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Visual Presentation | Undoing Fascism(s) Database
Presentation & Discussion
10/12/20 7pm
Free
In this presentation-led workshop, Heba Y. Amin, Emilio Distretti and Ian Alan Paul will introduce a new participatory database that documents the diverse afterlives of Mediterranean fascism(s). In the 1930s, European fascism(s) used the Mediterranean Sea as a laboratory for state and ideological formation, imperial ambitions, and the creation of a strategic military asset. The speakers will present investigations and entries to the Undoing Fascism(s) database that propose new analytical tools to reconfigure and resignify the legacies of fascisms that continue to affect our collective future.
In conversation with DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research), the event will engage modes of thinking to respond to a global present suffused with resurgent ethno-nationalisms, authoritarianisms, and dispossession. The Undoing Fascism(s) database is organised as a lexicon that aims to cultivate new political communities in an antifascist and de-colonial spirit.
Outside respondents:
iLiana Fokianaki, Angela Dimitrakaki, Mohamed Elshahed
Participants of the first Mediterranean Facism(s) conference at the University of Basel 2019: Heba Y. Amin, Ida Danewid, Emilio Distretti, Beth Hughes, Platon Issaias, Emily Jacir, Léopold Lambert, Ian Alan Paul & Alessandro Petti.
Participants and respondents are invited to contribute ideas and objects towards the curation of the database content. The discussion will be moderated by Anthony Downey.
Heba Y. Amin is a multi-media artist from Egypt. She works with political themes and archival history, using mediums including film, photography, archival material, lecture performance and installation. Amin teaches at Bard College Berlin, is a doctorate fellow in art history at Freie Universität, and a current Field of Vision fellow in New York. She is the co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, curator of visual art for the MIZNA journal, and co-curator for the biennial residency program DEFAULT with Ramdom Association.
Emilio Distretti is a researcher and an educator based in London. Emilio is Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Basel. His research takes on interrelated avenues on the politics of space, architectural heritage and postcolonial and decolonial politics in the Mediterranean.
Ian Alan Paul is an artist and theorist whose work examines enactments of power and practices of resistance in global contexts. Their practice straddles experimental documentary, critical fiction, media art and code. Paul is presently based and pursuing projects in Barcelona.
DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) is an architectural collective that combines conceptual speculations and pragmatic spatial interventions, discourse and collective learning. The artistic research of Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti is situated between politics, architecture, art and pedagogy. In their practice art exhibitions are both sites of display and sites of action that spill over into other contexts: built architectural structures, the shaping of critical learning environments, interventions that challenge dominant collective narratives, the production of new political imaginations, the formation of civic spaces and the re-definition of concepts.
Image 1: Ángel de la Victoria (The Angel of Victory), Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain. Courtesy of Ian Alan Paul.
Image 2: Hollerith Preparatory Worksheet Card, Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Germany. Courtesy of Arolsen Archives.
Image (square): Borgo Bassi, Abandoned Fascist Built Rural Settlement, Sicily. Courtesy of Emilio Distretti.