New forms of identity

Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

The topic of the thirteenth edition of Mine, Yours, Ours festival, held in Rijeka from 22nd to 24th March, is transnationalism – a social phenomenon which arises from the heightened interconnectivity between people and the receding economic and social significance of boundaries among nation states.

Curated by James Bridle, the Transnationalisms exhibition will open in Mali salon gallery, on Thursday, 22nd March at 20:00, bringing the works by the artists Julian Oliver, Daniela Ortiz, Jeremy Hutchison, Raphaël Fabre, Jonas Staal and the groups Studio Folder (Marco Ferrari & Elisa Pasqual) and They Are Here (Helen Walker & Harun Morrison). The exhibition will stay on display until 14 April, from Tuesday to Saturday from 11 to  20, and on Sunday from 11 to 13 and from 17 to 20. Find out more about the exhibition on this link.

The conference on the topic of transnationalism will take place in the large hall of Filodrammatica, on Friday and Saturday, 23 and 24 March. The participants that will hold presentations are writer and artist James Bridle, journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, artist and net.art pioneer Heath Bunting, chief analyst at the Centre for Peace Studies in Zagreb Gordan Bosanac, cultural studies scholar and writer Aljoša Pužar, and architect Marco Ferrari. Each day, the block of three thirty minute presentations will be followed by discussion.

Admission to all events is free. Read on to learn more about the program.

Program

Mali salon (Korzo 24, Rijeka)
Thursday, 22 March, 2018

 
Transnationalisms exhibition opening, at 20:00
(on display until 14 April)
 

Filodrammatica, Korzo 28/1, Rijeka
Friday, 23 March, 2018

 
presentations & discussions, from 18:00

James Bridle: The Real Name Game
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian: Cosmopolites and Data Havens
Heath Bunting: The Status Project
           

Filodrammatica, Korzo 28/1, Rijeka
Saturday, 24 March, 2018

 
presentations & discussions, from 18:00

Aljoša Pužar: The Fucked up Ethics of the N. 3
Gordan Bosanac: How migrations are influencing new technologies, citizenship and nation states
Marco Ferrari: Italian Limes: Mapping the Shifting Border across Alpine Glaciers

 

 

People are on the move. Around the world, 65 million people have been forced from home, 20 million are refugees, and 10 million are stateless: denied a nationality and access to basic rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement. At the same time, populist and anti-immigrant parties are leading in the polls across the continent, ethnic groups clamour for independence, and the European Union, which has dissolved borders between 26 nations in the past two decades, is about to shrink for the first time. But even as governments build walls, close borders, cancel passports and deport migrants, people are increasingly organising between nations, new forms of identity are flourishing, and digital technologies are permitting new kinds of citizenship and story-telling to come into being.

The nation state, only 370 years old, is creaking, and with it go the identities that shaped it. But what will replace them? Will borderless technologies and communities continue to flourish, breaking down the barriers between nations and citizens, or will the rising tides of migration, climate change, separatism and nationalism lead to an ever more fractured future? Transnationalisms brings together a group of artists exploring how new technologies, new kinds of community, and new forms of identity are reshaping geography, as well as researchers, thinkers, and activists committed to understanding and shaping this transformation.

 

Friday, 23 March, from 18:00 @ Filodrammatica

The Real Name Game
James Bridle

James Bridle New technologies are allowing new forms of identity and community to flourish and be recognised, from virtual citizenships to digital nations, and gender identities to non-human actors. At the same time, systems of power and governance attempt to corral and suppress identity within geographical borders and database schema. James Bridle explores the uses and abuses of identity in his own practice, and the work of others.

James Bridle is an artist and writer working across technologies and disciplines. His artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. His writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, the Observer and many others, in print and online. He lectures regularly at conferences, universities, and other events. His formulation of the New Aesthetic research project has spurred debate and creative work across multiple disciplines and continues to inspire critical and artistic responses. “New Dark Age”, his book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, is forthcoming from Verso (UK & US) in 2018.

 

Cosmopolites and Data Havens
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Atossa Abrahamian will discuss the new forms and strange variations of citizenship explored in her book, ‘The Cosmopolites’, from the adventures of the ultrarich purchasing nationalities for their geopolitical power, to the dispossessed and stateless at the sharp end of the trade in passports. Beyond human citizenship, she will also delve into the ways in which data and information – from tax and money to trade secrets and private histories – is moved, processed, smuggled and hidden around the globe.

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a journalist living in New York. She is the author of The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen (Columbia Global Reports, 2015), an investigation into the global passport market. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, the London Review of Books, Dissent, and other publications. She has worked as an opinion editor at Al Jazeera America and a general news and business reporter for Reuters.

 

The Status Project
Heath Bunting

Heath Bunting will discuss his work and practice in the context of the Transnationalisms exhibition, exploring a range of issues from creating open and democratic systems by modifying communications technologies and social systems to the porosity of borders, both in physical space and online.

