The Mediterranean Sea plays an important role today as a transit area between Europe, Africa and Asia, facilitating the efficient shipment of goods, raw materials and people. However, the seabed beneath the surface is home to a number of hazardous substances, wrecked sea vessels --- and countless people who have lost their lives at sea. It appears that the European states and authorities are primarily managing the Mediterranean as a surveillance area for extensive databases transmitted in real time, and as an operational area in which border protection is implementing a policy of European isolation and illegal pushbacks.

Nevertheless, some sea rescue activists and artists adopt a counter-surveillance approach to the Mediterranean, viewing it as an opportunity and obligation to investigate the unofficial, dark and repressed side of transit, with the aim of securing and documenting traces in this area. The workshop brings together four experts who examine the Mediterranean, its acoustic and visual dimensions, in an artistic and forensic approach, with a view to understanding it as a crime scene and archive. How might the vast and varied data surrounding current maritime disasters be transformed into texts, images and films? And how might what happens at sea on a daily basis become aesthetically, politically and ethically tangible?

Workshop

7. December 2024, 10-20 Uhr
ifk Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften
Reichsratstr. 17, 1010 Wien

Program
10:00-10:30    Welcome and Introduction (Burkhardt Wolf)
10:30-12:00    Marina Gioti: Shipwreck(ed) Ecologies: Mapping Failure and Catharsis in the Subaqueous Realm (Moderation: Charlotte Reihs)
12:00-12:15    Coffee break
12:15-13:45    Stefanos Levidis: Dark Waves, Sharp Rocks: Sensing state violence at the Mediterranean frontier (Moderation: Sophie Liepold)
13:45-15:30    Lunch break
15:30-17:00    Christian von Borries: The task of the image. Photos and videos of migration and how AI might dissolve human biases (Moderation: Simon Angerer)
17:00-17:30    Coffee break
17:30-18.45    Screening of the movie Purple Sea (2020) in the presence of its director Amel Alzakout
18:45-20:00    Roundtable Discussion (Moderation: Jonathan Stafford)

Marina Gioti is a trained Chemical Engineer, visual artist and filmmaker based in Αthen.

Stefanos Levidis is an architect and spatial researcher, an associate of ‘Forensic Architecture’ and an adjunct professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts.

Christian von Borries is a Berlin-based musician, filmmaker and Senior Academic Advisor of the China Academy of Art, Shanghai.

Amel Alzakout is a Syrian filmmaker, currently based in Leipzig, who documented her own near-fatal escape to Europe in Purple Sea.

Charlotte Reihs, Sophie Liepold, Simon Angerer and Carina Hinterdorfer are Ph.D. students at the Doctoral School of Philological and Cultural Studies - PhilKult, Section: »Knowledge, Literature and Media«.

Jonathan Stafford is an art historian with a research focus on maritime history, currently at the Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin.

Burkhardt Wolf is Professor of German Studies at the University of Vienna with a research focus on the cultural history of seafaring and currently head of the section »Knowledge, Literature and Media« at the Vienna DocSchool.

Funded by the Doctoral School of Philological and Cultural Studies – PhilKult of the university; with thanks to the ifk for its support.

The copyright for the image lies with Marina Gioti.