Migration, Sex, History: Africa/Europe

It is necessary to radicalize the language of film, to collect, elaborate and stage, if necessary, the discussions on the present situation of dispossessions, discrimination and exploitation in order to make the images of violence (against refugees, asylum seekers and those seen as different, as others, the rest) clearly present here and now. The idea is to situate a film in between not quite a documentary, not a narrative, fiction either, but to incorporate the elements of both; particularly the insertion of documentary to disrupt the narrative flow; the fragmentation and re-arrangement of the plot.

The lines are the Third cinema conceived by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, the L.A. Rebellion film movement (Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima and Julie Dash), The Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) with John Akomfrah, the Sankofa collective of black British filmmakers with Isaac Julien, Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Nadine Marsh-Edwards, etc. and the golden age of Yugoslav Black cinema with Dušan Makavejev, Živojin Pavlović, Aleksandar Petrović, Želimir Žilnik.

Let’s say “Each generation necessarily engages in a process of rewriting/reconstituting the past. Film makers have to paint their own landscapes; they must breathe new life into each moment in cinema. That can only be achieved when practitioners have mapped out the field of visual representations and the film techniques they wish to deploy.” - Reece Auguiste, Member Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC)

The social, political space is disintegrating under economic pressures, neoliberalizations and bigger and bigger precarity. This results in a situation of deterioration of rights by those who were seen as not being part of nation body. Uprisings and self-organization of workers and refugees open the questions of discontinuities in the history of Europe after WWII. Practically we see the passage from migrants to criminals, the reactionary narrativisation of past colonialism, present refugees and new forms of racisms.

Depoliticization of the space of Europe is going on with strong criminalization that leads to violent decomposition of political demands.

The EU politics is the one of brutality, racial undercurrents, economic inequalities and silenced history of migration and immigration. The EU is a place of a constantly hiding its proper policy of colonialism, anti-Semitism and racism, and therefore it is the intention to construct a different logic to dominant thinking on migration, sexuality and history. The refugees, the migrants are presented as uneducated and passive while the idea is to see them speaking, contextualizing their positions, reflecting. Also regarding aesthetics, it is here the point of the rest, the others, of the bastards.

Nation-state always functions through a production of a space of unity based on the blood and soil. A construction of a nation-state new archive is an archive without migrants. By “‘ideology’ we are not referring to the sitting ducks of cultural criticism: race, class, and gender. Instead [. . .] ideology in the most basic sense of the word: as a rational legitimization of the existing order and a tacit agreement in which everyone is involved: politicians and venture capitalists, administrators and….” (Lara Nielsen).

Parallels can be drawn and used in terms of analyzing migration with judicial demands in terms of rights and papers and even more the idea of labor, division of labor while developing a political position with and through the film. In Sensible Politics. The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism McLagan and Mc Kee say: “Attending to political aesthetics means focusing not on a disembodied image that travels under the concept of art or visual culture, nor on a preformed domain of the political that seeks subsequent expression in media form. Instead, it requires bringing the two realms together into the same analytic frame.”

The idea is to provide alternatives to classical and official mainstream cinema. To eschew the conventions and rework them being influenced by films from Latin America, the Black film movements, and the emerging cinema of Africa. The point of departure that is in the back of the film is several conditions, deliberations formed by several groups of conceptual revaluation of the film aesthetics in connection with social and political topics that has to be brought and elaborated in the film production.

Those who will participate in the project after we made the research are several; Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur, Belinda Kazeem, Njideka Stephanie Iroh, Marissa Lôbo, Rubia Salgado, Alessandra dos Santos Silva (Austria), Timea Junghaus (Hungary), Monika Bobako, Marcin Starnawski (Poland), Grada Kilomba, Sabine Schiffer, Constantin Wagner (Gemany), Kwame Nimako, Gloria Wekker, Philomena Essad (Netherlands), Ibrahim Saydi, Kheraba Drame, Yast Solo, Andrés García, Beatriz Preciado, Toni Serra (Spain), Marie Hélène Bourcier (France), Paul Gilroy, Sara Ahmed (Great Britain), Simon Njami (Switzerland), Domenico Losurdo, Silvia Federici, Antonella Corsani, Sandro Mezzadra (Italy), Šefik Tatlić(Croatia), Aigul Hakimova (Slovenia)

Expanding connections, networking, distributing and elaborating alternative knowledge systems that attack the imperial occidental matrix of power that hides processes of enslavement, pauperization, poverty.

With this crowdfunding campaign we want to cover the costs of filming and editing of our documentary, while traveling around Europe, from Hungary, Austria, Poland, Germany, Netherlands, Britain, France, Spain, Switzerland, Italy to Slovenia.

Marina Gržinić, artist, theoretician, professor at the Institute of Philosophy SASA (Ljubljana) and Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her academic and artistic work is in the field of contemporary philosophy and aesthetics after modernism, with a particular emphasis on the theory of ideology, the theory of technology, biopolitics, video technology and art (theories of media and virtual worlds), and feminism and contemporary art.

She works in collaboration in the field of video and media art with Aina Šmid (born in Ljubljana, 1957); Aina Šmid as well work in projects of journalism, she is presently a free-lance writer. Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid work together from 1982, they produced 40 videofilms and installations.

From 2010 they entered many other collaborative networks and collaboration.
From 2010 they collaborate with Tjaša Kancler in numerous projects of theoretical, political and media work.

Tjaša Kancler, artist, activist and associated professor at the Department of Design and Image, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Barcelona. S/he works in collaboration with Anja Steidinger on kronotop.org (www.kronotop.org), a research project and an online archive of video-interviews with artists, filmmakers, theorists and activists, conceptualized as a collective space for enunciation with the intention to relate art, activism, politics and critical theory.

The team is small: three people that work together and do everything from shooting, developing the screenplay, editing and website, and elaborating theoretically the whole project.