Out.of.the.blue.map

An itinerant curatorial research program

Out.of.the.blue.map is a context-sensitive, itinerant curatorial research program exploring the notion of permanent liminality within Mediterranean [fluid+solid] territories. Anchored between Morocco, France, and the Netherlands, the program operates a collective and critical rethinking of governance systems shaping the Mediterranean [fluid+solid] borderscapes. From 2019 to 2020, this collaborative effort brings together French, Moroccan and Dutch artists, researchers, designers, architects and activists whose works contest, question or summon Mediterranean [fluid+solid] geographies. The program is structured around a series of stopovers in Morocco, France and in the Netherlands, during which a cycle of exhibitions and workshops will be organised, from March to December 2020 [International Community of Arts Rotterdam + Mahal Art Space Tanger + Les Parallèles du Sud Manifesta 13 Marseille + Jan Van Eyck Academie Maastricht].

Lexicon

Resulting from a 2-years research, a lexicon will be developed, edited, and exhibited throughout the program. Co-produced with designers, artists, journalists and activists, it is an evolving, hybrid editorial object composed of fragments from juridical literature and reports, activists testimonies, artists, media and political discourses, informal narratives and imaginaries as well as visual elements. The lexicon constitutes in itself an alternative map to Mediterranean [fluid+solid] liminal spaces. It will grow at every step of the program, and will be exhibited throughout the year.

Out.of.the.blue.map constitutes an attempt to compose alternative narratives and maps, going beyond inherited narratives and colonial fictions ; to experiment new ways for borders to be sensed, and made sense of. Both a space of passage and of rupture, the Mediterranean Sea constitutes a liminal territory for some of those who cross it. The participatory work of the lexicon allows one to deconstruct this territory, and to free oneself from imposed narratives by exploring their dead angles.

For more information : https://calypso3621.com/

On line: a manifestation of the human border

June 6 and 9, 2018

On June 9th 2018, the artist Clio Van Aerde will start her expedition during which she seeks to explore the physical border of the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. The departure and arrival point is Schengen and to arrive back to the starting point, it will take around four weeks. The artist will walk as precisely as possible along the border-line. Thanks to the collaboration with MUDAM, the public will be able to observe the development of this endeavour in real time in the museum and on online.cliovanaerde.com
on line follows the Walking Art practice and questions the meaning of the border by exploring its physicality on a human scale. This project seeks to enlighten absurdities as for instance privileges and barriers encountered in relation to the possession of a certain passport or another. In the larger sense, nowadays, while some people lead progressively nomadic lives as if the borders had vanished, others perceive the exact same borders as impassable barriers. The body finds itself physically limited while the use of technology, more essential than ever and inexhaustible, surpasses every physical limits. The naive procedure of on line seeks to question what society is taking for granted.
On June 6th at MUDAM, right before the performance and on July 11th (location t.b.c.), after the performance Clio Van Aerde and two members of the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning of the University of Luxembourg, Estelle Evrard and Cyril Blondel will hold a public debate about on line.

Born in Luxembourg, Clio Van Aerde is an artist and a scenographer, living in Luxembourg and Vienna. She studied in Madrid, Paris and Vienna before graduating in scenography at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien. Her artistic practice questions the trivial relations between body, time and space through performances that explore repetition and endurance. Next to her own practice, Van Aerde also works as a stage and set designer and engages in the organisation and development of the research based residency Antropical as part of Kolla Festival.

Cyril Blondel is post-doc researcher in geography and spatial planning at the University of Luxemburg (Research Unit IPSE). He holds a PhD in planning from the University of Tours, France, since 2016. He was in 2015-2016 Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the University of Tartu, Estonia, as part of the FP7 European project RegPol2. He has also been guest researcher in Graz and Leipzig. He is now involved in the H2020 European project RELOCAL that aims at “resituating the local in European Cohesion”. His research interests are mainly connected to the production of spatial justice and territorial development public policy in Europe, in particular in and towards peripheral and border spaces. He is also interested in interactions between art and research. He has conducted his fieldwork mainly in Portugal, Serbia, Croatia, Estonia and France. He is in the first semester of 2018 sharing a residence one week a month with the theatre writer Magali Mougel in the mining basin of Pas-de-Calais in France.

