from Mexico to the United States, and cases
>of migrants who do not, as George Sánchez articulates it,  "become
>Mexican American"; more specifically, he is currently working on an
>article that draws from this project titled "Undocumented
>Literature.”
>
>Alva Mooses and Grupo <>
>is a multidisciplinary artist and currently a Visiting Lecturer in the
>Department of Art at Cornell University.  My studio practice is informed by nearly a decade of organizing informal
>artist residencies and community art projects in Chicago; Guerrero, Mexico; El
>Polvo, El Salvador; Buratovich, Argentina among others. I worked in villages or
>neighborhoods dealing with large migrations of people moving in or out that
>dramatically affected the social dynamics in each context. 
> 
>In 2015, I
>was working in the Dominican Republic and Haiti making drawings by directly
>tracing fences throughout the island including the national border fence at the
>Jimani/Malpasse crossing. I am currently working on a collaborative publication
>project titled Correspondence from NYC to PAP connecting artists whose
>work is based in and around Port-au-Prince and New York City.  I am also a
>founding member of a new NYC based collective Grupo < > .
>
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>Grupo < > creates spaces where different voices, bound together under a broad
>geopolitical classification, meet to explore questions of identity through art.
>Our collective efforts include talks, exhibitions, publications, performances
>and gatherings.
> 
>The questions we ask are informed by our liminal condition and the consciousness of
>cultural and geographic migration. What brings us together is the need to open
>a context that while defined < > is undefinable and irreducible. Grupo
>< > generates dialogue and community, grounded by but not limited to the
>concerns and needs of artists whose practices are interwoven with the history
>of Latin America and the Caribbean.
>
>
>Ian Alan Paul is a transdisciplinary artist, curator and
>theorist living between Oakland, Barcelona, and Cairo. His projects and writing
>have approached a large variety of topics including the Guantanamo Bay Prison,
>Fortress Europe, the Zapatista communities, Drone Warfare, and most recently
>with the military regime in post-coup Egypt. Using diverse media to produce
>documentary, critical fiction, hacktivism, performance, and simulation, Ian’s
>work aims to both complicate and defamiliarize our shared sense of politics,
>ethics, and aesthetics. Ian has lectured, taught, and exhibited
>internationally, and has had his work featured in The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Le
>Monde, Art Threat, Mada Masr, Jadaliyya, Art Info, and C Magazine. He received
>his MFA and MA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011 and is currently
>finishing his PhD in UC Santa Cruz.
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