Bringing together the work of international artists from different generations and origins, 2move explores the connections between video, mobility, migratory culture and our contemporary world. Today, the encounter with the traces of migration gives way to a plurality of sensory experiences which both transform and modify our everyday life, experiences that are themeselves ‘aesthetic’. The medium of video not only records these experiences, but also contribute to both imagine and construct them.
Migration is a timely and urgent subject for reflection. It is widely being studied as one of the main concerns of our contemporary society and of socio-cultural and artistic thought, although usually holding a pessimistic point of view. People movements and displacement, either voluntary or not, are drawing complex social realities and relationships. These are frequently controversial, and always challenging to received ideas and notions on which the effective basis for coexistence in our new mixed societies rests. Composing new cognitive maps that enable ways to an understanding of this multifaceted phenomenon can help us to approach and look into it far from prejudice. Thus, we think it is time to acknowledge, even celebrate, the benefits of migration for the so-called host societies. The mixed societies that have emerged as the result of migration have benefited enormously from the arrival of people from many different cultures. This project is committed with the need to perform a positive turn, so as to strike an attention in which the absorption of the memories of the countries and communities of departure is fully integrated. This is what the qualifier ‘migratory’ denotes in this project.
The aesthetic dimension of 2move develops in two different directions: the influence of immigrants in the culture of host countries, especially in the public space; and the influence of these countries on the subjective relationships of immigrants with their homelands, whether they have personal memories of that homeland or not; whether this homeland is imaginary or the product of “post-memory.” These relationships, in turn, also impact on the countries of residence, where they circulate among migrants and their interlocutors, like ghosts.
We approach video as a privileged medium to think and put the two parts of the sentence together - the aesthetic and the migratory. However, we do not consider video as a one-to-one medium, but as a plurality: from intimate video to performative documentary, also including "docufiction", the tradition of aesthetic video art, animation, installation or video-essay.
Thus, the works in the exhibition are taken as material carriers, reflections and re-elaborations of the experiences of what we can call our contemporary ‘migratory culture’. Together, they display different ways to visually articulate some themes that go through it, like the ordinary, banal, and sometimes abject ‘look’ and monotonous normality of the urban everyday; the hetero-temporality of a world that likes to think in progression, thus considering cultures which are less obsessed with this narrowly linear temporality as well as the 'asynchronicity' and clash of timings and technologies belonging to different worlds and socio-cultural structures; the surface or “skin” that prevents us from seeing, as both racism and the opaqueness of the seemingly transparent medium of video elaborate together; distance and proximity, what could be called ‘the facing’: the bond between speech - not just as 'giving voice' but also as listening, and answering - and the face, thus turning the classical 'window of the soul' into an 'inter-face'; the cut, or severance, between mobility and sedentariness, as embodied in the disagreement between the dubious visibility of immigrants in the West and the absence of those they have left behind; the transformation of both intimacy and the way of inhabiting your home and your community; the contemporary social construction of stereotypes and narrations, in the border between reality and fiction, or even the nostalgia of lost modes of production; and the presence, finally, of the metaphor of water as a place of 'double movement' and of a place of transit, halfway between things, between past and future.
The website www.doublemovement.org sets up an extension of the project through which providing access to interested users and wider audiences, documenting its development, gathering parallel activities and encouraging an ongoing debate.
- Mieke Bal & Miguel A. Hernández-Navarro
The aesthetic dimension of 2move develops in two different directions: the influence of immigrants in the culture of host countries, especially in the public space; and the influence of these countries on the subjective relationships of immigrants with their homelands, whether they have personal memories of that homeland or not; whether this homeland is imaginary or the product of “post-memory.” These relationships, in turn, also impact on the countries of residence, where they circulate among migrants and their interlocutors, like ghosts.
We approach video as a privileged medium to think and put the two parts of the sentence together - the aesthetic and the migratory. However, we do not consider video as a one-to-one medium, but as a plurality: from intimate video to performative documentary, also including "docufiction", the tradition of aesthetic video art, animation, installation or video-essay.
Thus, the works in the exhibition are taken as material carriers, reflections and re-elaborations of the experiences of what we can call our contemporary ‘migratory culture’. Together, they display different ways to visually articulate some themes that go through it, like the ordinary, banal, and sometimes abject ‘look’ and monotonous normality of the urban everyday; the hetero-temporality of a world that likes to think in progression, thus considering cultures which are less obsessed with this narrowly linear temporality as well as the 'asynchronicity' and clash of timings and technologies belonging to different worlds and socio-cultural structures; the surface or “skin” that prevents us from seeing, as both racism and the opaqueness of the seemingly transparent medium of video elaborate together; distance and proximity, what could be called ‘the facing’: the bond between speech - not just as 'giving voice' but also as listening, and answering - and the face, thus turning the classical 'window of the soul' into an 'inter-face'; the cut, or severance, between mobility and sedentariness, as embodied in the disagreement between the dubious visibility of immigrants in the West and the absence of those they have left behind; the transformation of both intimacy and the way of inhabiting your home and your community; the contemporary social construction of stereotypes and narrations, in the border between reality and fiction, or even the nostalgia of lost modes of production; and the presence, finally, of the metaphor of water as a place of 'double movement' and of a place of transit, halfway between things, between past and future.
The website www.doublemovement.org sets up an extension of the project through which providing access to interested users and wider audiences, documenting its development, gathering parallel activities and encouraging an ongoing debate.
- Mieke Bal & Miguel A. Hernández-Navarro
