Border Sawal Jawab - refilmed!

Here's a new version of Border Sawal Jawab, shot by Meena and performed by Shy and myself.

Border Sawal Jawab from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.

Borders ReSurfacing: Meena's Assignment 5

This last month I've been playing around with some of the footage Cynthia and Sandra shot at the Salaach River. These are just two little experiments I made by layering two videos on top of each other, and playing with contrast, brightness, saturation, and a negative effect. I was inspired by what Sandra and Cynthia were saying regarding the concept they had come up with called "Back to Beautiful." The original footage is so beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, and yet I didn't feel like it should ONLY be that. So in post-production, I've been mainly playing with ways to interrupt or manipulate the original beauty of the videos.  I would eventually like this to be layered and/or juxtaposed with some documentary photography/journalistic images of this same river with refugees. Maybe even words scrolling over videos as well. I started looking for news footage online specific to the Salaach but only found a few things (and Sandra posted some local news articles during our research right?). I haven't had chance to play with that yet. Of course I've had some technical difficulties. It all just takes time and lots of hard drive space...but I'm having fun and would like to keep playing with this stuff.

https://vimeo.com/232076213


https://vimeo.com/232096063

Meena's Creative Response #2 - Borders Resurfacing

Sorry I've been sick and not feeling creative! I didn't "remix" the written material, just chose excerpts from each of your writing that stood out to me.


The sharks were sighted here just a day ago
But now we have the all clear
The bacteria was polluting the water five days ago
But now we have the go ahead
Human waste mixed with the ocean waters seven days ago  not safe
But now we can swim (PS)

Our 1900 miles of pipeline built on Tongva land (quoting a FB post from Jools) is a tiny reflection of the DAPL:  So much can be hidden under water until the inevitable moment of structural fail as human's imperfect creations backfire into spluttering bubbles of wing destroying sludge...It was there, at the edge of my adopted city, that a Pakistani-American I once knew, lost his import export business because his incoming crates were marked suspicious after 9-11, never again to be released. (SM)

It is hard to imagine those lost bodies, those child bodies, George Ow and Young Lee fishing steelhead trout, catching little frogs and river creatures: the way play looked before capitalism took over.  Wooden houses perched rickety on stakes above the water, so precarious, so precious, so easily swept away.  In the memory of my imagination, it is always summer, not this damp chill to the bone, concrete seeping cold into my ass, this winter of unremembering. (CLL)

Refugee life. Migrant life. Brown skin. Black life. The reasons why people make these journeys. Not to colonize or dominate. But for personal reasons. To save their life. To change their life. Roaring. Constant. Ebbing. Rushing. Crashing. Flowing. (MM)

That blissful forgetting changed when the Saalach became a site of hope and despair, when the border was closed, as thousands of people fleeing from Syria wanted to pass. (SC)

Gesture remix

https://vimeo.com/200594402

PW: waterborders2

Resurfacing Borders Creative Response #1

https://vimeo.com/196229121

Freewrite:

I wonder I can't imagine the possibility that I might see boats, rafts, people coming in out of the horizon. Stumbling onto this edge between sand and water. What happens. Why does someone make that treacherous journey. Why does someone risk their life. I don't have answers. Except to those people who don't value human life. Refugee life. Migrant life. Brown skin. Black life. The reasons why people make these journeys. Not to colonize or dominate. But for personal reasons. To save their life. To change their life. Roaring. Constant. Ebbing. Rushing. Crashing. Flowing. Can I see people making their way from the horizon to where I stand. But it's happening. As I stand here. As we do this. People are risking their lives to save their lives. Right now. Always. Pelican. Flies. Across. Sky.

https://vimeo.com/196226837

PW: waterborders1

Borders ReSurfacing: Creative Brainstorm (Meena)

1) Sandra posted a really great assignment as part of ReImagining Citizenship (Borders ReSurfacing's predecessor) and I don't think it ever got investigated. It's still really relevant and worthwhile. Wanted to bring this back into the mix. See below.

2) The link that Cynthia posted of John Akomfrah's work is still staying strong with me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6tbMrbvWwc

3) Then there is also this article that Sita Frederick sent me about a boat of Indians travelling from Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico, supposedly to try to enter the US as refugees...? Could't find great writing about this but so curious.


http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2016/10/17/border-patrol-agents-thwart-illegal-alien-smuggling-puerto-rico/

Reimagining Citizenship Assignment 2 (by Babli)
STEP 1: Do a 10-15 minute free-write reflecting on art making and cultural citizenship (the way you believe it can be effectively deployed as a concept), in times of a crisis such as the current "refugee crisis" in Europe- a crisis that is a matter of life and death for many. You can refer to different situation than the current one debated here.

