Re: [-empyre-] the mouth of Duck river

[Ana Valdés]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Johannes as usual you are a seasoned traveler in the seas of knowledge and
poetry and your writings always make me happy :) I always feel challenged
and comforted at the same time :)
To walk has always been people's way to move and eventually settled down
today we barely walk. I did a long interview with the French urbanist and
philosopher Paul Virilio and he corrected me kindly when I said: we travel
much today.
And he, who refuses to travel by plane, said to me: "No dear friend this is
an usual misunderstanding we don't travel we are being travelled".
It means we are merely being transported but very seldom we walk with our
own feet.
The refugees take back the archaic way of be humans to walk...
Ana
Den 17 feb 2016 03:09 skrev "Johannes Birringer" <
johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk>:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>
>
> I tried to be hands on today, but now realize within the space of a day
> the debate has moved on
> in new directions; so backtracking is possibly in the way, but I had
> promised a reference to
> a violently moving border, across the united states empire in older times,
> as that mapping
> was evoked to me by Christina's painting, and I did not question the
> painting or the analyses
> here, or the activism, naturally. But I sensed Irina was right when she
> mentions what
> >>would seem to be the limits of the conversation too>>
>
> And maybe Ana this is what you meant, the limits of "posing" (clearly a
> strange
> action by Wei Wei, as Murat, Babak and you notice) but you have stretched
> the canvas
> so very wide, in the preface to " Across borders and networks: migrants,
> asylum seekers, or refugees?"
> (from Roman empire to the poles) and I merely worried about the stretch,
> and what we can possibly pose in response.
>
> My question yesterday actually was for Ricardo, and his idea of the
> "taking back gesture" -
> and I inquired about what the preface meant by 'networked existence' and
> how/whether the transborder tool worked for migrants/asylum
> seekers/refugees coming across
> borders,seas, rivers, and getting stranded in deserts.
>
> I also think, again, the crisis is a crisis of the from, not the to.
> Tomorrow I am hosting a workshop with a Greek ethnographer who will address
> this topic, and I'll report back to you all
> (Maria Kastrinou: '“Either we'll survive the sea or we'll die:” From Syria
> to War':
> Her proposal for examination was:
>
> >>“Either we’ll survive the sea or we’ll die” is a phrase I heard often,
> too often in Lesbos, Greece, uttered by people who had just crossed the sea
> in perilous conditions, often, too often, with little children and
> newborns, women, men, old and young. In this talk, I do not ask what
> ‘drives’ these people to risk everything, including their lives, in order
> to reach the shores of Europe. Instead, I recount what has made them flee
> from Syria. To do this, I piece together fragments of Syria in peace and in
> war, recounted through personal stories and also long-term ethnographic
> fieldwork. From Syria to war, then, is an exploration and a provocation to
> re-think and perhaps re-centre where the crisis is…
> >>
>
>
> Christina, the colorful canvas I saw from the historian Claudio Saunt,
>
>
> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/06/17/interactive_map_loss_of_indian_land.html
>
> evokes "a time-lapse vision of the transfer of Indian land between 1776
> and 1887. As blue “Indian homelands” disappear, small red areas appear,
> indicating the establishment of reservations.
> The project’s source data is a set of maps produced in 1899 by the Bureau
> of American Ethnology. The B.A.E. was a research unit of the Smithsonian
> that published and collected anthropological, archaeological, and
> linguistic research on the culture of North American Indians, as the
> nineteenth century drew to a close... The “source map” option (available on
> the map's site) offers a deep level of detail. By selecting a source map,
> and then zooming in to the state you’ve selected, you can see details of
> the map used to generate that section of the interactive. A pop-up box
> tells you which Native nation was resident on the land, and the date of the
> treaty or executive order that transferred the area to the government, as
> well as offering external links to descriptions of the treaty and of the
> tract of land. In the site’s “About” section, Saunt is careful to point out
> that the westward-moving boundaries could sometimes be vague. An example,
> the 1791 treaty with the Cherokee that ceded the land where present-day
> Knoxville, Tenn. stands. The treaty's language pointed to landmarks like
> "the mouth of Duck river," a broad approach that left a lot of room for
> creative implementation. When dealing with semi-nomadic tribes, Saunt
> added, negotiators sometimes designated a small reservation, "rather than
> spelling out the boundaries of the 

Re: [-empyre-] : Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum seekers, or refugee?

[Ana Valdés]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Babak i am not discussing technicalities here who ever said that quote had
a point and the comment was relevant and my question about the thousands
anonymous drowning in the shores of Europe is still on the table.
Ana
Den 16 feb 2016 23:43 skrev "Christina McPhee" :