Estelle Evrard is a senior researcher in political geography at the University of Luxembourg. She holds a Master Degree in European Law (2006) from the Institute of European Studies (Brussels) and a PhD in Geography (2013) from the University of Luxembourg. Her interest for the European construction is the common thread through her professional career. Her research deals with the significance of the European integration for localities in terms of governance, autonomy and territoriality. In this endeavour, she understands border areas as exemplary terrain for investigation. She is also interested in the research/practice/policy interface (e.g. ESPON, INTERREG) as well as in the interaction between art and research. She is currently involved in the H2020 European project RELOCAL that aims at “resituating the local in European Cohesion” (2016-2020) and in the INTERREG VA Greater Region “UniGR-Center for Border Studies” project (2018-2020).

Supported by : L’Œuvre Nationale de Secours Grande-Duchesse Charlotte
In collaboration with : Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean et de l’Université du Luxembourg
technological equipment : Motion-S
technical equipment : Saturn
Provision of cartographic data: Administration du Cadastre et de la Topographie, Luxembourg
Documentary : Catherine Dauphin
Artistic consultant : Camille Chanel

Thierry Fournier – En Vigie

Series of generative videos, 16/9e, 20’, with sound, on loop
LCD screen, usb key, sound, 2018

En Vigie (The Lookout) is a series of generative videos, which establishes a paradoxical relationship between looking and waiting. A landscape chosen by the sea or a large river is filmed in a fixed shot. The image is then interpreted by a program: each movement is highlighted, like a firefly. All these movements control the movement of a reading head in an orchestral crescendo, which never ceases to vary and whose climax never occurs.

Through this situation of artificial cinematographic suspense, the landscape and the horizon become the object of a shared gaze between human and machine, which questions our physical limits but also the contemporary forms of augmented surveillance – of which the Mediterranean territory is particularly invested.

The series includes three autonomous videos: En Vigie / Strasbourg (2017), En Vigie / Nice and En Vigie / Venise (2018), each lasting approximately 20′, on loop. En Vigie / Nice is presented as part of the solo exhibition Machinal, Villa Henry, Nice, from 25 March to 28 April 2018, accompanied by a catalogue with a text by Céline Flécheux and an interview with Isabelle Pellegrini.

Martin De Wulf – Migrations Map

Martin De Wulf
Migrations Map
Interactive map
Visit the project

The map allows you to see for every country X in the world either the top ten providing countries of lifetime migrants to X or the top ten receiving countries of lifetime migrants from X. On top of that, when you let your mouse hover over a country, you can see the total population, the GDP per capita, the HIV and Tuberculosis prevalences and the death rate of children under five.

Martin De Wulf, born in 1978, have been programming this map to learn and have fun with HTML5 technologies. Besides of learning, my only goal is to create a website that can make people think.

Addie Wagenknecht – Data and Dragons: Cloud Farming

Data and Dragons: Cloud Farming, 2014 custom designed printed circuit boards, ethernet patch cables, 80/20 aluminum installation: 31 x 87 x 35 in / 78.7 x 221 x 88.9 cm, Photo by John Berens for bitforms gallery, New York City, USA
placesiveneverbeen.com

Cloud Farming questions the sacred nature of technology by re-contextualizing system hierarchy as a portrait of data. It manifests the cloud, social networks, data, leaks and what forms social capital into a single object. Ultimately its a creative experiment about contemporary power structures as a type of group consciousness, becoming a 3-dimensional map of post-Wikileaks information culture.

Addie Wagenknecht

b.1981, Portland, OR
Lives and works in Innsbruck, Austria

Addie Wagenknecht is an American artist based in Austria whose work explores the tension between expression and technology. Blending conceptually-driven painting, sculpture, and installation with the ethos of hacker culture, Wagenknecht constructs spaces between art object and lived experience. Here, the darker side of systems that constitute lived reality emerge, revealing alternative yet parallel realities. In the context of post-Snowden information culture, Wagenknecht’s work contemplates power, networked consciousness, and the incessant beauty of everyday life despite the anxiety of being surveilled.

