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

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
Interactive map
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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.

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

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
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 (Bénédicte et Laure-Anne Jacobs)
eu4you
Interactive installation, 2016
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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
Installation, 2016
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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
Cartography, 2015
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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
2015
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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

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.

Emerging Futures Lab (EFL)
Borderland Biashara
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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
Cartographie, 2015
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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.net – www.afterthemap.info.

RYBN
ADM8
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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.

Antoine D’Agata
Odysseia
2011-2013
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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.

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.