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> or next time you need a book cover :-)
>
>
> > On Feb 16, 2016, at 3:36 PM, Christina McPhee  wrote:
> >
> > --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> > Re: wanting to be thinking on these topologies, freedom *and* survival,
> repression *and* production,
> >
> > I did, again last summer, during the first wave of the Syrian refugees,
> and came upon a figure like this:
> >
> > “Asylum”   http://www.christinamcphee.net/asylum/
> >
> > 2015  oil, graphite, paper collage and ink on muslin 165.7 x 99 x 6.3 cm
> >
> > She is leaving, freedom from, freedom to, and her dress is caught in the
> maelstrom.  Or/and this is not a silhouette,  is this a navigation?
> >
> > -cm
> >
> >
> > Ian wrote,
> >
> >> On Feb 16, 2016, at 9:27 AM, Ian Paul  wrote:
> >>
> >> I think the challenge in many ways for us is in understanding borders
> and migrations (and their networks) in their historical specificity, while
> also understanding how those specificities are (re)produced in much more
> expansive processes that both exceed and precede them. And so, how can we
> think of borders and migrations as being both cause and effect? Both agent
> and object? Things that both separate and tie together? We should be able
> to think of borders as being both productive and repressive, enabling
> certain forms of life while seeking to eradicate others. We should be able
> to think of migrations as being an expression of freedom and perhaps even
> poetry, while also being able to think of them as also at times being
> driven by necessity and survival. I want to be thinking on these
> topologies: freedom *and* survival, repression *and* production.
> >
> > ___
> > empyre forum
> > empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> > http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Re: [-empyre-] : Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum seekers, or refugee?

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--I wrote about it in my Facebook poetry page about a week ago in reaction to
an article about it in Hyperallergic. Here is the link:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/255509864471609/

Ciao,
Murat

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 5:43 PM, Babak Fakhamzadeh <
babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com> wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> An excellent question! (Also, it was a boy, not a girl, but that's not
> too important.)
>
> Here's an article with the image:
>
>
> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-artist-ai-weiwei-syrian-boy-aylan-kurdi-drowned-turkish-beach/
>
> To me, it seems Weiwei is looking for attention by trying to appear
> relevant. And, because those who have a high profile are profiled
> highly, because it was Weiwei who released this image, we know about
> this.
>
> As someone (on Facebook? Twitter?) asked (paraphrasing): "Am I
> supposed to be offended by this, or is this supposed to be high art?"
> --
> Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com |
> http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com
>
> Ask me for my PGP public key to send me encrypted email.
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 7:23 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat 
> wrote:
> > --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> > What do you guys think of Ai Weiwei's photo reenacting in his own body
> the death of the three-year old Syrian girl washed on the Anatolian shore?
> >
> > Ciao,
> > Murat
> >
> > On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Ian Paul 
> wrote:
> >>
> >> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> >> While it's perhaps not so productive for us to say that borders and
> migrations are simply symptomatic of larger systems/histories, it's also
> insufficient to treat borders and migrations as discrete or autonomous
> objects of study. What is a border, after all, if not a particular way of
> articulating a relationship between territories, between bodies, between
> economies, etc.? This relationality, and all of the complexity it entails,
> should be what we're after.
> >>
> >> Ricardo cited "Escape Routes" in an earlier thread, and I think that
> text in particular could be useful for us in the sense that the authors
> approach borders and migrations in this multitudinous fashion: as material
> realities in the present that are also structured by epistemological,
> geological, political, ethical, and economic bordering(s) that seamlessly
> function alongside/within/through the border practices of nation states.
> >>
> >> I think the challenge in many ways for us is in understanding borders
> and migrations (and their networks) in their historical specificity, while
> also understanding how those specificities are (re)produced in much more
> expansive processes that both exceed and precede them. And so, how can we
> think of borders and migrations as being both cause and effect? Both agent
> and object? Things that both separate and tie together? We should be able
> to think of borders as being both productive and repressive, enabling
> certain forms of life while seeking to eradicate others. We should be able
> to think of migrations as being an expression of freedom and perhaps even
> poetry, while also being able to think of them as also at times being
> driven by necessity and survival. I want to be thinking on these
> topologies: freedom *and* survival, repression *and* production.
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >>   ~i
> >>
> >>
> >> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 1:27 AM, Babak Fakhamzadeh <
> babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> >>> Hi Johannes,
> >>>
> >>> I like your musings, but you're putting up quite a list of potential
> >>> discussion points. :)
> >>>
> >>> Should we discuss the wars? Perhaps. But, what, then is in need of
> >>> discussion? That is, to what extent is the current Syrian/Iraqi
> >>> conflict open to interpretation? I doubt few of us on this list are
> >>> fooled by western/American propaganda in relation to the sources of
> >>> the conflict and most of us probably have a decent understanding of
> >>> the actual players in the conflict. But, also, we're focussing on
> >>> migration and refugees, not on the war, no?
> >>> --
> >>> Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com |
> http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com
> >>>
> >>> Ask me for my PGP public key to send me encrypted email.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 2:41 AM, Ana Valdés 
> wrote:
> >>> > --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> >>> > Johannes I was deliberately in the use of the words callosity
> because my question is: do we really change a thing in the lives of the
> refugees or the migrants discussing the concept but not the roots? As Ian
> wrote we should maybe discuss the war itself or the inequalities. A
> discussion hands on is maybe the thing related in the first weeks travel to
> Calais and teach refugees 

Re: [-empyre-] the mouth of Duck river

[Johannes Birringer]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--


I tried to be hands on today, but now realize within the space of a day the 
debate has moved on
in new directions; so backtracking is possibly in the way, but I had promised a 
reference to
a violently moving border, across the united states empire in older times, as 
that mapping
was evoked to me by Christina's painting, and I did not question the painting 
or the analyses
here, or the activism, naturally. But I sensed Irina was right when she 
mentions what 
>>would seem to be the limits of the conversation too>> 

And maybe Ana this is what you meant, the limits of "posing" (clearly a strange
action by Wei Wei, as Murat, Babak and you notice) but you have stretched the 
canvas
so very wide, in the preface to " Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum 
seekers, or refugees?"
(from Roman empire to the poles) and I merely worried about the stretch, and 
what we can possibly pose in response. 

