“An Aesthetics of Dis/Placement: Steve Sabella’s 38 Days of Re-Collection,” in Rebecca Raue & Steve Sabella eds., Fragments from Our Beautiful Future, Berlin: Kerber Verlag, 2017, pp. 62-75. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Traces, tiles and fleeting moments
Time for mapping, 2018
In this chapter, I discuss ways in which artists have exploited and exposed the temporalities of 'geomedia'. I am following writers working at the intersection of media studies and geography in using this term to refer to a contemporary complex of technologies, content and practices that involve mapping, remote survey visualisations and the binding of digital information to location via GPS (Thielmann, 2010; Lapenta, 2011). My aim is to challenge the idea that geomedia's only temporal effects are ones of timelessness. Crucial to this challenge is a separation out of two different, and sometimes conflated, versions of timelessness ascribed to cartography and new media. However, rather than an artwork, I will begin with an image of artists at work. Depicting a moorland landscape split by a narrow, unmarked road, and with two figures in the midground to the right, this panoramic digital photograph is one image among the millions of others that, since 2007, have been captured and stitched into the dynamic archive of photographic mapping that is Google Street View. 1 Over the course of their lives, most of these automated images-instances of what Joanna Zylinska calls 'non-human photography'-will escape serious human scrutiny (Zylinska, 2013). Until April 2014, these lives would have been cut short by updates from the restless fleet of Google's Street View cars. Since the introduction of a time slider to Street View's interface, however, such images remain accessible; although with all the millions of miles of road covered, and given the evident remoteness of the location depicted, it is unlikely that I would have found this particular image if I had not been told precisely where to look. This image
Desiring Diagrams: Aesthetic Practices of Cartographic Fragmentation and the Deleuzian Erewhon
The International Journal of the Arts in Society: Annual Review, 2011
The first portion of the paper focuses on two particular works of art, Guy Ernest Debord's Naked City and Jane and Louise Wilson's A Free and Anonymous Monument, and examines the ways in which both works, despite their different contexts and media, employ an aesthetics of fragmentation and reconfiguration. Debord's Naked City, first published in 1957 by the MIBI (Mouvement Internationale pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste), displays a generic Plan de Paris cut up into nineteen different sections, scattered on a piece of paper, and connected to one another only through red directional arrows. With an absolute disregard for both spatial and directional relations, The Naked City disrupts the false continuity of the Plan de Paris and, in so doing, exposes the violent, homogenizing logic of capitalist aesthetics. This paper argues that Jane and Louise Wilson's 2004 video installation, A Free and Anonymous Monument, utilizes a similar aesthetic of fragmentation and reconfiguration, deconstructing maps and cartographic practices (envisioned very loosely here), as a means of criticizing the homogenizing logic of capitalist constructions of space. The second part of the paper, takes into account Marcus Doel's critique of "slice and stitch" methodology as a means of articulating difference employed very literally within both works and argument for the enactment of a moving and mobilized non-representational theory, depicted as performance. In opposition, but also alongside Doel, I argue that a work of art can maintain a "slice and stitch" method while also being performative. Examining Debord's Naked City and Jane and Louise Wilson's A Free and Anonymous Monument, the paper links the performative nature of both works to Gilles Deleuze's concept of the Erewhon-"an originary 'nowhere' and the displaced, disguised, modified and always recreated 'here-and-now'". The paper contends that the nature of the Erewhon, as simultaneously One and Multiple, is dependent upon the various foldings that take place. Consequently, I argue that the aesthetics of fragmentation and reconfiguration are bound up with the performative folding, and allow for criticality and potentiality to function alongside one another in a work of art.
Seventeen Pieces: Displacement, Misplacement, and Conservation
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2020
This article explores the systemic importance of art in the conservation of images, historical reference, and cultural meaning as displaced victims of humanitarian crises make the transition from the land of their birth to a new country with a different history and cultural landscape. In presenting the work of Kevork Mourad, an artist of Armenian descent displaced from Syria, we show the essential, layered interplay of visceral, lived individual experiences and the historic collective memory of real and imagined pasts that survive the destruction of physical artifacts.