A member of Free Art & Technology (F.A.T.) Lab, Wagenknecht was the recipient of a 2014 Warhol Foundation Grant, which she used to found Deep Lab, a collaborative group of researchers, artists, writers, engineers, and cultural producers interested in privacy, surveillance, code, art, social hacking, and anonymity. As an active leader in the open source hardware movement, she also co-founded NORTD Labs, an international research and development collaborative with Stefan Hechenberger, which produces open source projects that have been used and built by millions worldwide. Wagenknecht’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Phillips, New York; LEAP, Berlin; Haus der elektronischen Künste (HeK), Basel; MU, Eindhoven; the Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; MuseumsQuartier, Vienna; Grey Area Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco; Gaîté Lyrique, Paris; Beit Ha’ir Museum, Tel Aviv; and many festivals such a GLI.TC/H and the Nooderlicht Photography Festival. Her work has been featured in TIME, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Art in America, Vanity Fair, BUST, Vice, and The Economist. Past residencies have included Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, New York; Culture Lab at Newcastle University, UK; Hyperwerk Institute for PostIndustrial Design, Switzerland; and the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.

Presently chair of the MIT Open Hardware Summit, Wagenknecht holds a Masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Oregon. Wagenknecht’s first solo exhibition in the United States, Shellshock, opened November 2014 at bitforms gallery in New York. Upcoming solo exhibitions will be presented at MU, Eindhoven and HeK, Basel. bitforms

Cartographies of Fear #2

Anne Zeitz & Carolina Sanchez Boe
Cartographies of Fear #2
Installation, 2016

Migrants’ access to new technologies plays an important role in their border crossings and their trajectories. Cartographies of fear #2 presents the experience of a Syrian man in Paris. The videos show visible and invisible places and borders within which he has lived happy moments with his wife, as well as the places that he discovered as an asylum seeker and where he feels vulnerable.

Carolina Sanchez Boe has a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Aarhus in Denmark. Her research focuses on international migration, migration control and containment.

Anne Zeitz has a PhD in Aesthetics, Sciences and Technologies of Arts from the University Paris 8. Her research focuses on the observation concepts and operative images, as well as theories of surveillance, “sousveillance” and the “algorithmic governmentality” in art, literature and film.

Michel Couturier – Calais 1

Michel Couturier
Calais 1
Photography

This artwork is part of a larger project on European ports (Calais, Dover, Catania …). The artist focuses on the infrastructures and apparatuses of control and the regulation of flows of merchandises and people: barriers, checkpoints, gates. This work uses different kinds of media: photos, drawings and video.

Michel Couturier questions the cities and their suburbs since 2001, often related to mythology and its survivals in the modern landscape. His work, which is expressed through photography, video and drawing explores the oddities produced by engineers and examines our relationship with the public space. His recent work addresses transit areas and control places as emblematic places of our living space.

Larbits Sisters – eu4you

Larbits Sisters (Bénédicte et Laure-Anne Jacobs)
eu4you
Interactive installation, 2016
Visit the project

Eu4you starts with the migration crisis that is rattling Europe and has brought President Juncker to plead for a quota system to distribute the refugees between countries. With an equal chance of freedom, equality and prosperity, and taking into account different variables, the eu4you algorithm performs an equation that reconstitutes the visitor’s computational DNA. It rules on the visitor’s destiny: the promise of a golden future on European soil, or not.

Under the name Larbits Sisters, Bénédicte and Laure-Anne Jacobs form a duo. An important part of their work focuses on the exploration of digital technologies. Emerging issues around the Internet such as privacy, digital identity, 2.0 practices form the starting point of their artistic approach.

CoRS (Codesign Research Studio) – Body and borders

CoRS (Codesign Research Studio)
Body and borders
Installation, 2016
Visit the project

Our research questions the purpose and consequences of existing, new and planned border constructions in Europe by investigating their physical manifestation and context. We use architectural tools and methods, including on-site visits, drawings and models, and collect hard and soft data to understand and document the border constructions. But more importantly, we want to study the constructions in relation to the people attempting to get past them and the way in which the constructions relate to the human body.