My question yesterday actually was for Ricardo, and his idea of the "taking 
back gesture" -
and I inquired about what the preface meant by 'networked existence' and 
how/whether the transborder tool worked for migrants/asylum seekers/refugees 
coming across
borders,seas, rivers, and getting stranded in deserts. 

I also think, again, the crisis is a crisis of the from, not the to.  Tomorrow 
I am hosting a workshop with a Greek ethnographer who will address this topic, 
and I'll report back to you all
(Maria Kastrinou: '“Either we'll survive the sea or we'll die:” From Syria to 
War':
Her proposal for examination was:

>>“Either we’ll survive the sea or we’ll die” is a phrase I heard often, too 
>>often in Lesbos, Greece, uttered by people who had just crossed the sea in 
>>perilous conditions, often, too often, with little children and newborns, 
>>women, men, old and young. In this talk, I do not ask what ‘drives’ these 
>>people to risk everything, including their lives, in order to reach the 
>>shores of Europe. Instead, I recount what has made them flee from Syria. To 
>>do this, I piece together fragments of Syria in peace and in war, recounted 
>>through personal stories and also long-term ethnographic fieldwork. From 
>>Syria to war, then, is an exploration and a provocation to re-think and 
>>perhaps re-centre where the crisis is…
>>


Christina, the colorful canvas I saw from the historian Claudio Saunt, 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/06/17/interactive_map_loss_of_indian_land.html

evokes "a time-lapse vision of the transfer of Indian land between 1776 and 
1887. As blue “Indian homelands” disappear, small red areas appear, indicating 
the establishment of reservations.  
The project’s source data is a set of maps produced in 1899 by the Bureau of 
American Ethnology. The B.A.E. was a research unit of the Smithsonian that 
published and collected anthropological, archaeological, and linguistic 
research on the culture of North American Indians, as the nineteenth century 
drew to a close... The “source map” option (available on the map's site) offers 
a deep level of detail. By selecting a source map, and then zooming in to the 
state you’ve selected, you can see details of the map used to generate that 
section of the interactive. A pop-up box tells you which Native nation was 
resident on the land, and the date of the treaty or executive order that 
transferred the area to the government, as well as offering external links to 
descriptions of the treaty and of the tract of land. In the site’s “About” 
section, Saunt is careful to point out that the westward-moving boundaries 
could sometimes be vague. An example, the 1791 treaty with the Cherokee that 
ceded the land where present-day Knoxville, Tenn. stands. The treaty's language 
pointed to landmarks like "the mouth of Duck river," a broad approach that left 
a lot of room for creative implementation. When dealing with semi-nomadic 
tribes, Saunt added, negotiators sometimes designated a small reservation, 
"rather than spelling out the boundaries of the cession." 
This vagueness benefited the government’s purposes in crafting treaties and 
executive orders. “Greater legality and more precision,” Saunt argues, “would 
have made it impossible to seize so much land in so short a time.”


How does the site operate that you refered us to, Ricardo -  
http://bordermonitoring.eu/   ?   is it a similar monitoring of moving borders 
and what was refered to a hotspots?


Johannes Birringer
dap-lab


___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Re: [-empyre-] : Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum seekers, or refugee?

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Re: wanting to be thinking on these topologies, freedom *and* survival, 
repression *and* production,

I did, again last summer, during the first wave of the Syrian refugees, and 
came upon a figure like this: 

“Asylum”   http://www.christinamcphee.net/asylum/

2015  oil, graphite, paper collage and ink on muslin 165.7 x 99 x 6.3 cm 

She is leaving, freedom from, freedom to, and her dress is caught in the 
maelstrom.  Or/and this is not a silhouette,  is this a navigation?

-cm


Ian wrote,

> On Feb 16, 2016, at 9:27 AM, Ian Paul  wrote:
> 
> I think the challenge in many ways for us is in understanding borders and 
> migrations (and their networks) in their historical specificity, while also 
> understanding how those specificities are (re)produced in much more expansive 
> processes that both exceed and precede them. And so, how can we think of 
> borders and migrations as being both cause and effect? Both agent and object? 
> Things that both separate and tie together? We should be able to think of 
> borders as being both productive and repressive, enabling certain forms of 
> life while seeking to eradicate others. We should be able to think of 
> migrations as being an expression of freedom and perhaps even poetry, while 
> also being able to think of them as also at times being driven by necessity 
> and survival. I want to be thinking on these topologies: freedom *and* 
> survival, repression *and* production.

___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Re: [-empyre-] : Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum seekers, or refugee?

[Babak Fakhamzadeh]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
That quote is actually popularly attributed to Stalin, but it seems
that it's unfounded (which does not mean it was Goebbels who said it).
Details:

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/



--
Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com | http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com

Ask me for my PGP public key to send me encrypted email.


