Guest Lecture during a seminar session of “Narrating Migration” instructed by Prof. Radha S. Hegde at New York University, Berlin.

9 January 2024
6:30-8:00 p.m.
Unter den Linden 6, Raum 2070A

This talk examines visual documentation and the documentary form in their intimate connection with racialized state surveillance and border control in the United States. It discusses the ways that visual documents such as the photograph have been wielded on behalf of U.S. immigration policy to contain border crossings since the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), and highlights the underexamined linkage between official documentation and historical processes of Asian racialization. Against this backdrop, I turn to the ongoing work of Miko Revereza, a Philippine-born artist and self-ascribed “undocumented-documentary filmmaker.” I explore how Revereza advances an aesthetic of the undocument, or fugitive, errant, and ephemeral visual forms that both attune us to documentation’s violent history and mobilize self-documentary practices beyond the demand to capture and report.

Feng-Mei Heberer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, and the author of Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). Her research interests lie at the junctures of gendered racialization, labor, and transnational migration with a focus on queer-feminist Asian diasporic media cultures. In addition, she researches and works in film curation and cultural organizing.

8 January, 4 pm, DOR 24, r. 1.501

Snare for Birds: Rereading the Colonial Archive is a collaborative research art project by Kiri Dalena, Lizza May David, and Jaclyn Reyes that inquires into the tangents of the Philippines’ colonial past, archiving, and its impacts on being Filipina. The project builds upon the imagery and knowledge of Dean Worcester, an ornithologist and Secretary of Interior of the Philippine Islands during the American colonial period, whose photos are part of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum’s archive in Cologne, Germany. Worcester’s views shaped US public opinion, foreign policy, and inevitably what we know to be Filipino history and identity. Snare for Birds: Rereading the Colonial Archive recipocrates Worcester’s endeavor: to engage with archival images like specimens and to claim truths a camera was “made to tell.” It encourages viewers to question the colonial gaze, the accessibility of these historical records, and the ways in which our responses to these images shape how we engage with our predecessors.

Lizza May David lives and works in Berlin and studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nuremberg, the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon and at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Currently, she is a lecturer at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. She is interested in gaps and silences in personal and collective archives and experiments with forms of activation or disturbance through abstract painting. She navigates through affects and moments that elude representability, leading to experimental approaches for the very same reason. She does not assume the existing binary simplifications of the world, but rather thinks relationally in crossroads, turning points, overlapping and branching out, finding further expression in collaborations, architectural interventions or installations.

More information can be found here.

Anne Potjans was part of an interview conducted by Malika Stuerznickel, Jenny Oliveira Caldas, and Nelly Yaa Pinkrah at EACH ONE TEACH ONE e.V. on the institutionalization of, and community organization around, Intersectional Black European Studies (InBEST) in preparation of a contribution to the first edited volume of the same name, edited by Maisha Auma, Denise Bergold-Caldwell, Fatima El-Tayeb, Peggy Piesche, and Katja Kinder.

Wassan Ali wird in ihrem Beitrag das Projekt “Geschichte bewahren, Geschichte im Entstehen” vorstellen (eng.) – ein Projekt, das darauf abzielt, die Geschichte von QTIBIPoC in das Spinnboden Lesbenarchiv zu bringen. Folgende Fragen werden zur Diskussion gestellt: Wie lässt sich ein Archivierungsprojekt mit postkolonialen Lehren wie dem “Verlernen des Imperialismus” (Ariella Azoulay) oder der Erklärung, dass “Opazität bewahrt werden muss” (Édouard Glissant), in Einklang bringen? Der Beitrag skizziert einige der Risiken, aber auch Affirmationen, die mit der Einbeziehung von Geschichte(n) verbunden sind, die im Allgemeinen nicht Teil des archivarischen Auftrags sind.

https://www.temporal-communities.de/events/workshop-archive-von-unten.html

Keynote address “Anger has a Sound: Black Feminist Frequencies” by Anne Potjans. More information here.

Elahe Haschemi Yekanis text “Queer Invisibility, Archival Poetry and Utopian In-Betweenness” has been published in the catalogue of the exhibition in German, English and Ukranian. More information on the exhibition itself can be found on Close[t] Demonstrations’ website. The full catalogue can be downloaded here.

Thao Ho presented her research on the intersection of archival work and decolonial activism at the workshop titled “Lively Metaphors in Preservation Practices: Sex and Death,” organised by Perverse Collections: Building Europe’s queer and trans archives (PERCOL) in Amsterdam. Taking place on 2 & 3 November 2023, the closed workshop was held in collaboration with the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam and the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision. The two-day event, generously hosted by the two institutions, aims to facilitate an exchange between museum professionals, scholars, and practitioners working with trans and queer archives. Participants are asked to actively contribute in the form of a short input on the different potentialities and difficulties connected to dealing with trans and queer collections.