Idiosyncratic Spaces and Uncertain Practices: Drawing, Drifting and Sweeping Lines Through the Sand
2017
I am sitting on the doorstep of the hotel side door, thinking of thresholds - marginal spaces that provide the kind of ambiguity I need to practice, to disperse, to encounter, to act – not standing for anything certain but renegotiating a relationship with audience; testing out work that is perhaps not “of art” (Duchamp 1913, 105). I pick up on a kind of creative energy found in such settings as abandoned buildings, building sites, cracks, gutters, vacant lots, wind and dust, clefts and fissures, and the crumbling pavement beneath my feet - they offer a useful metaphor for my (our?) uncertain? state of being. Marcel Broodthaers wrote: "The definition of artistic activity occurs, first of all, in the field of distribution" (Crow, 1996 177). According to Daniel Kunitz (2011 47-52) the lesson of such earlier efforts in the1960’s where art challenged context, is that if you want to disrupt the understanding of what art is, you need to alter how it gets to its audience (see Fig...
Beyond the Artifact: Unfolding Medieval, Algorithmic, and Unruly Lives of Maps
Material Culture Review, 2022
Discovered on the walls of caves in present-day France, some of the earliest known maps do not depict the earth but the brightest stars of the milky way. Although we know almost nothing about the artists who made them, we sense that they, much like us, looked beyond the terrestrial for meaning and connections. As material artifacts, maps (re)connect temporally distant human experiences, thus underlining Doreen Massey’s concept of place as “the ever-changing outcome of complex sets of relations.” Scrutinizing the ostensible emotional flatness of maps, this paper examines how they enter sensuous, affective, and biographical dimensions of placemaking. Acknowledging that mapped spaces are (socially) constructed not just of sight but also of memory, affect, sound, or tactile experience, it asks when and how maps assume lives of their own, for instance by engendering social change or interfacing with mental geographies of individuals. The paper investigates and historicizes these questions through various styles and periods of mapmaking, for example Ai Weiwei’s map of China made from Tieli wood of demolished Quing dynasty temples, Becky Cooper’s experiential maps of Manhattan, Guy Debord’s “Naked City” depiction of Paris, or Mona Hatoum’s “Present Tense” map of Palestine made from olive oil soap that mediates the soluble borders of the region. Building upon spatial turn scholarship and the theoretical frameworks of critical cartography and affect studies, the paper argues that instead of truthful statements about the world, maps are sites of affective negotiations of meaning. They are ‘living’ socio-material agents that build upon complex assemblages of identity, memory, emotion, and power.
2024
Translation and Objects offers a new and original perspective in Translation Studies, originating from the conviction that in today's world translation is pervasive. Building on the ideas of scholars who have expanded the boundaries of the discipline, this book focuses on the analysis of objects that migrants carry with them on their journey of migration. The ideas of displacement and constant movement are key throughout these pages. Migrants live translation literally, because displacement is a leitmotif for them. Translation and Objects analyzes migrant objectssuch as shoes, stones, or photographs-as translation sites that function as expressions as well as sources of emotions. These displaced emotional objects, laden with meanings and sentiments, tell many stories, saying a great deal about their owners, who almost never have a voice. This book shows how meaning is displaced through the materiality, texture, smells, sensations, and forms of moving objects. Including examples of translations that have been created from a nonlinguistic perspective and exploring linguistic issues whilst connecting them to other fields such as anthropology and sociology, Vidal sets out a broad vision of translation. This is critical reading for translation theory courses within Translation Studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies.
Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 2015
As people around the world continue to have their voices, desires, and movements restricted, and their pasts and futures told on their behalf, we are interested in the critical project of decolonizing, which involves contesting dominant narratives and hegemonic representations. Ignacio Martín-Baró called these the “collective lies” told about people and politics. This essay reflects within and across two sites of injustice, located in Israel/Palestine and in South Africa, to excavate the circuits of structural violence, internalized colonization and possible reworking of those toward resistance that can be revealed within the stubborn particulars of place, history, and culture. The projects presented here are locally rooted, site-specific inquiries into contexts that bear the brunt of colonialism, dispossession, and occupation. Using visual research methodologies such as embroideries that produce counter-narratives and counter-maps that divulge the complexity of land-struggles, we s...