Ilona Jurkonytė
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Ilona Jurkonytė
is a film and moving image researcher and curator, currently a Marie
Skłodowska-Curie Actions / UKRI Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Modern
Languages, University of St Andrews. Her work explores the intersections
of film, media, and environmental justice.
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© Ilona Jurkonytė. All Rights Reserved.
A Sea of Images
Screenshot from Rough History (of the Destruction of Fingerprints), 2015 © Ayesha Hameed. All Rights Reserved.
Film Program: A Sea of Images
Slought is pleased to announce Sea of Images, a program of
short films that investigates the visual geopolitics of oceans, on
Thursday, September 14th from 6:30-8pm. The program features works by
artists and researchers including Forensic Oceanography, Emilija
Škarnulytė, Ayesha Hameed, Filipa César and Louis Henderson that
consider the connections between visual technologies of maritime
surveillance, borders and migration, historical memory and witnessing.
Organized in conjunction with the Concordia-Penn Graduate Student
Conference "Counterpublics," this program will launch Slought's new
Mediatheque space. Organizer Gwynne Fulton will introduce the films, and
the screening will be followed by a public discussion.
The sea has been variously theorized as a blank space outside of time
and history and a "terra nullius," or a commons that facilitates
movement, but belongs to no one. Roland Barthes once described the ocean
as a semiological void that "bears no message." This program brings
together experimental media practices that critically intervene in these
interpretations by reframing the spatial order of the sea as a
historical construct produced and mediated by imaging technologies.
The works presented in this program explore connections between
optical apparatuses of surveillance, history and memory, violence and
visibility, suggesting a series of overlapping questions: What is the
forensic status of images? How have technologies of surveillance—from
modern navigation and cartography through networked satellites and
aperture radio—produced the sea, rather than merely representing it? How
have they been deployed by mobile practices of maritime governance to
police offshore borders? And how can they be repurposed to bear witness
to the ocean's subaltern stories? This program considers the sea as a
material witness to an archive of diasporic memory that spans from the
Black Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Defying traditional forms of
temporality and historiography, these works develop new strategies of
visual engagement from opacity and fugitivity to abstraction and op-art
that help us interpret what Forensic Oceanography has called "liquid
traces" of these counterpublic histories. Deploying image practice as an
archeological and forensic method, they articulate a submarine
resistance to the dominant visual order of sovereignty at sea.
Forensic Oceanography (Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani)
Liquid Traces: Left-to-Die-Boat
2015, 19 min
Forensic Oceanography's Liquid Traces: Left-to-Die-Boat (2015)
utilizes rerouted data from government remote-sensing and surveillance
technologies to visualize, with precision, the deathly trajectories of
migration in the Central Mediterranean Sea. This forensic reconstruction
demonstrates the complex and overlapping jurisdictions at sea that
allow EU states to evade responsibility for rescuing people in distress.
Emilija Škarnulytė
Sirenomelia
2017, 6 min
Emilija Škarnulytė's Sirenomelia (2017) is an oneiric,
post-documentary work named after a rare congenital deformity called
Mermaid Syndrome, that traces a mermaid's explorations of a classified
cold-war era 25,000m2 decommissioned NATO submarine base in Arctic
Norway.
Ayesha Hameed
A Rough History (of the Destruction of Fingerprints)
2015, 9 min
Ayesha Hameed's A Rough History (of the Destruction of Fingerprints) (2015) looks at the coalescence of skin and data in the collection in
the EURODAC system and in the migrant practice of the destruction of
fingerprints. It examines the life and circulation of the fingerprint in
a speculative history that travels from maritime border checks to early
gestures in film.
Filipa César and Louis Henderson
Sunstone
2017 (work in progress), 30 min
Filipa César and Louis Henderson's Sunstone (2017) is an
archeological "Op-Film" that circumnavigates a disorienting dérive of
optical technologies of cartography, navigation and surveillance, from
the material production of Fresnel lighthouse lenses to the invention of
global navigation satellite systems (GNSS)—the tool that announces the
obsolescence of the lighthouse.
Organizing Institutions:
Slought,
Cinema Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania,
Concordia University
Curators:
Gwynne Fulton,
Ilona Jurkonytė