Codesign Research Studio is a subsidiary of the architecture studio Codesign. CORS works at the intersection between theory and practice, they question the orle and responsibility of architects and explore issues that are rarely highlighted

Nicolas Lambert – The migratory red mound

Nicolas Lambert
The migratory red mound
Cartography, 2015
Visit the project

In 25 years, more than 35 000 migrants died trying to reach the European Union. Drowned into the sea near Lampedusa, suffocated in a truck in Austria, starved to death in the Sahara desert or hit by a train in the Channel Tunnel, these tragedies continue day after day. Formerly hidden or ignored, these figures are now regularly in the news. In September 2015, the whole of Europe was seriously upset with the picture of the Kurdish child Kurdi Aylan who died on a Turkish beach.

The maps 1 to 4 tell the story of this geography of deaths and implicate the responsibility of Europe in these dramas. From 1995 to 1999, Southern Spain (Strait of Gibraltar and the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla) appears as the preferred point of entry to the European Union. Gradually “secured” (SIVE in 2002, heightening the walls of Ceuta and Melilla in 2005), immigration flows moved to the south in direction to the Canary Islands and to Senegal. To stem these undesired mobilities of humans in direction to Europe, Frontex set up in 2006 control operations far from the borders of the European Union. From 2010, following the “Arab Spring” and much more dramatically with the geopolitical instabilities caused by the wars in Libya and Syria, the huge majority of the dramas are refocusing in the Mediterranean area. Finally, progressively Europe moves or strengthens its border controls, making the trip to Europe becomes more and more dangerous for migrants.

The migratory red mound (map 5) is a global and metaphorical vision of this tragedy. This map draws the European border, not as a line, but as a battlefield. On this map in 3 dimensions, a new territory is taking shape. The height of the mound illustrates the scale of the hecatomb. But, before becoming a map, the “red mound” (“la butte rouge” in French) is over all a song written by Gaston Montéhus (1872-1952). This anti-war song refers to the Bapaume mound which was one of the bloodiest places of the First World War. Revolutionary song also, the red mound is also identified as a reference of the Paris Commune events in 1871. Actually, the migratory red mound is therefore part of a long story of pacifism: the refusal of the First World War once, and the rejection of the invisible war waged against migrants by the European union today.

Methodology: The potential is a spatial interpolation method developed in the 1940s by the physicist John Q. Stewart (1942), by analogy to the gravity model. This method aims to estimate unknown values of non-observed points from known values given by measure points. Cartographically speaking, they are often used to get a continuous surface from a set of discrete points. In thematic mapping, this method allows to simplify and highlight relevant spatial structures. For the maps shown here, the calculations were carried out with the R package SpatialPosition. STEWART J.Q. (1942) “Measure of the impact of a population at a distance”, Sociometry , 5 (1 ) : 63-71 .

Nicolas Lambert is a cartographer, member of the interdisciplinary network for the European spatial planning (CNRS). Involved in the European research program ESPON, his works mainly deal with the graphic representation of spatial information, for which he is developing a critical and radical dimension. He’s also member of the network Migreurop and of the French committee for cartography.

Martin Grandjean – Refugee’s trajectories

Martin Grandjean
Refugee’s trajectories
2015
Visit the project

By relying on an unusual method of visualisation, this map underscores the role that traditional cartographic representations play in the way we apprehend refugee trajectories. Drawing on data provided by the United Nations Refugee Agency, the author made the thickness of the edges proportional to the number of displaced persons between two points. Hence, he shows that while Europe is the point of convergence of many migrant routes, they actually represent a small minority of the world’s refugees. Most displaced people move to neighbouring countries as part of south–south migrations.

Martin Grandjean is a researcher in contemporary history at the University of Lausanne. His research focuses on network analysis of large corpus of archives. Spokesperson of Humanistica, the French association of digital humanities, he also has projects in the field of data visualization and Open Data. We find his questions related to the development of historical data, statistical visualization and data-journalism on his blog www.martingrandjean.ch

Isabelle Arvers – Heroic Makers vs Heroic Land

Isabelle Arvers
Heroic Makers vs Heroic Land
Vidéos Machinimas, 2016

These interviews are excerpted from a work-in-progress. It’s a machinima documentary that I’m making from a game engine, photos taken in the Calais jungle and interviews with the residents from February 6-20, 2016. Notwithstanding, France’s Pas-de-Calais prefecture issued an expulsion order regarding the jungle’s south section that expired on February 23. The entire camp has been nicknamed the “jungle”, as this land was originally a hunting field, and the lack of basic support from the local authorities has transformed people into animals…

