FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2007
Media Insurgencies: Panel Discussion
11 – 1 p.m. Polycentric Session, UC-Berkeley, Townsend Center
for the Humanities
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The Great Wall (2006, Super-8, 16 minutes)
considers the fortification of national borders and the specters left
in the wake of international immigration policies. The film passes between
the US-Mexico border and an immigrant detention center in Berlin.
We, the Undersigned, Girls of Hiroshima (2005, 15 minutes, Found Footage)
reflects on psychic fallout in the wake of disaster, bringing together
the image texts of Gerhard Richter, Mahmoud Darwish, Jean-Luc Godard,
Resnais and Duras, Al Jazeera, Zionist propaganda, and letters from
the girls of Hiroshima to Claude Eatherly, the man who dropped the atomic
bomb.
Département des Arts de l'Islam, Salle 1, Objets d'Irak
(2004, 3 minutes, Mini-DV, Web Images) examines how the discourse
of 'culture' was mobilized during the ransack of the Iraqi National
Museum. During this period, international attention shifted to the question
of culture and specifically how such a term was to be defined given
the loss and destruction of the objects toward which history was said
to refer. The title refers to the setting on which the video opens,
an empty museum display in the Islamic Art section of the Louvre. The
anachrony of contemporary photojournalism at the site of the display
asks one to contend with the Orientalist fabulation of a conception
of 'culture' limited to the domain of archaic objects.
My Child, Anak (2001, Mini-DV, VHS-C, and Super- 8, 25 minutes)
foregrounds the work translation between languages, cultures, and selfhoods.
Interviews with a group of children in the Philippines are set against
a series of dialogues in the United States between the artist as a two-year
old girl, and her mother as she teaches her how to speak. Between such
refrains of "the child" stand the legacy of colonialism, the
residue of ethnography, and the ever-present question of a local and
global politics of representation.
Participant's Bio:
Michelle Dizon is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and theorist based in
Los Angeles. Her project-based work addresses questions of postcoloniality,
globalization, racialization, sexuality, identity, and historical memory.
She is currently an MFA Candidate in Interdisciplinary Studio in the
Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles and a
Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California,
Berkeley.