[-empyre-] futile gestures and questions about Alarm Phone

[Ricardo Dominguez]

Hola Tod at s,

The shutting down of any one gesture as "futile" does not allow one to 
consider the networks of multiple "futile" gestures that embeded in 
networks that allow for aggregation of potentialities of gestures to 
amplify one another-even a great distance.

I was on a panel a few days ago as part of the Trans-Border Institute at 
University of San Diego focusing on the group Las Patronas
who give food to the people flowing north on The Beast (the name of a 
very well known train that immigrants hang on too). The
Patronas who was part of the panel mentioned the importance of small 
gestures from art projects, to documentaries, and their own work has a 
social force field that now protects them from aggressive actions by the 
Mexican police and immigration patrols.

And when they started everyone in their communities said they were 
crazy, that they were not helping anyone, and that no institutions would 
ever help them. What can a little food really do. But as she said-their 
community now sees all the artists who are helping them and making an 
impossible gesture survive and become more than a singular node of 
concern-they are now part of a network of concern and they them selves 
have started to make art work as well:

https://vimeo.com/100758100

For instance a Transborder Immigrant Tool like gesture that Maurice 
wrote about: “Watch The Med Alarm Phone.” You can find two websites here 
that we have built: one onto which we upload our Alarm Phone reports and 
that also contains a map that seeks to display the violence of the 
European border regime which, especially in the sea, usually remains 
invisible (http://watchthemed.net/) and a second one specifically 
dedicated to the Alarm Phone project, our public campaigns, statements 
and so on (http://alarmphone.org/en/).




Maurice what are some the basic issues that the project faces or has 
faced from its staging to its continuation? What other networks does it 
build on and or flow along with?

Very best,
Ricardo





... My question about your notion of the "gesture" (and your theatrical 
reference in regard to the Transborder Immigrant Tool) was meant simply 
to raise discussion about the rhetorical (or you may call it affective 
poetic) nature of what I meant to interrogate as, in some contexts, 
futile gestures.

respectfully Johannes Birringer

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