Heath Bunting is a co-founder of both net.art and sport-art movements. He is banned for life from entering the USA for his anti genetic and border crossing work and has had multiple works of art censored and deleted by the UK security services. His main work, The Status Project, involves using artificial intelligence to search for artificial life in societal systems. Aside from this, he is currently training artists in security and survival techniques so they can out-live organised crime networks in the forest during the final crisis.

 

Saturday, 24 March, from 18:00 @ Filodrammatica

The fucked up ethics of the n. 3
Aljoša Pužar

Aljoša Pužar Moje Tvoje Naše TransnacionalizmiThe talk will try to warn about triadic, triangular and three-bound structures of culture and society. It will think of conceptual devices such as third space, hybridity and in-betweenness as the trickery of the weak ethical life. It will cover the everyday trauma of the national borders and the appalling reality of ethnocentric mind, but also the problem of the self-standing fiction of the multicultural “Border”. It will talk about the rhetorical tool of direct truthful speech and the notion of positive antagonism as the basis of good life. It will criticize the idea of political correctness, historical dialogues, national peace-making and all similar rituals of the pretended common ground.

Aljoša Pužar is a cultural studies scholar and writer, born in Rijeka. His studies range from the anthropological and cultural theory of in-betweenness, to Korean gender and youth studies. He has taught in translation studies, literary theory and cultural studies at the University of Rijeka, and cultural geography, gender studies, and anthropology at South Korean universities (HUFS, Yonsei). He currently teaches at the University of Ljubljana. He has published books and newspaper columns, essays and short stories. He is presently living between Ljubljana and Rijeka.

 

How migrations are influencing new technologies, citizenship and nation states
Gordan Bosanac

Gordan BosanacMany are saying how Europe has changed since 2015. Poland and Hungary have been transformed into ill democracies. The UK decided to leave the EU. Populist, anti-system political parties and extreme right-wing parties have entered the national parliaments. A sudden flux of people escaping from the wars, corruption, unemployment, and religious strife came to Europe. Many of them are still stuck at the European borders. Our reality is maybe, as never before, so global (we can directly see and feel the effects of social injustice from different parts of the world) and so local (by having the rise of the national identities due to the threat from the global presence in our backyards). In such a tense context everything is at stake: from citizenship and nation state to the new usage of technologies. Technology has helped refugees to navigate through the route to Europe. Moreover, the migration slang has been developed and the route to Europe is today referred to as The Game with different levels. Technology has also become the place of migrant digital heritage – carrying the personal memories in the mobile phone. In parallel, more technology has been developed to protect the borders from those playing The Game. Technology at the same time is helping the global movement of the people and is defending the concept of nation state.

Gordan Bosanac is the Chief Analyst at the Centre for Peace Studies in Zagreb. After graduating from the Faculty of Physics – University of Zagreb he completed the non-formal Peace Studies program organized by the Centre for Peace Studies. In 2004 he obtained degree MA in Human Rights, graduating from the University School of London, School of Public Policy. Mr Bosanac’s areas of expertise include: human rights policies, security, development cooperation, combating discrimination and hate crimes, LGBT rights, migration and the development of civil society. Lately he is engaged in the protection of refugees and migrants’ rights and advocates against militarization policies. He also teaches Human Security at the Centre for Peace Studies in Zagreb.

 

Italian Limes: Mapping the Shifting Border across Alpine Glaciers
Marco Ferrari

Marco FerrariThe border between Italy and its adjacent countries traverses snowfields and perennial ice sheets at high altitudes, mostly following the path of the Alpine watershed. Due to the global warming–induced shrinkage of the glaciers, a substantial shift of the watershed line has been detected in several places.

The Italian Limes project was conceived to intervene in the rupture that has emerged between the increased speed of natural changes and the slowness inherent in their cartographic and political representation. Between 2014 and 2016, the project team of Studio Folder installed a network of custom-made, open-source sensors on a small section of the Austrian–Italian border on the Similaun glacier, to transmit in real time the position of the line. Marco Ferrari will talk about the genesis of the project and the fieldwork done in the Alps; he will also present the ongoing research on the history of Italian border surveys, along with a glimpse over other projects of Studio Folder that aim to develop a similar methodology of inquiry within the field of cartographic representation.

Marco Ferrari is an architect, co-founder (together with Elisa Pasqual) of Studio Folder, a design and visual research agency based in Milan, Italy. His main research interests pivot around the understanding of the relationships between cartography and politics, working across a diverse range of outcomes and methodologies. Besides the ongoing research project and interactive installation Italian Limes, Studio Folder’s recent projects include the participation to the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale, After Belonging, with Uncharted, a project that investigates the political infrastructure behind contemporary cartography; Åzone Futures Market, an online exhibition for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on the impact of emerging technologies; the design of the identity and website for Serpentine Radio, a new online platform by the Serpentine Galleries. Marco Ferrari has been Creative Director of Domus magazine between 2011 and 2013, and a regular graphics editor for Abitare magazine between 2007 and 2011. He has been teaching ‘Methods and Tools for Representation’ at ISIA in Urbino since 2010, and led an Information Design research laboratory at the MA Communication Design at IUAV University in Venice, between 2013 and 2016.

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