Undisciplining Photography
Symposium
27.05.21 28.05.21
Undisciplining Photography Symposium invites photographers and researchers to engage in debates on the potential of photography in contemporary visuality.
What can we do with photography across disciplines: in and outside aesthetical, societal and political
spaces? To what new horizons can we disclose the medium?
What conventions should we leave behind to open up a photographic
practice beyond the boundaries that have already been set to it? To what political, historical and social roots can we trace these boundaries back?
What issues determine our lives today? How do you approach them visually? What decisions have shaped your visual strategies?
The symposium is divided into 5 thematic sections:
· Dirty Pictures · Unlearning Imperialism
· Persons & Structures
· Unforgettable Loss
· Entangled Landscape
· Dirty Pictures · Unlearning Imperialism
· Persons & Structures
· Unforgettable Loss
· Entangled Landscape
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Imperialism and Photography
Colonial Rule, Missionary Vision and Counter-Practicespresented by Andrea Stultiens, Gerlov van Engelenhoven
guest speakers Sara Blokland, Walter Costa, George Mahashe, Dzifa Peters, Markha Valenta, Carine Zaayman
The world as we know it today has been shaped by centuries of colonization, imperia rule, global trade and extractive and exploitative human relationships. Grappling with the position of photography in societies requires close examination of the colonia legacy and how it is interlinked with the photographic medium. What can a decolonial, postcolonial or anti-colonial visual practice look like? How to address the historical trajectory and burden of imperialism and find ways out, around, through and living with these histories? What positions and methods are available?
image courtesy Andrea Stultiens, from work in progress Reframing PJU
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Dirty Pictures
Logistics, Infrastructure and Invisible Labourpresented by Donald Weber
guest speakers Michele Borzoni, Mads Holm, Donald Weber
The click of a mouse button can send you anything imaginable via online marketplaces such as Amazon. Within the fast circulation of goods, often hidden are forces of displacement, dispossession and violence. Warehouses, megaships and mega-ports, railroads and other infrastructures inhabit not just the edges of our cities, but often are key vectors of friction and risk. In a way, logistics is a map of human desire, an entanglement of biological and technological networks where often the most vulnerable are exploited to ensure the smooth flow of goods, people, money and information. How to address as a photographer such hidden, pervasive networks?
Images:
Confrontation between a policeman wielding a nightstick and a longshoreman striker during the West Coast waterfront
general strike, San Francisco, 1934.
Dorothea Lange. Shipyard Construction Workers, Richmond, California, 1942.
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Unforgettable Loss
Images at the Intersections of Post-Memory, Trauma and Identitypresented by Shailoh Phillips
guest speakers Laia Abril, Ewan Macbeth, Ali Shobeiri
The persistence of traumatic memory is a recognizable part of post-conflict culture, often re-emerging long after the events that caused it have ceased. Narration or depiction might provide a means of dealing with the cataclysmic past, without suggesting that this process can ever be complete, or even sufficient. How are traumatic events passed down through generations? What is the role of photography within the production and reproduction of past traumas?
Image courtesy Nola Minolfi, Healing Memories