Please join us for our upcoming event in relation to Niels Christensen's "Body Bona Fide #2"
Thursday December 11th 7pm-9.30pm.
We will start the evening with a screening of "Body Bona Fide #1" followed by a lecture performance "Spiability of the I" by Niels Christensen. Afterwards there will be discussion, beers and snacks.
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The conditions of life and security guaranteed by the European welfare states to its citizens are continuously and increasingly premised on forms of border violence that operate in a double movement. On the one hand, the perimeter of Schengen as well as individual nation-state borders are becoming ever more heavily fortified; on the other, borders are becoming fluid and omnipresent through processes of border externalisation, surveillance, automated digital registration and classification of bodies.
Since the exhibition of the work-in-progress film work Body Bona Fide #1 at Astrid Noacks Atelier in 2024, the following considerations have guided my ongoing engagement with the infrastructure of datafication within the European Union. The border regime – with its policy, institutions and technologies – constitutes an integral component of the conditions for my own subjectivity. However, such contingencies are continuously flattened in favor of an endless circulation of signs that (falsely) claim to rest upon themselves – the Nation, European identity, “the people”, the welfare state, liberal democracy etc. But at the same time an unmasking is taking place. As these myths can no longer be hidden and it becomes obvious that the signified are in fact constituted in -and upheld through violence, increasingly also the violence is openly acknowledged, circulated, defended and hailed. Yet, the majority of those who have the right to mobility, the so-called bona fides, live in commonplaces – sites and corridors where myth and ideology conceal themselves in plain sight. If the border regime is to be challenged, such commonplaces must be made perceptible in their structural, material and historical contingency. They must be (re)linked to the power apparatus.
My current work is partially funded by a EU research grant, but perhaps more importantly, not only do central infrastructures of the border regime – such as the European Agency for Large-Scale IT Systems (eu-LISA) who store and manage biometrics – produce information I rely on directly in my work, they also inhabit the same sphere of knowledge as any critique I might articulate. The task of the film I envision cannot, then, be to merely produce “objective knowing,” but also to test possible and impossible ways of disturbing the arrangement of these shared complicities.
During this second stay at Astrid Noacks Atelier – which I consider more as another point of departure than as a conclusion for the film project – these considerations will be developed in a lecture performance, where I will also be showing new material recorded during a recent family trip to St. Johann im Pongau, in the Salzburg region of Austria. Few places in Europe so vividly embody the myth of a stable European identity. Here, within a mountain, in the underground military facility Einsatzzentrale Basisraum, eu-LISA is said to store its backup of databases containing millions of digital identities, fingerprints and face scans of people on the move – among them the Eurodac biometric database of asylum seekers.
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