STEP 2: Read your own free-write closely and try to establish the main emotion (stayibhava) tha it reveals.

STEP 3: Make a study based on that stayibhava, if you want you can use one of Cynthia's suggestions:

This assignment consists of three steps. Please DO NOT read step 2 and step 3 before having completed step 1.

Creative Assignment Possibilities (Cynthia) :

(1)   Create a movement study exploring the idea of living perpetually on a border.  Consider how your study might not be completely abstract but in dialogue with actual border stories.

(2)   Create a study investigating two-facedness: both welcoming and repelling.

(3)   Do a free-write about your own history of migration (this can include your family’s).  Put this story into conversation with stories of current refugees.  You may use text, movement, video, images, etc.

Borders ReSurfacing: Creative Brainstorm (Meena)

1) Sandra posted a really great assignment as part of ReImagining Citizenship (Borders ReSurfacing's predecessor) and I don't think it ever got investigated. It's still really relevant and worthwhile. Wanted to bring this back into the mix. See below.

2) The link that Cynthia posted of John Akomfrah's work is still staying strong with me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6tbMrbvWwc

3) Then there is also this article that Sita Frederick sent me about a boat of Indians travelling from Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico, supposedly to try to enter the US as refugees...? Could't find great writing about this but so curious.

http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2016/10/17/border-patrol-agents-thwart-illegal-alien-smuggling-puerto-rico/

Reimagining Citizenship Assignment 2 (by Babli)

This assignment consists of three steps. Please DO NOT read step 2 and step 3 before having completed step 1.

STEP 1: Do a 10-15 minute free-write reflecting on art making and cultural citizenship (the way you believe it can be effectively deployed as a concept), in times of a crisis such as the current "refugee crisis" in Europe- a crisis that is a matter of life and death for many. You can refer to different situation than the current one debated here.

STEP 2: Read your own free-write closely and try to establish the main emotion (stayibhava) tha it reveals.

STEP 3: Make a study based on that stayibhava, if you want you can use one of Cynthia's suggestions:

Creative Assignment Possibilities (Cynthia) :

(1)   Create a movement study exploring the idea of living perpetually on a border.  Consider how your study might not be completely abstract but in dialogue with actual border stories.

(2)   Create a study investigating two-facedness: both welcoming and repelling.

(3)   Do a free-write about your own history of migration (this can include your family’s).  Put this story into conversation with stories of current refugees.  You may use text, movement, video, images, etc.

ReSurfacing Borders Round III - Meena's links

I started a new collaboration with an old friend Sita Frederick. Sita has been working on a performance work "Otro Lado" dealing with issues of borders, statelessness, migrant bodies, cages, etc. for the last few years. I'm designing media projections for her show in January 2017. She sent me this photo essay as part of getting the ball rolling in our creative collaboration:

http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/11/citizens-of-nowhere/414741/

Also, I was in Hollywood this past weekend for a youth film festival and there was a musical and social justice pop-up happening on the street. Aztlan Underground, a musical group with indigenous roots in the Americas, was playing. Powerful. One song that stood out to me was a call and response with the refrain "we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us."

Here is a youtube video on them performing the song (at a different time).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mQ4KUojVVI

And lyrics to the song:

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/a/aztlan+underground/decolonize_21030867.html

ReSurfacing Borders: preliminary round ii

Here are links I am curious about. Themes that came up for me are borders, xenophobia, Europe, visual culture.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/un-refugee-chief-worrying-climate-of-xenophobia-in-europe/

http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/xenophobic-hate-and-militias-grow-in-europe-too-in-hunt-for-refugees
"Mobility and migration in film and moving-image art" by Nilgun Bayraktar


http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369801X.2015.1106962

Babli or Cynthia or Shy, since you are affiliated with a college or university I wonder if you can access the book in question in this book review, or the films they are analyzing:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20403526.2016.1217639?journalCode=rtrc20

Specifically I'm curious if any of you have access to these:

Ayse Polat's experimental short film "Countess Sophia Hatun" 1997

Fatih Akin's film "Edge of Heaven" 2007
I found the US trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8rhDyhIloM
Here is another trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdufEvwgt3w

and the last scene!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ56jlVi5zs

ReSurfacing Borders Preliminary Round_Meena

So my links for this 'preliminary round' of ReSurfacing Borders refer to MIA's song and music video "Borders." Please re-read lyrics, re-watch the video, and I found these two articles about it. If you have seen/read any other good/better articles about this video please forward! Let's chat on August 24th!

http://www.warscapes.com/opinion/mia-s-borders-refugees-refugees

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-Nw7HbaeWY

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/11/mia-borders-video-refugees-migration-appropriation/418017/

Reimagining Citizenship: BN feet with Moten's Gift II

PW: Moten's Gift

1) Are there any movement concepts you find interesting in relationship with Moten's words?