On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 11:55 PM, Ana Valdes  wrote:
> The question was this particular Syrian boy the first one to drown in an 
> European shore? He was the one which picture was taken by an photographer but 
> what about the other ones the ones who died before the ones who dies now the 
> ones who will die tomorrow.
> Goebbels said a dead Jew is a crime one hundred dead Jews are a massacre one 
> million dead Jews are a statistic.
> How many dead children needs to change the rules and the world?
> Ana
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Feb 16, 2016, at 7:43 PM, Babak Fakhamzadeh  
>> wrote:
>>
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> An excellent question! (Also, it was a boy, not a girl, but that's not
>> too important.)
>>
>> Here's an article with the image:
>>
>> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-artist-ai-weiwei-syrian-boy-aylan-kurdi-drowned-turkish-beach/
>>
>> To me, it seems Weiwei is looking for attention by trying to appear
>> relevant. And, because those who have a high profile are profiled
>> highly, because it was Weiwei who released this image, we know about
>> this.
>>
>> As someone (on Facebook? Twitter?) asked (paraphrasing): "Am I
>> supposed to be offended by this, or is this supposed to be high art?"
>> --
>> Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com | http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com
>>
>> Ask me for my PGP public key to send me encrypted email.
>>
>>
>>> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 7:23 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat  
>>> wrote:
>>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>>> What do you guys think of Ai Weiwei's photo reenacting in his own body the 
>>> death of the three-year old Syrian girl washed on the Anatolian shore?
>>>
>>> Ciao,
>>> Murat
>>>
 On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Ian Paul  wrote:

 --empyre- soft-skinned space--
 While it's perhaps not so productive for us to say that borders and 
 migrations are simply symptomatic of larger systems/histories, it's also 
 insufficient to treat borders and migrations as discrete or autonomous 
 objects of study. What is a border, after all, if not a particular way of 
 articulating a relationship between territories, between bodies, between 
 economies, etc.? This relationality, and all of the complexity it entails, 
 should be what we're after.

 Ricardo cited "Escape Routes" in an earlier thread, and I think that text 
 in particular could be useful for us in the sense that the authors 
 approach borders and migrations in this multitudinous fashion: as material 
 realities in the present that are also structured by epistemological, 
 geological, political, ethical, and economic bordering(s) that seamlessly 
 function alongside/within/through the border practices of nation states.

 I think the challenge in many ways for us is in understanding borders and 
 migrations (and their networks) in their historical specificity, while 
 also understanding how those specificities are (re)produced in much more 
 expansive processes that both exceed and precede them. And so, how can we 
 think of borders and migrations as being both cause and effect? Both agent 
 and object? Things that both separate and tie together? We should be able 
 to think of borders as being both productive and repressive, enabling 
 certain forms of life while seeking to eradicate others. We should be able 
 to think of migrations as being an expression of freedom and perhaps even 
 poetry, while also being able to think of them as also at times being 
 driven by necessity and survival. I want to be thinking on these 
 topologies: freedom *and* survival, repression *and* production.

 Cheers,
  ~i


> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 1:27 AM, Babak Fakhamzadeh 
>  wrote:
>
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hi Johannes,
>
> I like your musings, but you're putting up quite a list of potential
> discussion points. :)
>
> Should we discuss the wars? Perhaps. But, what, then is in need of
> discussion? That is, to what extent is the current Syrian/Iraqi
> conflict open to interpretation? I doubt few of us on this list are
> fooled by western/American propaganda in relation to the sources of
> the conflict and most of us probably have a decent understanding of
> the 

Re: [-empyre-] : Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum seekers, or refugee?

[Babak Fakhamzadeh]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
An excellent question! (Also, it was a boy, not a girl, but that's not
too important.)

Here's an article with the image:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-artist-ai-weiwei-syrian-boy-aylan-kurdi-drowned-turkish-beach/

To me, it seems Weiwei is looking for attention by trying to appear
relevant. And, because those who have a high profile are profiled
highly, because it was Weiwei who released this image, we know about
this.

As someone (on Facebook? Twitter?) asked (paraphrasing): "Am I
supposed to be offended by this, or is this supposed to be high art?"
--
Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com | http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com

Ask me for my PGP public key to send me encrypted email.