Read these interviews on Makery

The question I ask myself, what I want to understand, is how to live in the jungle, how to restore its humanity, how to create spaces for living and sharing together. How to do the work of a government that shuns it, that refuses to see the urgency of the situation, that focuses instead on “reducing” the number of immigrants in Calais—without ever taking into account the dignity of those in transit, who seek not asylum but to cross the Channel to the UK as soon as possible…

In a little less than a year together, and with the help of numerous French and especially British NGOs, the refugees of the jungle have built what has become a city-world, populated by places of worship, shops, services, restaurants, schools, galleries, cultural spaces…

These everyday heroes are not only able to meet most community needs, they introduce a fledgling political model, based on decisions made from the representative of each community present, which are heard by NGOs, with all due respect to the needs, expectations and voices of the residents.

The jungle’s biggest irony is the mayor of Calais’ “big project” to rebrand her city by creating a 275 million euro amusement park called Heroic Land—a theme park inspired by the world of video games, manga and heroic fantasy… with total contempt for the true heroes, those who find solutions to the oh-so-complex problems of migration and transit zones…

For this reason I chose the medium of video games to translate my interviews of these jungle residents and give them another dimension. The excerpts presented here refer to building the Chemin des Dunes school. Zimako Jones, the project’s instigator and an asylum seeker from Nigeria, was assisted by NGOs such as Solidarité Laïque, Ateliers Sans Frontières, volunteer groups and “brothers”, as he calls them. One of these brothers is Marko, a Kurdish man who has been in the jungle for more than 11 weeks (and prefers to remain anonymous). He is helping Zimako finalize the construction of what he calls a forum, a place for meeting, exchange and learning for children, as well as for adults.

They talk about building, following a vision, never giving up, staying on site, supporting families, children, mutual aid…

Isabelle Arvers est auteur, critique et commissaire d’exposition indépendante. Son champ d’investigation est l’immatériel, au travers de la relation entre l’Art, les Jeux Vidéo, Internet et les nouvelles formes d’images liées au réseau et à l’imagerie numérique.

Marko, from the Calais jungle to Isabelle Arvers’s machinima:

Marko, de la jungle de Calais au machinima d’Isabelle Arvers:

Stéphane Rosière et Sébastien Piantoni – Wall’s Cartography

Stéphane Rosière et Sébastien Piantoni
Wall’s Cartography

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, barriers and walls have multiplied along borders. In 2016, they line a distance of some 20 000 km (8% of the world’s borders). New kinds of apparatus have replaced former frontlines (Cyprus, Korea, Western Sahara). They often perform different functions: regulating the movements of and excluding certain kinds of populations, preventing terrorism, highlighting state sovereignty and materialising borders. Yet these constructions are never isolated. They are part of integrated, high-tech surveillance systems that are not always visible.

Stéphane Rosière is Professor and at the head of the Master degree diploma of Geopolitics in the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (URCA), he’s also head of the Research laboratory Habiter (EA.2076) and Editor-in-chief of the online journal L’Espace Politique.

Sébastien Piantoni is Studies Engineer since 2009 within the team Habiter (EA 2076) from the University of Reims.

Joana Moll & Cedric Parizot – The Virtual Watchers

Joana Moll & Cedric Parizot
The Virtual Watchers
Interactive installation, 2016

Virtual Watchers is an on-going research project at the intersection of art, research and technology that questions the dynamics of crowdsourcing at contemporary State borders. It focuses on the exchanges that occurred within a Facebook group that will be called here the RedServants, in order to protect there anonymity. This group gathered American citizens that volunteered to monitor US-Mexico border through an online platform that displayed live screenings of CCTV cameras. The declared aim of this operation was to bring American citizens to participate in reducing border crime and block the entrance of illegal immigration to the US. This artwork offers an interactive window that allows the public to dive into the conversations, jokes, and questionings of the RedServants. By doing so, it highlights to what extent the emotional investment and exchanges of these people work as an essential mechanism in the construction and legitimization of a post-panoptic system. Second, it underscores the dyfunctionning of this system of surveillance that fail to provide an efficient tool for monitoring border trespassing.