2) Are there any movement concepts you find uninteresting in relationship with Moten's words?

3) Anything you find problematic?

4) I presented a version of this at ARC Pasadena a few weeks ago. I received some great feedback via text from friend and dance scholar Naomi Bragin, particularly relating to time in the second section. Can you think of concrete choreographic tasks that might work towards accomplishing what she is suggesting?

"This idea of death only holds true if as Fred Moten says you focus on the burial ground of the subject which is the world but what about speculative politics which is the seeing of other worlds which I would describe as parallel universes not distinct from what is now

It makes me think of the way you play with time in your work, how you might twist that to challenge a perception of time within a linear frame, in order to speculate on what's to be seen

Also I was thinking it might b meaningful for u to explore the cadences or resonances of what you do with blackness, something along the lines of what SG said about the pop lock and drop it :)"

Note: Pop lock and drop it translated into - when I go from aramandi to muramandi fast! 

Reimagining Citizenship: Assignment 1 Study: can BN feet be in conversation with blackness?

Assignment 1 study i... can BN feet be in conversation with blackness?

PW: BN feet to Moten Gift

https://vimeo.com/157516620

No specific feedback necessary because it's still in the very very rough raw unfinished phase,  but you find anything interesting or problematic, let me know please!

Meena's notes and response to "Reimagining Citizenship Round 2"

Video from August 21, 2015 

• Someone is suggesting point system (similar to Canada). Which refugees are “useful”? Argh.
• There is no immigration system in place in Germany. Need to create a mechanism. What are Germany's immigration policies?
• Differentiating between asylum seekers versus migrants looking for a better economic life but not in life danger. Argh.
• Sweden and Germany are bearing the bulk.
• Hungary, Britain, France, Spanish, are building fences, barriers, walls.
• Betrayal of European values to not accept refugees? What are these so called European values?
• Christian refugees only for some countries. Anti-muslim sentiment :-(
• Ethnic similarities/connections to European country depending on who they accept. If relatives are in the EU, refugees should go that. One guy seems really appalled that someone might want to CHOOSE. 
• 1857 people have lost their lives since June trying to cross over Mediterranean borders.

Video from Sept 18, 2015

• Have introduced policed border controls.
• Merckel's contradiction between saying Germany must accept refugees, and then putting into place border control.

Video from Oct 30, 2015

• Controlling refugee bodies – registration centers are supposedly deterring refugees. Debate as to if they are.
• I’m curious to know how the debate has shifted since the Paris bombs. Increased anti-Muslim and violence towards refugees.
• Dude feeling like a refugee seeking asylum doesn’t have the  right to choose where they want to live. Hmm.
• Rise of right wing political groups in Europe riding on anti-immigrant policies. Argh. Can see similar movement in US too. Canada has only now after 8 years of massive right wing leadership, voted in something slightly more liberal.

Notes from article
Gerard Delanty, University of Liverpool, UK 

Two Conceptions of Cultural Citizenship: A Review of Recent Literature on Culture and Citizenship

• Citizenship as based on formal rights and not cultural belonging.
• Rights in exchange for duties and loyalties.
• Citizenship as generally defined by birth, or in some cases descent, while multicultural policies served to manage immigrants. “Today this distinction has virtually collapsed.”  How would the author now reframe this argument? That the original population is more culturally plural because of four decades of intermixing, but also because of westernization and globalization.
• How culture – mostly defined by diversity – is to be brought into the realm of citizenship.
• “Cultural citizenship”  - the inclusion or exclusion of certain groups or individuals
• I wonder – if minoritarian subjects were included within the dominant notions of cultural belonging (for example including realms of communications such as media) would the practice and policing of citizenship shift? I feel like this author is arguing for that. 

Ideas for creative assignments:

I don't have any ideas for creative assignments. Sorry :-(  I'm open to what you and Cynthia propose.

Reimagining Citizenship: Creative Assignment #1

Due by November 2, 2015.