On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 7:23 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat  wrote:
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> What do you guys think of Ai Weiwei's photo reenacting in his own body the 
> death of the three-year old Syrian girl washed on the Anatolian shore?
>
> Ciao,
> Murat
>
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Ian Paul  wrote:
>>
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> While it's perhaps not so productive for us to say that borders and 
>> migrations are simply symptomatic of larger systems/histories, it's also 
>> insufficient to treat borders and migrations as discrete or autonomous 
>> objects of study. What is a border, after all, if not a particular way of 
>> articulating a relationship between territories, between bodies, between 
>> economies, etc.? This relationality, and all of the complexity it entails, 
>> should be what we're after.
>>
>> Ricardo cited "Escape Routes" in an earlier thread, and I think that text in 
>> particular could be useful for us in the sense that the authors approach 
>> borders and migrations in this multitudinous fashion: as material realities 
>> in the present that are also structured by epistemological, geological, 
>> political, ethical, and economic bordering(s) that seamlessly function 
>> alongside/within/through the border practices of nation states.
>>
>> I think the challenge in many ways for us is in understanding borders and 
>> migrations (and their networks) in their historical specificity, while also 
>> understanding how those specificities are (re)produced in much more 
>> expansive processes that both exceed and precede them. And so, how can we 
>> think of borders and migrations as being both cause and effect? Both agent 
>> and object? Things that both separate and tie together? We should be able to 
>> think of borders as being both productive and repressive, enabling certain 
>> forms of life while seeking to eradicate others. We should be able to think 
>> of migrations as being an expression of freedom and perhaps even poetry, 
>> while also being able to think of them as also at times being driven by 
>> necessity and survival. I want to be thinking on these topologies: freedom 
>> *and* survival, repression *and* production.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>   ~i
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 1:27 AM, Babak Fakhamzadeh 
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>>> Hi Johannes,
>>>
>>> I like your musings, but you're putting up quite a list of potential
>>> discussion points. :)
>>>
>>> Should we discuss the wars? Perhaps. But, what, then is in need of
>>> discussion? That is, to what extent is the current Syrian/Iraqi
>>> conflict open to interpretation? I doubt few of us on this list are
>>> fooled by western/American propaganda in relation to the sources of
>>> the conflict and most of us probably have a decent understanding of
>>> the actual players in the conflict. But, also, we're focussing on
>>> migration and refugees, not on the war, no?
>>> --
>>> Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com | 
>>> http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com
>>>
>>> Ask me for my PGP public key to send me encrypted email.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 2:41 AM, Ana Valdés  wrote:
>>> > --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>>> > Johannes I was deliberately in the use of the words callosity because my 
>>> > question is: do we really change a thing in the lives of the refugees or 
>>> > the migrants discussing the concept but not the roots? As Ian wrote we 
>>> > should maybe discuss the war itself or the inequalities. A discussion 
>>> > hands on is maybe the thing related in the first weeks travel to Calais 
>>> > and teach refugees English or computer skills or make theatre or dance 
>>> > with them write down their stories record their flight.
>>> > Ana
>>> >
>>> > Skickat från min iPhone
>>> >
>>> >> 15 feb 2016 kl. 20:56 skrev Johannes Birringer 
>>> >> :
>>> >>
>>> >> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>>> >> Dear all,
>>> >>
>>> >> Header:  it actually would make sense 

Re: [-empyre-] Alter-mapping, alter-passage, and altering-art

[Alva Mooses]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--In responding to the topic of networks and migration in the Mexico/U.S.
context, I think of Sarah Lynn Lopez’s research, The Remittance House:
Architecture of Migration in Rural Mexico. Lopez writes:

Remittance houses are emblematic of a profound shift in rural Mexican
society. Perhaps the single most striking quality of the remittance
construction is the social distance embedded in its form. Scholars of the
built environment can contribute to the study of how migration is
transforming rural Mexican society by analyzing changes in spatial format
both migrants’ places of origin and points of arrival. Social relations
stretched across geographies and exacerbated by distance increasingly
define places. Places in Mexico are marked by the absences and familial
fragmentation that constitute ‘migration as a way of life’. These absences
are a necessary precondition for migrants to realize their dream houses.

Over the past year I have been working with four NY-based artists that are
originally from Mexico, Cuba, Chile and Brazil to form the collective Grupo
< > . We have been meeting
a couple times a month and corresponding with one another via email to
create a collective text that connects personal narratives of origin to our
work. Throughout the text we are able to discuss our distinct experiences
as a refugee, immigrant, the experience of temporary work abroad and
diaspora. We repeatedly describe the architecture of the spaces that we
have lived in, the geography and language; at times multiple voices become
one.

This is a clip from one of our first shared readings of the text:
https://:.com/155157046 

We are currently discussing ways for our Grupo < > project to extend beyond
the five of us.

Kind regards,

Alva
___
empyre forum
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http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Re: [-empyre-] FW: Week 3: Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum seekers, or refugee?

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--"Second, it's undoubtedly necessary to also insist that these migrations
are also entangled with the longer histories of capitalism and the nation
state. The histories of colonialism in North Africa and the Middle East,
the West's military and financial support of authoritarian regimes in the
MENA region, the histories of resource extraction and dispossession, all
set the stage for and helped to precipitate these crises that, when looked
through these lenses, seem less like crises and more like predictable
consequences of these histories. In other words, we can also frame these
events as being intimately tied to more or less continuous historical
processes of exploitation that should push us to consider them as
expressions of much more spatially and temporally diffuse and heterogeneous
systems that manifest less as a surprise and more as the status quo."

Hi Ian, there is no doubt the artificial borders Western powers drew in the
Middle East after World War I, placing opposing religious or ethnic groups
within a border on the principle of "divide and conquer, have a lot to do
with the present chaos, as suppressive governments one way or another lost
their tyrannical controls. Western imperialism has a lot of responsibility
up to this point. But there is nothing that says that Shiites and Sunni
have to bomb each others' mosques, kill each others' civilians or
economically suppress each other or Christians or Copts, etc. There, the
responsibility is theirs. I think one should avoid merely applying all
arguments to the present situation. More detailed analyses are necessary.

