Key Work: Evelina Gambino & Tekla Aslanishvili on "Algorythmic Island"
2 March 2021
In this talk Evelina Gambino & Tekla Aslanishvili discuss the challenges, conflicts and negotiations that have shaped their individual and collective work in Anaklia and across other infrastructural spaces in Georgia. Born in the field, their collaboration and friendship has travelled across different settings and countries to become a daily element of their respective lives. The continuous conversation in which they are engaged unfolds through different media, from text messages to written samples, stills of Aslanishvili‘s film, meetings, discussions, phone calls, etc. This process is a testament to the impossibility of treating the field as a bounded object as well as fieldwork as an experience that can be contained by any strict time/space or discipline. Bringing together these different political, affective and practical elements, Gambino & Aslanishvili will discuss their practice and future projects.
Key Work: Crofton Black on "Unredacting the Black Sites"
23 February 2021
Since 2010 Crofton Black has worked alongside organisations including Reprieve, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Rendition Project to map out the logistics underpinning the CIA's network of secret prisons, operated from 2002 to 2006 to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists. In 2016, with the artist Edmund Clark, he published Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition, an exploration of his investigation through documents and photographs. His 2019 publication with Sam Raphael and Ruth Blakeley, CIA Torture Unredacted, offered a further layer of analysis through the lens of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on detention by the CIA. In this talk he will offer an insight into the methods of interpretation that he and his colleagues used in analysing this heavily censored body of material to build up a comprehensive picture of the CIA's detention network, spatially and chronologically, and those held in it.
Key Work: Carey Young on “Palais de Justice”
2 December 2020
Since 2002, visual artist Carey Young has developed a number of artworks that are also functional legal instruments, and which have conceptualised and explored law as an artistic medium. “Palais de Justice” was filmed surreptitiously at the Palais de Justice in Brussels, an enormous and ornate 19th century courthouse designed to depict law in terms of the sublime. Contradicting the familiar patriarchal culture of law, Young's camera depicts female judges and lawyers at court. Sitting at trial, directing proceedings or delivering judgments, female judges are seen through a series of circular windows in courtroom doors. The piece considers the complex relations between lenses, surveillance and ideas of framing or being framed, which are at the core of the law-related work Young has been developing for more than a decade.
FA/CRA Forum: Kodwo Eshun responds to Forensic Architecture
2 December 2020
For much of 2020, Forensic
Architecture has worked on the link between the scale of a split second and
that of the long duré: the scalar link between the killing of Mark Duggan and
the systemic police brutality at BLM protests; between clouds of teargas
filling the roundabouts and streets in the US, Chile, France or Hong Kong; to
what Achille Mbembe described in his work on the “Universal Right to Breath”
as the closing down of the skies. To help think through these
projects critically, FA invited the filmmaker,
theorist and artist Kodwo Eshun to reflect and respond. Kodwo is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths and co-founded of The Otolith Group.
FA investigations:
The Killing of Mark Duggan
Police Brutality at the BLM Protests
Clouds Studies
FA investigations:
The Killing of Mark Duggan
Police Brutality at the BLM Protests
Clouds Studies
Key Work: Shela Sheikh on “Wild Relatives”
18 November 2020
Shela Sheikh will reflect upon Jumana Manna’s "Wild Relatives” (60 mins) as it relates to her own research. Wild Relatives starts from an event that has sparked media interest worldwide: in 2012 an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of en- counters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth.
Read Shela Sheikh‘s article here.
Read Shela Sheikh‘s article here.