The creative assignment suggestions each of us proposed are below. Allow yourself to be inspired by all of them in your creative study. We all were caught up with Fred Moten's conceptualization of "more than and at the same time less than one" (Sandra's suggestion, Meena's A and Cynthia's 1).  Make a creative study that concerns itself with this condition of "more than and at the same time less than one"...there is a part of me that wants to maintain a relationship with Blackness in this creative study so I wonder if I might ask that in your personal exploration of "more than and at the same time less than one" if there can be some visible (visible at least to you) trace of Moten's context of Blackness within your study.

Suggestions by...

Sandra:

I am actually struck by his adjectives, which he uses with reference to this condition-

e.g.:

Entangled, vulnerable, open non-full, more than and less than yourself.

I could imagine to make a study based on them

Meena:
 
A) Create a contact improvisation of your fragmented non-whole bodies, within the context of Black fragmented selfhood; try to work through knowing that your fragments are not the same or to the same extent as Black selfhood.
 
B) I'm trying out a version of this task as a dancer/facilitator in the upcoming exhibition of taisha paggett "School for Technicolor People" at LACE. Isolate sentences of Fred Moten that really stand out to you. Say those sentences out loud a few times to get a feeling for the rhythm and feeling of the sentences. Create a rhythm sequence with your feet that repeats or responds to the feelings, structures, syllables, of those phrases that you chose. You should have a movement sequence of foot rhythms. One sequence can incorporate some of the words (from your written response of Moten's talk). A second sequence should have no words spoken, just your feet in conversation with Moten's words quietly living within your interior you.

Cynthia:

(1)  Create a movement study that embodies – or rather, enfleshes – excess and lack.  Embrace irregularity, and resist wholeness and resolution.

 
(2) Ask yourself, “What does blackness have to do with me?”  Do a 10-minute free-write addressing this question, then transform some of those ideas into artistic form (movement, video, poetry, soundscape, etc.). 

Reimagining Citizenship Round #1: Meena suggestions for creative assignments

Can you read the writing in the photos of my previous text?

Questions and thoughts first. You don't have to answer.
 
i) Moten makes numerous theoretical interventions here to disrupt the Western European canon of usual suspects by not only centralizing, but visibilizing Black intellectual thinkers who have predated the work Western European thinkers. But never credited. What would happen if PNC worked with the lens of Blackness in addition to all the other lenses PNC uses? Name a non-Black theorist you love and an argument the theorist makes that you love. Find out what was happening around the same time of your theorist. Find a Black intellectual around the same era who was making a similar claim, or was in conversation with the ideas of the theorist you love.

ii)  Do you consider Tolliver's prayer a performance? Do you consider the Middle Passage a sort of durational contact improvisation performance? How does this change our notion of performance, of contact improv, of duration performance?

iii) How have your ancestors been subjected to philosophical and legal underminings of wholeness? 

iv) I have thought about the ramifications of accepting the gift, in the ways that I partially understand what Moten talks about when he talks about the gift that Black people have to give. Gift as loss.  I feel I have accepted partial aspects of the gift when I was more active in issues of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty years ago still living in Canada. In the post-colonial context, there is a notion of longing for that home that once existed. Here, there is no luxury of once upon a time. Giving up a sense of home, citizenship, belonging, owning property. How can I own property, own a home, on this land where this land is not, should not, cannot be my own?

v) I get the need non Black people have to compare Blackness to concepts that we might know more about. Cross-comparing to try to get even a sliver of partial understanding. Even though I feel it is destructive. In the case of queer theory for example, Moten does say that queer theories also support the "more than and less than ONE" theory that he talks about in Blackness. And that all minoritarian subjects are aware of the fantasy of whole subjecthood. But he also believes that the historical and legal traumas to Black people, to Black notions of selfhood is beyond/on the other side of any other conception of self. What is different or similar between working from Blackness as a theoretical lens and queer theory? What is similar and different about post-colonial theories?

Suggestions for creative assignment: 

A) Create a contact improvisation of your fragmented non-whole bodies, within the context of Black fragmented selfhood; try to work through knowing that your fragments are not the same or to the same extent as Black selfhood.

B) I'm trying out a version of this task as a dancer/facilitator in the upcoming exhibition of taisha paggett "School for Technicolor People" at LACE. Isolate sentences of Fred Moten that really stand out to you. Say those sentences out loud a few times to get a feeling for the rhythm and feeling of the sentences. Create a rhythm sequence with your feet that repeats or responds to the feelings, structures, syllables, of those phrases that you chose. You should have a movement sequence of foot rhythms. One sequence can incorporate some of the words (from your written response of Moten's talk). A second sequence should have no words spoken, just your feet in conversation with Moten's words quietly living within your interior you.

Reimagining Citizenship: Meena's written response round #1