CONF 29.09.2017

Encounters (Florence, 12-13 Oct 17)

Florence, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, Photothek in Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai / Villa Romana, 12.–13.10.2017

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut

Encounters: Handling, Placing and Looking at Photographs in Relation to Migration
International Conference

organized by Costanza Caraffa, Eva-Maria Troelenberg and Anna Sophia Messner


In the last decades, photography studies have provided fertile grounds for debates about our understanding – and critical deconstruction – of notions such as indexicality, iconicity, objectivity or evidentiality. Moreover, both the material turn as well as the affective turn have contributed significantly to larger debates about the understanding of photographs as three-dimensional tactile and visual objects in their own right, as bearers of experience, knowledge and affect (Geismar/Morton 2015), able to activate and perform relations between human beings (Olin 2012).

Elizabeth Edwards' definition of photographs as "raw histories", both "painful" and "unprocessed" (2001), can also be applied to migration experiences. Migration has been debated both as a historical-empirical reality and as a discursive concept in the wake of post-colonial scholarship. It involves ideas such as displacement and dislocation, exile and diaspora, trauma and memory, interruption and alienation, diversity and alterity as well as nationalism and transnationalism. Handling photographs in relation to migration emphasizes the multilayered encounters across time and space that are embodied in the photographs themselves.

This conference will analyze the entanglement between photography and migration by means of case studies as well as methodological, theoretical and artistic contributions. It seeks to investigate the "migration and photography complex" (paraphrasing Hevia 2009) in its aesthetic, material, affective, ethical, legal and archival dimensions by approaching important questions such as:

How have experiences of migration shaped and reshaped the production and uses of photographic images, their subjects and motifs, their iconographies, their aesthetics, their object character and materiality? How do photographs circulate (in)between private and institutional networks with regards to their collection and exhibition as well as popular and artistic practices? Who are the actors and agents in these socio-political and aesthetic migration processes concerning image production, reception, transmission, translation and distribution? How do migration trajectories of people and photographs intersect and thereby shape vernacular, artistic and academic photographic practices?

Due to the present state of emergency in its global dimension, recent and current migration processes, and the related production and circulation of images (e.g. digital pictures taken on smartphones circulating on social networks), we are constantly confronted with the "excess" (Pinney 2003) and the "noise" (Poole 2005) of photography. It is exactly these disturbing moments, however, that can constitute a point of departure for an interdisciplinary debate that we expect to be lively and dynamic.


PROGRAM

THURSDAY 12 OCTOBER
Venue: Photothek in Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai

10.00
Introduction
Costanza Caraffa, Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Anna Sophia Messner

10.20
Keynote Lecture
Attending to Migration
Margaret Olin / Yale University, New Haven, CT

Chair: Costanza Caraffa

11.20 Coffee Break


PANEL I ARRIVALS ?
Chair: Eva-Maria Troelenberg

11.50
Portraying Race beyond Ellis Island
Leslie Ureña / photography historian and curator, Washington, DC

12.25
Migrating Objects – A Suitcase as Photo Archive
Anna Sophia Messner / Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut

13.00 Lunch Break


PANEL II PARTICIPATORY PRACTICES
Chair: Jeanette Kohl / University of California, Riverside, CA

14.30
How To Self-Translate the Experience of Migration–Participatory Practices in Social Documentary Photography
Birgit Mersmann / Universität Basel

15.05
Born Immigrant
Morteza Khaleghi / artist, Rome

15.40
Photo-Monologues and Photo-Dialogues from the Family-Album: Belonging, Uprooting, Migration
Ya'ara Gil-Glazer / Tel-Hai Academic College

16.15 Coffee Break


Venue: Villa Romana

18.00
Roundtable
Whose Images / Whose Imaginations?
Moderators: Estelle Blaschke / Université de Lausanne

Angelika Stepken / Villa Romana, Florence
Participants: Fide Dayo / artist, Rome
Armin Linke / artist, Milan/Berlin
Rob Pinney / photographer, London


FRIDAY 13 OCTOBER
Venue: Photothek in Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai

PANEL III DIASPORAS, COMMUNITIES, IDENTITIES
Chair: Alison Boyd

9.30
Things We Lost in the Fire: Images from the Bamboo Club 1966 - 1977
Gavin Maitland / freelance writer, researcher and lecturer, UK

10.05
Photographer as Ethnographer: Visual Studies of Urban Migration in Germany
Elâ Kaçel / Bahçesehir University, Istanbul and Humboldt-Fellow at RWTH Aachen

10.40 Coffee Break

11.10
Entangled: Contemporary Iranian Photography in Migration Context
Cathrine Bublatzky / Universität Heidelberg

11.45
Objects of Escape - Inventories of Migration
A joint art project by Massimo Ricciardo and Thomas Kilpper
presentation and tour of the installation in the Photothek with Massimo Ricciardo / artist, Turin

12.45 Lunch Break


PANEL IV ENCOUNTERS AND NARRATIVES
Chair: Shamoon Zamir / New York University Abu Dhabi

14.30
Pictures of Longing: Migration Photographs as Grass-Root Stories
Sigrid Lien / University of Bergen

15.05
Moving Pictures: Slavery, Anthropology and Cultural Resilience in Sudan
Katie J. Hickerson / University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

15.40 Coffee Break

16.10
Photographing Palestinian Refugees
Issam Nassar / Illinois State University, Normal, IL

16.45
Portraits of Unbelonging: Photographs as Sites of Encounters with the Ottoman State and Armenian Emigrants to the United States
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel / Macalester College, St. Paul, MN

17.20 Final Discussion


VENUES
Photothek in Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
Via dei Servi 51
50122 Florence / Italy

Villa Romana
Via Senese 68
50124 Florence / Italy


ORGANIZATION
Costanza Caraffa / head of the Photothek, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
Eva-Maria Troelenberg / head of the Max-Planck Research Group "Objects in the Contact Zone – The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things", Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
Anna Sophia Messner / doctoral fellow, Max-Planck Research Group "Objects in the Contact Zone – The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things" Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut


FURTHER INFORMATION
Internet: http://www.khi.fi.it
Newsletter: http://www.khi.fi.it/newsletter
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/khi.fi.it/
Video: https://vimeo.com/khiflorenz

Quellennachweis:
CONF: Encounters (Florence, 12-13 Oct 17). In: ArtHist.net, 29.09.2017. Letzter Zugriff 28.03.2024. <https://arthist.net/archive/16345>.

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