Visit the project

Joana Moll is an artist and researcher based in Barcelona. Her work critically explores the way post-capitalist narratives affect the alphabetization of machines, humans and ecosystems. Her main research topics include communication technologies and CO2 emissions, virtual civil surveillance and language. She has presented her work in several museums, festivals, universities and publications around the world. Furthermore, she is a member of the transdisciplinary research project Antiatlas des Frontières and co-founder of The Institute for the Advancement of Popular Automatisms. She is a visiting lecturer at Vic School of Art and a lecturer at VIT Lab in Vic (Barcelona). Her full resume is available at http://www.janavirgin.com.

Cédric Parizot is a researcher in anthropology at the Institute of Research and Studies of the Arab and Muslim Worlds, (CNRS/Aix Marseille University). His research focus on mobility and bordering mechanisms in the Israeli-Palestinian spaces. Since 2011, he is the coordinator of the antiAtlas of Borders He sees the integration of artistic practices and digital technologies into its ethnographic research as a way to reappraise critically his own practices of modelization of knowledge.

Technical Development: Ramin Soleymani
Freelancing software developer and media artist. Worked in computer science research for a while, before starting to dive into open education and the hacking culture of Berlin. Is convinced that the ivory tower of science will crush if you just drill long enough at the very same spot with your little finger.

Emerging Futures Lab – Borderland Biashara

Emerging Futures Lab (EFL)
Borderland Biashara
Visit the project

Borderland Biashara is an ongoing project to understand and map the informal economic ecosystem in the borderlands of the East African Community. Biashara means commerce or business in Swahili. This ethnographic research explores the role of mobile phone in the biashara at the Kenya-Uganda border. International borders often create ‘unnatural’ complications to everyday activities such as informal trade . These complications may take the form of restrictions on mobility, customs checkpoints, currency exchange, etc. Mobile phones play a vital role in overcoming these barriers to biashara, and the East African region is globally unusual due to the presence of ubiquitous mobile money transfer platforms, and the dominance of the prepaid (pay-as-you-go) subscription model. This photo-log captures some the stories from observing cross border transactions and communications.

Emerging Futures Lab (EFL) is an interdisciplinary research driven concept design and innovation consulting practice operating primarily in the emerging consumer markets of sub Saharan Africa. With roots in human centered design, business strategy and marketing, as well as engineering and technology, EFL offers holistic roadmaps to maximize opportunities in informal and rural markets. Clients include governments, global consumer brands, social enterprises, and multi donor funded regional trade and integration bodies. This exhibit was curated by Rinku Gajera, a human centered design planner who facilitates socially, environmentally & economically balanced design interventions through participatory methods, and Michael Kimani, research associate.

Bill Rankin – One World II

Bill Rankin
One World II
Cartographie, 2015
Visit the project

At the height of World War II, the architect-turned-cartographer Richard Edes Harrison published his famous “One World, One War” map in Fortune magazine, which used a polar projection to show the United States in close proximity to the threats from Germany and Japan. Compared to the isolationist message of the Mercator, it made engagement with the war seem like a geographic imperative.

My map updates Harrison’s basic idea for the present day. Instead of showing territorial states engaged in a global war, my version uses shipping routes and railways to show the intermodal donut of global capitalism – the frenetic circulation across the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the thick rope threading through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Malacca, and the offshoots to South America, Australasia, and Africa. By using a different projection with a different orientation, I also decenter the United States and transform a world of seven separate continents into a single borderless network.

Bill Rankin is a historian and cartographer at Yale University. His mapping activity reimagines familiar geographies as complex landscapes of statistics, law, and history; his maps have appeared in publications and exhibitions throughout the US, Europe, and Asia. His recently published book, After the Map, is a history of the mapping sciences in the twentieth century.

www.radicalcartography.netwww.afterthemap.info.

RYBN – ADM8

RYBN
ADM8
Visit the project

ADM8 is a trading robot conceived to invest and speculate on financial markets. Based on artificial intelligence algorithm, the program can launch purchasing and selling orders completely autonomously. Its decision-making and prediction system allows him to seek, identify and anticipate trends in the financial chaotic oscillations. Commissioned on 31 August 2011, the program relies on a n operative budget of 10,000USD and will continue to operate until bankruptcy.

With the support of DICREAM / CNC, the ZKM Karlsruhe (Institut fur Bildmedien / GAM) and the Gaite Lyrique / TAQ, Paris.

