CONTAINED MOBILITY

Ursula Biamann | CH 2004 | 21 min.

Format: DVD
Material: MiniDV
Original language : English

Script: Ursula Biemann
Camera: Ursula Biemann
Editing: Ursula Biemann
Sound: Ursula Biemann

Production: Ursula Biemann

25th VIPER Swiss Award

www.geobodies.org

Upon entering the harbour, the voyager leaves the exceptional condition of the boundless sea – this traversable space of maritime immensity – to come ashore in an offshore place, in a container world that only tolerates the trans-local state of not being of this place – nor of any other really – but of existing in a condition of permanent not-belonging, of juridical non-existence. He comes to signify the itinerant body, bound to string along a chain of territories, never reaching a final destination. Probing the protocols of access time and again, he moves through non-civil places, waits for status in off-social spaces, only to remain suspended in the post-humanist lapse. What used to be a state of temporary exemption – survival in the fluid time-space of legal deferral – has slowly consolidated into the prime mode of migratory subsistence. The site of this existence is connected but segregated, it is the world system of contained mobility. - Ursula Biemann

Ursula Biemann is an artist, theorist and curator who has in recent years produced a considerable body of work on migration, mobility, technology and gender. In a series of internationally exhibited video projects, as well as in several books she has focused on the gendered dimension of migrant labour from smuggling on the Spanish-Moroccan border to migrant sex workers moving from the East to the West. Biemann's practice has long included discussions with academics and other practitioners, she has worked with anthropologists, cultural theorists, NGO members, architects, as well as scholars of aural and sonic culture. She researches at the Institute for Theory of Art and Design at HGK Zurich lectures at the CCC program of esba Geneva, and teaches seminars and workshops internationally.

Films: Performing the Border 1999 | Writing Desire 2000 | Remote Sensing 2001 | Europlex 2003 | Contained Mobility 2004 | Black Sea Files 2005

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