Ciao,
Murat

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 5:58 PM, Ian Paul  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hello everyone (and thank you Ricardo for the invitation!),
>
> I'll begin by trying to introduce some focus for us specifically in
> relation to the migrant/refugee crises unfolding across the EU at the
> moment. Particularly, I was hoping to think through these "crises" as being
> in some way novel, while also being imbricated with much longer and more
> continuous historical processes.
>
> First, I would like to suggest that we must in some way contend with the
> fact that the current increases in the flow of bodies leaving the Middle
> East and North Africa are caused at least in part by the extinguishment of
> the Arab Spring uprisings by various authoritarian regimes. While the
> global left payed a great deal of attention to the revolutions/uprisings
> during their romantic and spontaneous genesis, this attention largely
> receded as repression intensified or as the uprisings became more plural
> and complex and as the various contradictions of the different contexts
> intensified. The migrations that have followed, many of which are
> unquestionably undertaken out of necessity, take place against a global
> context that is decidedly absent of any kind of leftist internationalism
> that could have acted in potential solidarity with these uprisings or with
> the repression that ensued. How does thinking of these migrations as the
> dispersed kinetic fallout of the rupture opened by failed revolutions
> change our thinking about the dynamics of these diverse situations, and
> what are the stakes of framing the crises in this way? And what does the
> specificity of this current conjuncture potentially offer our movements and
> our ways of thinking/doing?
>
> Second, it's undoubtedly necessary to also insist that these migrations
> are also entangled with the longer histories of capitalism and the nation
> state. The histories of colonialism in North Africa and the Middle East,
> the West's military and financial support of authoritarian regimes in the
> MENA region, the histories of resource extraction and dispossession, all
> set the stage for and helped to precipitate these crises that, when looked
> through these lenses, seem less like crises and more like predictable
> consequences of these histories. In other words, we can also frame these
> events as being intimately tied to more or less continuous historical
> processes of exploitation that should push us to consider them as
> expressions of much more spatially and temporally diffuse and heterogeneous
> systems that manifest less as a surprise and more as the status quo.
>
> And so this is where in some way I would like to bring us ~ inhabiting at
> once the ruptures and breakages fissured open by the uprisings as well as
> the continuity of global capital and colonialism.
>
> Cheers,
> ~i
>
> __
>
> *Ian Alan Paul // Artist, Curator, Theorist*
> *PhD Candidate, UCSC Film and Digital Media Studies*
> *www.ianalanpaul.com  ~
> www.twitter.com/ianalanpaul *
>
> *"**Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.*
> *In one of them I am your enemy.**" (Borges)*
>
>

Re: [-empyre-] : Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum seekers, or refugee?

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--What do you guys think of Ai Weiwei's photo reenacting in his own body the
death of the three-year old Syrian girl washed on the Anatolian shore?

Ciao,
Murat

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Ian Paul  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> While it's perhaps not so productive for us to say that borders and
> migrations are simply symptomatic of larger systems/histories, it's also
> insufficient to treat borders and migrations as discrete or autonomous
> objects of study. What is a border, after all, if not a particular way of
> articulating a relationship between territories, between bodies, between
> economies, etc.? This relationality, and all of the complexity it entails,
> should be what we're after.
>
> Ricardo cited "Escape Routes" in an earlier thread, and I think that text
> in particular could be useful for us in the sense that the authors approach
> borders and migrations in this multitudinous fashion: as material realities
> in the present that are also structured by epistemological, geological,
> political, ethical, and economic bordering(s) that seamlessly function
> alongside/within/through the border practices of nation states.
>
> I think the challenge in many ways for us is in understanding borders and
> migrations (and their networks) in their historical specificity, while also
> understanding how those specificities are (re)produced in much more
> expansive processes that both exceed and precede them. And so, how can we
> think of borders and migrations as being both cause and effect? Both agent
> and object? Things that both separate and tie together? We should be able
> to think of borders as being both productive and repressive, enabling
> certain forms of life while seeking to eradicate others. We should be able
> to think of migrations as being an expression of freedom and perhaps even
> poetry, while also being able to think of them as also at times being
> driven by necessity and survival. I want to be thinking on these
> topologies: freedom *and* survival, repression *and* production.
>
> Cheers,
>   ~i
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 1:27 AM, Babak Fakhamzadeh <
> babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Hi Johannes,
>>
>> I like your musings, but you're putting up quite a list of potential
>> discussion points. :)
>>
>> Should we discuss the wars? Perhaps. But, what, then is in need of
>> discussion? That is, to what extent is the current Syrian/Iraqi
>> conflict open to interpretation? I doubt few of us on this list are
>> fooled by western/American propaganda in relation to the sources of
>> the conflict and most of us probably have a decent understanding of
>> the actual players in the conflict. But, also, we're focussing on
>> migration and refugees, not on the war, no?
>> --
>> Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com |
>> http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com
>>
>> Ask me for my PGP public key to send me encrypted email.
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 2:41 AM, Ana Valdés  wrote:
>> > --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> > Johannes I was deliberately in the use of the words callosity because
>> my question is: do we really change a thing in the lives of the refugees or
>> the migrants discussing the concept but not the roots? As Ian wrote we
>> should maybe discuss the war itself or the inequalities. A discussion hands
>> on is maybe the thing related in the first weeks travel to Calais and teach
>> refugees English or computer skills or make theatre or dance with them
>> write down their stories record their flight.
>> > Ana
>> >
>> > Skickat från min iPhone
>> >
>> >> 15 feb 2016 kl. 20:56 skrev Johannes Birringer <
>> johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk>:
>> >>
>> >> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> >> Dear all,
>> >>
>> >> Header:  it actually would make sense to track back to opening
>> statement for this month. For me, it raised many questions, for example
>> what the 'networked existence' of a refugee or migrant or asylum seeker is
>> meant to denote, in the question/ proposition? And Babak, Huub, Ricardo -
>> do you not eloquently evoke a crisis of the from, not the to, the issue of
>> why people are fleeing?   Have we discussed the wars?
>> >>
>> >> Well, Ana, what would hands on discussion be for you?
>> >>
>> >> I really appreciated all posts, and I found Christina's painting very
>> powerful, maybe because I saw it on the  same day that someone,
>> accidentally (and yes I despise superbowls and police Kettling/enclosures,
>> and huge movies that strive  to awe us, like The Revenant), sent me a
>> mapping of the US in the 18th and 19th centuries of annexation and theft of
>> millions of acres of native American lands, the map was created by Claudio
>> Saunt, more about that mapping tomorrow. (and i hate the mumbling 