RBYN is a multidisciplinary art collective established in 2000. The collective is based in Paris and specialises in the production of installations, performances and interfaces referring to codified systems of artistic representation (painting, architecture, counter-culture) as well as to human and physical phenomena (geopolitics, socio-economics, sensory perception, cognitive systems). RYBN originates from the Open Source community and is interested in counter models and in ways to reveal ‘what hides behind’ the opacity of systems.

Nicola Mai – Travel

Nicola Mai
Travel
2016

Travel is a two-screen ethnofictional installation presenting the life history of Joy, a Nigerian migrant woman selling sex in the Bois de Vincennes in Paris. Joy left Nigeria in order to help her family after the death of her father. She knew that she was going to sell sex before leaving, but was unaware of the hard working and life condition she would have had to face in France. After having endured several months of exploitation, Joy decides to reinterpret her story of migration as one of trafficking. With the help of an association she obtains humanitarian protection, but in order to keep helping her family and live her life she keeps selling sex at night.

Nicola Mai is an ethnographer and filmmaker working as Professor of Sociology Migration Studies at London Metropolitan University. His main research interest is the negotiation of gender, sexuality and subjectivity through the migration process, with particular reference to the globalised sex industry as a contested and ambivalent space of control and autonomy. In his academic work and films, Nick problematises prevailing understandings of the global sex trade as characterised by exploitation and victimisation, by showing the complexity of the subjective investments of the people involved. In his Sex Work Trilogy, he explores differents meeting experiences between migration and the sex industry.

Antoine D’Agata – Odysseia

Antoine D’Agata
Odysseia
2011-2013
Visit the project

Odysseia assembles texts, photos and videos in a single installation. This artwork is neither documentary nor humanist; it expresses the vision of an artist preoccupied with identity issues, suffering bodies and death. It presents the daily life of these “migrants” in a world between nomadism and inertia. Nothing spectacular occurs since, in this tragic reality, nothing is extraordinary. Scenes display landscapes with no specific interest. What should be at stake in these pictures is the knowledge of what is lacking, what we will never be able to see.

Antoine D’Agata was born in Marseille in 1961, he left France in 1983 for ten years. He began his career as a photographer during the 90’s in New-York. He is also interested in cinema and has directed three films.

Keina Espiñeira – The Colour of the Sea

Video, 2015

After a long journey departing from Guinea Conakry, Aliou, Diakité and Boubacar find themselves immobilized in the EU-African city of Ceuta. For them the waiting time in Ceuta is uncertain. It can take months, and even years, in some cases. Meanwhile, they are settled in the Centre of Temporary Stay for Immigrants (CETI).

During their waiting in Ceuta, they find themselves immobilized between two EU thresholds: a land border represented and marked by a fence with the surrounding forest in Morocco; and a sea border represented by the disconnection of mainland Europe through the waters of the Strait of Gibraltar. The forest and the sea, both are part of the border landscape of this Spanish enclave in North Africa.

The Colour of the Sea delves into a border experience that takes place in the city of Ceuta, at the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. I was interested in portraying a place where human trajectories are spatially and temporally suspended. By crossing contemporary nomadic landscapes the film explores this mundane limbo. Spontaneous conversations from the present collide with African.

legends from the colonial past. The Colour of the Sea is a documentary film performed in participatory action with their protagonists. The main characters, Aliou, Diakité and Boubacar, knew that it does not look for a representation of their migratory biographical travel. Instead, it seeks to both produce and activate a border experience through the act of filming this threshold stage of their journey. The film reveals the conflict triggered and the dilemmas they have in relation to participate.

Keina Espiñeira is a scholar and artist. She is interested in politics of visuality, postcolonial academic activism, political and cultural geographies, border-art, Morocco and the Mediterranean region. Keina’s doctoral dissertation Migrant landscapes in the stretched border. The postcolonial condition of the Spanish-Moroccan Border (2015, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain) is focused on spatial practices and representations of the Spanish-Moroccan border in regards to African human mobility. On her work she explores modern borderscapes of power and resistance from a decolonial perspective. Currently she is working on developing the visual methodology further as both a research and a pedagogical tool and experimenting with collective possibilities of visual counter representations and radical cartographies.