Immigrant Movement International

Lectures by Brian Holmes and Eric Kluitenberg

Launch and presentation ‘Open’ 21 on (Im)Mobility

Sunday, October 9, 2011 2-4 PM

Programme:

2 PM – Introduction – Jorinde Seijdel: “Open #21 (Im)mobility. Exploring the Limits of Hypermobility”

2.30 PM – Lecture – Brian Holmes: “What Sustains a Public Sphere? Solidarity in the Post-Liberal Societies”

3.15 PM – Lecture – Eric Kluitenberg: “The Global Im/Mobility Privilege”

4 PM – End

Brian Holmes is a cultural critic living at present in Chicago. He is working on crisis theory and technopolitics. All of his texts are obtainable free of charge here. For decades, the critique of neoliberalism has been a paying proposition for left-leaning artists and intellectuals. Amidst the Internet and real-estate booms, a fragile mix of enlightenment and entrepreneurial values preserved some space for theories of radical democracy. Today, financial turmoil and its hard-right political consequences have laid that ambiguity to rest. In this lecture, Brian Holmes reopens the debate about the practical basis for an aesthetics of equality. The first step toward new institutions of solidarity, he argues, is to understand one’s own position on the margins.

Eric Kluitenberg is a writer and curator who focuses on culture, media and technology, living in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Recent publications include Book of Imaginary Media (2006) and Delusive Spaces (essays, 2008). The right to freedom of movement is enshrined in international systems of law and power that offer little space for individual influence or control. Our examination of the global regimes of im/mobility revealed how deeply the transnational is rooted in specific local constellations, which offer the optimal point of intervention.

Jorinde Seijdel is editor in chief of Open. Cahier on Art and the Public Domain.

open #21 (im)mobility. Exploring the limits of hypermobility

Contributions by Brian Holmes, Florian Schneider, Marc Schuilenberg, and John Thackara. Interview with David Harvey.

Advanced communications technologies seem to be paving the way for an increase in physical and motorized mobility. At the same time, these accelerating flows of data and commodities stand in sharp contrast to the elbow room afforded to the biological body, which in fact is forced to a standstill. And while data, goods and capital have been freed of their territorial restrictions, the opposite is true for a growing proportion of the world’s population: border regimes, surveillance and identity control are being intensified at a rapid pace. In short, we are seeing both an uncurbed and uncontrolled increase of mobility and segregating filtrations. This issue of Open explores the internal contradictions of prevailing mobility regimes and their effects on social and physical space.

Open investigates the contemporary conditions of public space and changing notions of publicness in a structural manner in relation to cultural production. This implies an experimental and interdisciplinary exposition of the reality, possibilities and limitations of the current public domain, in particular from sociological, philosophical, political and artistic perspectives. Within the framework of this ‘project in progress,’ themes such as safety, memory, visibility, cultural freedom, tolerance, hybrid space, the rise of informal media, art as a public affair, manipulative, precarity and privacy have been examined.

Open is edited by Jorinde Seijdel (editor in chief) and Liesbeth Melis (final editing) and appears twice a year in a Dutch-language and an English-language edition. The graphic design is by Thomas Buxò and Klaartje van Eijk. Open is an initiative of SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain, Amsterdam (www.skor.nl) and is published by NAi Publishers.

For information, ordering and subscriptions see: info@naipublishers.nl and www.naipublishers.nl.

About the Venue

Immigrant Movement International (IM International) is a five-year project by artist Tania Bruguera. Its mission is to help define the immigrant as a unique, new global citizen in a post-national world and to test the concept of arte útil or “useful art”, in which artists actively implement the merger of art into society’s urgent social, political and scientific issues.

JOIN IMMIGRANT MOVEMENT INTERNATIONAL’S IMMIGRANT RESPECT AWARENESS CAMPAIGN

Creation of the Awareness Ribbon for Immigrant Respect

Inspired by the success of previous awareness ribbon campaigns and after talking to various community organizations, Immigrant Movement International found that there was no campaign for immigrant causes. We then decided to create the Awareness Ribbon for Immigrant Respect. The immigrant condition can be a very isolating and stigmatizing social experience. We hope that the ribbon can signal unspoken solidarity while calling for respect between people and facilitating an expanding conversation about immigration.

Why Immigrant Respect?

We decided on Immigrant Respect after learning that the language of ‘Immigrant Rights’ can be politically polarizing. Demanding Immigrant Respect, on the other hand, humanizes the issue. It communicates that it is not simply about money or laws, it is about people who deserve as much respect as anyone else.

The ribbon as symbol

The colors brown and blue, represent common entry points of immigrants traveling to a new country, over land, through the air, or via waterway. The bottom of the ribbon’s edges are in the shape of an arrow signaling movement, arrival, and transformation. The words Immigrant Respect convey the goal of the campaign.

Links

Add a badge to your social media profile, click here

Order a ribbon pin, click here

Make your own and send us a photo, click here

RESPECT FOR ALL IMMIGRANTS REGARDLESS OF LEGAL STATUS!

Where is New York?* Institutions and Immigration in Corona, Queens
09.26.11
6:30PM – 8:30PM
WOOD AUDITORIUM, AVERY HALL

Tania Bruguera, Immigrant Movement International
Larissa Harris, Curator, Queens Museum of Art
Prerana Reddy, Queens Museum of Artmoderated by Felicity Scott, GSAPP

Organized by the Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture Program and moderated by Felicity Scott, this is the first installment of the monthly series “Where is New York?*”

In summer 2011, acclaimed performance artist Tania Brugera relocated to Corona, Queens, where she operates the non-profit Immigrant Movement International at Corona Studio, a space at 108-59 Roosevelt Avenue that is jointly sponsored by Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art to organize classes, workshops, and public actions that address and highlight the needs of those who live nearby. This conversation on institutions and immigration in New York’s famously diverse borough will be joined by Queens Museum of Art Curator Larissa Harris and Director of Events Prerana Reddy, who have advocated for change in nearby Corona Plaza as part of the museum’s extraordinary array of community-based public programming.

Find out more at #wood92611

* Each month, one program at GSAPP will identify a site within the five boroughs that has been important to their discipline within the past year and bring designers, policymakers, developers, community activists, and other New Yorkers together to discuss the site and question where we are.

9/11 (The War on Immigrants), September 11, 10-5pm

The attacks of September 11, 2001 and the emergence of The War on Terrorism have produced aggressive networks of punishment, mass warehousing, and criminalization that deploy an unjust system of detention and deportation. Recent reports and academic research indicate that the U.S. government’s trend has been to increase the privatization of the detention center system as a way to increase national security measures. With the help of scholars, activists and legal advocates, awareness about the conditions and treatment of detained immigrants help in pressuring government officials to adopt reformative detention guidelines. To address this current reality, ‘Make a Movement’ Sundays: 9/11 (The War on Immigrants)” collaborated with IRATE/First Friends to train people to participate in a visitor program to visit immigrants detained at the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, NJ. After the training the participants traveled to the detention center to visit immigrants who have been converted into prisoners of the ”nation of immigrants.” After the visitation, the participants made a drawing of an officer based on the descriptions given by the detainees of the officer who arrested them.