Re: [-empyre-] Alter-mapping, alter-passage, and altering-art

[simon]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear <>,

Pau Delgado's "What are the actual reasons to decide to be an immigrant? 
If a relatively peaceful and 'welcoming' country like Uruguay is not 
enough for a refugee to stay, then, how should we read this? How should 
the economic aspects be considered in this case?" prompts me to put the 
question of the face-value of crisis, to ask about the crisis of 
face-value, that is of the "refugee crisis" in the era of a global 
labour marketplace, which, taken at face-value, engages those "economic 
aspects" of immigration Pau raises his question regarding. There is an 
irritant in the sense of urgency around the 'space' of immigration; it 
irritates perhaps by the notion of performativity in the expanded 
meaning Judith Butler brings to it to address all kinds of pressing 
contemporaneities. These seem to be constantly at crisis point. But 
maybe it is in the nature of a critical engagement to exacerbate, 
performatively, to dramatise, to push things to a point where they can 
appear to demand general attention and public and expert opprobrium or 
approbation and assure an issue market penetration, a sharp point. The 
question here would be, what is being performed or enacted before the 
immigrations are called a refugee crisis? because the crisis is 
statistical, has the logic of large numbers, which impress generals and 
publics.


Analysis would then operate in an opposite direction. Because it is 
irritating that cases, in their economic, humanitarian, political, or 
publicity, aspects are irreducible. How account for qualitative 
differences? Between colonisation in the age of empire pre-WWI, 
neocolonisation under the liberalisation of marketplaces, and now 
something else, a kind of political movement of bodies in their 
self-awareness of being data, of operating at the level of the 
statistic-ecstatic Big, and at the level of the Little, where we all are 
both flesh and... the "and" of a mathematisable virtuality, taken up in 
the mathesis of multiplicities as numerical and non-qualitative.


Still there is I think a shape to what is happening at present. I am 
waiting to understand it.


Best,
Simon Taylor
___
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empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Re: [-empyre-] : Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum seekers, or refugee?

[Ian Paul]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--While it's perhaps not so productive for us to say that borders and
migrations are simply symptomatic of larger systems/histories, it's also
insufficient to treat borders and migrations as discrete or autonomous
objects of study. What is a border, after all, if not a particular way of
articulating a relationship between territories, between bodies, between
economies, etc.? This relationality, and all of the complexity it entails,
should be what we're after.

Ricardo cited "Escape Routes" in an earlier thread, and I think that text
in particular could be useful for us in the sense that the authors approach
borders and migrations in this multitudinous fashion: as material realities
in the present that are also structured by epistemological, geological,
political, ethical, and economic bordering(s) that seamlessly function
alongside/within/through the border practices of nation states.

I think the challenge in many ways for us is in understanding borders and
migrations (and their networks) in their historical specificity, while also
understanding how those specificities are (re)produced in much more
expansive processes that both exceed and precede them. And so, how can we
think of borders and migrations as being both cause and effect? Both agent
and object? Things that both separate and tie together? We should be able
to think of borders as being both productive and repressive, enabling
certain forms of life while seeking to eradicate others. We should be able
to think of migrations as being an expression of freedom and perhaps even
poetry, while also being able to think of them as also at times being
driven by necessity and survival. I want to be thinking on these
topologies: freedom *and* survival, repression *and* production.

