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

[Ian Paul]

Hello everyone (and thank you Ricardo for the invitation!),

I'll begin by trying to introduce some focus for us specifically in
relation to the migrant/refugee crises unfolding across the EU at the
moment. Particularly, I was hoping to think through these "crises" as being
in some way novel, while also being imbricated with much longer and more
continuous historical processes.

First, I would like to suggest that we must in some way contend with the
fact that the current increases in the flow of bodies leaving the Middle
East and North Africa are caused at least in part by the extinguishment of
the Arab Spring uprisings by various authoritarian regimes. While the
global left payed a great deal of attention to the revolutions/uprisings
during their romantic and spontaneous genesis, this attention largely
receded as repression intensified or as the uprisings became more plural
and complex and as the various contradictions of the different contexts
intensified. The migrations that have followed, many of which are
unquestionably undertaken out of necessity, take place against a global
context that is decidedly absent of any kind of leftist internationalism
that could have acted in potential solidarity with these uprisings or with
the repression that ensued. How does thinking of these migrations as the
dispersed kinetic fallout of the rupture opened by failed revolutions
change our thinking about the dynamics of these diverse situations, and
what are the stakes of framing the crises in this way? And what does the
specificity of this current conjuncture potentially offer our movements and
our ways of thinking/doing?

Second, it's undoubtedly necessary to also insist that these migrations are
also entangled with the longer histories of capitalism and the nation
state. The histories of colonialism in North Africa and the Middle East,
the West's military and financial support of authoritarian regimes in the
MENA region, the histories of resource extraction and dispossession, all
set the stage for and helped to precipitate these crises that, when looked
through these lenses, seem less like crises and more like predictable
consequences of these histories. In other words, we can also frame these
events as being intimately tied to more or less continuous historical
processes of exploitation that should push us to consider them as
expressions of much more spatially and temporally diffuse and heterogeneous
systems that manifest less as a surprise and more as the status quo.

And so this is where in some way I would like to bring us ~ inhabiting at
once the ruptures and breakages fissured open by the uprisings as well as
the continuity of global capital and colonialism.

Cheers,
    ~i

__________________________________________

*Ian Alan Paul // Artist, Curator, Theorist*
*PhD Candidate, UCSC Film and Digital Media Studies*
*www.ianalanpaul.com <http://www.ianalanpaul.com> ~
www.twitter.com/ianalanpaul <http://www.twitter.com/IanAlanPaul>*

*"**Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.*
*In one of them I am your enemy.**" (Borges)*


On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 11:46 AM, Renate Terese Ferro <rferro at cornell.edu>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> >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.
> >
> >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.
> >
> >
> >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 < > .
> >
> >
> >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.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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