Lecture “The Imperative Eye. Some notes for thinking about colonialism(s) today: global division of labour and visual hegemonies” of Maria Ruido
Seminar – Images and geopolitics. Thought and artistic practices around the idea of the border.
Salón de Actos de la Diputación Provincial de Huesca
17 October 2019
The seminar Images and geopolitics. Thought and artistic practices around the idea of the border will take place on 17 and 18 October 2019 in Huesca.
This seminar, which forms part of the program of the ViSiONA, aims to approach the idea of border from different perspectives and fields of study.
In the face of the effects of neoliberal capitalism, which has turned geographical borders into places characterized by a growing polarity – which splits their achievements in terms of flow and blockade, possession and dispossession, rights and de-legitimations, visibility and opaqueness – the seminar will reflect on the influence that images (and their uses) have on the political distribution of the geographical. Some of the questions are: How do the images participate in this construction of walls? From what logic do images contribute to the layout of this unequal distribution of goods and rights? From what logic do images contribute to the progressive virtual blurring of border spaces depending on who or what dares them? How can the mechanisms with which the media industry promotes the spectacularisation of certain borders be reversed to the detriment of others condemned to formative blockade?
Visual artist and researcher María Ruido presents the lecture “The Imperative Eye. Some notes for thinking about colonialism(s) today: global division of labour and visual hegemonies”.
L’œil impératif (“The Imperative Eye”) is an audiovisual essay that the artist made in 2015, when she was living in Tangier. In this project María Ruido takes as her starting point the colonial policies of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco in the post-war period, as well as its influence on the cinematographic practices of the time, considering the opposition to these audiovisual products by the new generations of artists and filmmakers. This audiovisual essay has been presented, for the first time, in María Ruido. L’œil impératif, an exhibition at Arts Santa Mónica (Barcelona), from 17 November 2015 to 10 January 2016. In the exhibition, the artist analyses the political, economic and representative mechanisms that serve to perpetuate the effects of colonialism and neocolonialism in the former Spanish and French protectorates in North Africa through immigration policies, mercantilism, globalization and cultural, aesthetic and social imperialism.
Download the program here.