Cheers,
  ~i


On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 1:27 AM, Babak Fakhamzadeh <
babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com> wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hi Johannes,
>
> I like your musings, but you're putting up quite a list of potential
> discussion points. :)
>
> Should we discuss the wars? Perhaps. But, what, then is in need of
> discussion? That is, to what extent is the current Syrian/Iraqi
> conflict open to interpretation? I doubt few of us on this list are
> fooled by western/American propaganda in relation to the sources of
> the conflict and most of us probably have a decent understanding of
> the actual players in the conflict. But, also, we're focussing on
> migration and refugees, not on the war, no?
> --
> Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com |
> http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com
>
> Ask me for my PGP public key to send me encrypted email.
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 2:41 AM, Ana Valdés  wrote:
> > --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> > Johannes I was deliberately in the use of the words callosity because my
> question is: do we really change a thing in the lives of the refugees or
> the migrants discussing the concept but not the roots? As Ian wrote we
> should maybe discuss the war itself or the inequalities. A discussion hands
> on is maybe the thing related in the first weeks travel to Calais and teach
> refugees English or computer skills or make theatre or dance with them
> write down their stories record their flight.
> > Ana
> >
> > Skickat från min iPhone
> >
> >> 15 feb 2016 kl. 20:56 skrev Johannes Birringer <
> johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk>:
> >>
> >> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> >> Dear all,
> >>
> >> Header:  it actually would make sense to track back to opening
> statement for this month. For me, it raised many questions, for example
> what the 'networked existence' of a refugee or migrant or asylum seeker is
> meant to denote, in the question/ proposition? And Babak, Huub, Ricardo -
> do you not eloquently evoke a crisis of the from, not the to, the issue of
> why people are fleeing?   Have we discussed the wars?
> >>
> >> Well, Ana, what would hands on discussion be for you?
> >>
> >> I really appreciated all posts, and I found Christina's painting very
> powerful, maybe because I saw it on the  same day that someone,
> accidentally (and yes I despise superbowls and police Kettling/enclosures,
> and huge movies that strive  to awe us, like The Revenant), sent me a
> mapping of the US in the 18th and 19th centuries of annexation and theft of
> millions of acres of native American lands, the map was created by Claudio
> Saunt, more about that mapping tomorrow. (and i hate the mumbling of native
> american languages in The Revenant).
> >> Today, I marvel at what Ana means by the callosity of poetry, is it
> callous or cynical to draw, to make dance, to write, to sing? and what
> exactly is political activism in the era of post democracy? What are border
> tools and apps that won't be available to the  migrant from Bolivia or
> Honduras making her way up to Mexico and then Texas? How long do 

Re: [-empyre-] : Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum seekers, or refugee?

[Babak Fakhamzadeh]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi Johannes,

I like your musings, but you're putting up quite a list of potential
discussion points. :)

Should we discuss the wars? Perhaps. But, what, then is in need of
discussion? That is, to what extent is the current Syrian/Iraqi
conflict open to interpretation? I doubt few of us on this list are
fooled by western/American propaganda in relation to the sources of
the conflict and most of us probably have a decent understanding of
the actual players in the conflict. But, also, we're focussing on
migration and refugees, not on the war, no?
--
Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com | http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com

Ask me for my PGP public key to send me encrypted email.


On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 2:41 AM, Ana Valdés  wrote:
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Johannes I was deliberately in the use of the words callosity because my 
> question is: do we really change a thing in the lives of the refugees or the 
> migrants discussing the concept but not the roots? As Ian wrote we should 
> maybe discuss the war itself or the inequalities. A discussion hands on is 
> maybe the thing related in the first weeks travel to Calais and teach 
> refugees English or computer skills or make theatre or dance with them write 
> down their stories record their flight.
> Ana
>
> Skickat från min iPhone
>
>> 15 feb 2016 kl. 20:56 skrev Johannes Birringer 
>> :
>>
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Dear all,
>>
>> Header:  it actually would make sense to track back to opening statement for 
>> this month. For me, it raised many questions, for example what the 
>> 'networked existence' of a refugee or migrant or asylum seeker is meant to 
>> denote, in the question/ proposition? And Babak, Huub, Ricardo - do you not 
>> eloquently evoke a crisis of the from, not the to, the issue of why people 
>> are fleeing?   Have we discussed the wars?
>>
>> Well, Ana, what would hands on discussion be for you?
>>
>> I really appreciated all posts, and I found Christina's painting very 
>> powerful, maybe because I saw it on the  same day that someone, accidentally 
>> (and yes I despise superbowls and police Kettling/enclosures,  and huge 
>> movies that strive  to awe us, like The Revenant), sent me a mapping of the 
>> US in the 18th and 19th centuries of annexation and theft of millions of 
>> acres of native American lands, the map was created by Claudio Saunt, more 
>> about that mapping tomorrow. (and i hate the mumbling of native american 
>> languages in The Revenant).
>> Today, I marvel at what Ana means by the callosity of poetry, is it callous 
>> or cynical to draw, to make dance, to write, to sing? and what exactly is 
>> political activism in the era of post democracy? What are border tools and 
>> apps that won't be available to the  migrant from Bolivia or Honduras making 
>> her way up to Mexico and then Texas? How long do your phones and laptop 
>> batteries last for the poetry to kick in? Would she are what you call her 
>> and definebher as, would we a voice here from the ones talked about?  And 
>> then, writers and researchers, at the limits of language (as Christina and 
>> Irina pointed out), artists, scholars and activists - what do we chat about 
>> here, then?
>>
>> Regards
>> Johannes Birringer
>>
>> ___
>> empyre forum
>> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
___
empyre forum
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