The phenomenon of migration is one of the most dramatic socio-cultural, economic and political experiences of movements in the world. Caused by very diverse reasons such as war, political repression, work and educational aspirations, natural disasters or famine, migration is a heterogeneous phenomenon. It shapes not only the mobility of humans but also of concepts such as ‘self’ and ‘other’ across socio-political, geographical and temporal borders.
This seminar focused on the theme of migration from the perspective of artistic and media practitioners who conceptualize the experience of migration along different groups, localities, events or borders in contemporary art and film. Here, the notion of transculturality and critical transregionality allowed us to focus on video art, photography, painting, multi-media as well as on cinematic commercial and alternative video production. Themes ranged from mobile videos taken by cheap labour migrants from Asia in the Middle East to questions of artistic space-making of illegal and informal migration to high-end professional ‘flexible’ and transnational art markets and events.
This class was conceptualized as part of a project financed by Welcome to Science and the Department for Key Competences and University Didactics at Heidelberg University.
Students learnt to engage with databases and to create visual essays with reference to ethnographic methods. For their research, students were provided with various visual tools and platforms (e.g. the digital image annotation tool, HyperImage (HRA). Supervised by tutors, students got introduced to the technical elements in HyperImage (image annotation) to conceptualize and work on their projects and to combine writing and visual data in their argument.
Cathrine Bublatzky 