"A curious news story caught my attention during my research forthe project. On 25 October 2001, Italian port authorities intercepted an illegal, clean-shaven and smartly dressed Egyptian passenger who used a container to have himself shipped clandestinely to Canada. Much to the surprise of the authorities who discovered the blind passenger, his temporary habitat was equipped with mobile phones, a camera and a laptop computer connected via ethernettothe global network. The container was furnished for a long journey and equipped with a bucket he used as a toilet." Ursula Biemann
Ursula Biemann engages with questions of human displacement and the impacts of a growing global mobility. She aims to make visible the complex web of social, political and gendered relations that constitute place and identity. Her videos track the discursive and iterative ways in which places are produced, whereby roots are always already connected to routes. Her places are temporary, translocal existences not embedded in the local cultural surroundings but operating according to a different sort of logic, such as ports, free-trade zones, refugee centres and transit camps.
Geography here is taken as a system of knowledge formation, an epistemic category determining what we know and how we know it. This theoretical observation opens up a field of relations that is profoundly performative. Informed by feminist critique and postcolonial debates, Biemann has developed a practice in which her own subject position as an image-maker and producer of narratives is reflected. This translates into a particular form called video essay, uneasily situated between documentary film and video art. Like the literary essay, the video essay explores theoretical postulates of fact and fiction, reflecting the acts of writing and image-making as well as the technologies through which they are produced.
In Performing the Border (1999), the starting point of the essay is a place on the US/Mexican border called Juarez City. In this essay Biemann explores and performs a transnational zone that is constituted through the movement of political, gendered and sexualised bodies across the border, inscribing the border as a material reality through their actions. The argument she makes is that borders are not given but arise as a result of social and political constructions, which need to be performed and exercised. Where Performing the Border proposes the material inscription of movement in the terrain as the constitution of place, Contained Mobility explores the reverse: how is the notion of
place presented materially in movement?
Contained Mobility is Ursula Biemann's first double-screen video work, juxtaposing the two spatial realities of the global container transport system and human migration contained as bare life. Popular understanding of cultural identity continues to be fundamentally static, predicated on the nation state. Biemann offers a transformation of this concept from the perspective of mobility. Increasingly sophisticated technologies managing and controlling global flows are countered by equally inventive tactics of evasion by people questioning the prerogative of access to political communities.
The story of Anatol, the asylum seeker in the video, presents a scripted reality in a state of exception beyond the binary of renationalisation and repatriation. Translocal existence appears here as an extra-judicial movement from place to place between the rhetoric of the inalienable rights of human beings and the growing crisis of human rights as understood by the 1951 Geneva Convention. At the same time a global regulatory network is emerging that aims to control the flow of commerce and people on a global scale. Contained Mobility gives us an insight into some of the technological operations that constitute this network and the concomitant possibility of self-determined migration.
Paul Domela
[LESS]"A curious news story caught my attention during my research forthe project. On 25 October 2001, Italian port authorities intercepted an illegal, clean-shaven and smartly dressed Egyptian passenger who used a container to have himself shipped clandestinely to Canada. Much to the surprise of the authorities who discovered the blind passenger, his temporary habitat was equipped with mobile phones, a camera and a laptop computer connected via ethernettothe global network. The container was furnished for a long journey and equipped with a bucket he used as a toilet." Ursula Biemann
Ursula Biemann engages with questions of human displacement and the impacts of a growing global mobility. She aims to make visible the complex web of social, political and gendered relations that constitute place and identity. Her videos track the discursive and iterative ways in which places are produced, whereby roots are always already connected to routes. Her places are temporary, translocal existences not embedded in the local cultural surroundings but operating according to a different sort of logic, such as ports, free-trade zones, refugee centres and transit camps.
Geography here is taken as a system of knowledge formation, an epistemic category determining what we know and how we know it. This theoretical observation opens up a field of relations that is profoundly performative. Informed by feminist critique and postcolonial debates, Biemann has developed a practice in which her own subject position as an image-maker and producer of narratives is reflected. This translates into a particular form called video essay, uneasily situated between documentary film and video art. Like the literary essay, the video essay explores theoretical postulates of fact and fiction, reflecting the acts of writing and image-making as well as the technologies through which they are produced.
In Performing the Border (1999), the starting point of the essay is a place on the US/Mexican border called Juarez City. In this essay Biemann explores and performs a transnational zone that is constituted through the movement of political, gendered and sexualised bodies across the border, inscribing the border as a material reality through their actions. The argument she makes is that borders are not given but arise as a result of social and political constructions, which need to be performed and exercised. Where Performing the Border proposes the material inscription of movement in the terrain as the constitution of place, Contained Mobility explores the reverse: how is the notion of
place presented materially in movement?
Contained Mobility is Ursula Biemann's first double-screen video work, juxtaposing the two spatial realities of the global container transport system and human migration contained as bare life. Popular understanding of cultural identity continues to be fundamentally static, predicated on the nation state. Biemann offers a transformation of this concept from the perspective of mobility. Increasingly sophisticated technologies managing and controlling global flows are countered by equally inventive tactics of evasion by people questioning the prerogative of access to political communities.
The story of Anatol, the asylum seeker in the video, presents a scripted reality in a state of exception beyond the binary of renationalisation and repatriation. Translocal existence appears here as an extra-judicial movement from place to place between the rhetoric of the inalienable rights of human beings and the growing crisis of human rights as understood by the 1951 Geneva Convention. At the same time a global regulatory network is emerging that aims to control the flow of commerce and people on a global scale. Contained Mobility gives us an insight into some of the technological operations that constitute this network and the concomitant possibility of self-determined migration.
Paul Domela
