11-05-2007 
Beirut, Lebanon
GEO ART - Re-Thinking Beirut. Reconstruction, art et société, by Claudia Zanfi.
source: babel med
[more]
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09-05-2007 
London, England
07 May 2007 - National Day of Action & Celebration - rally in support of 'illegal' migrants in London. 'Strangers into Citizens' is a campaign by the Citizen Organising Foundation and London Citizens.
source: strangers into citizen
[more]
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07-05-2007 
Fortress Europe - April Report
April 2007 report: 28 victims at the border, 3 in Greece, 2 in Algeria, 2 on the coast of Malaga, in Spain, and 21 on the way to Canary islands. Concern over deportations in Morocco and Libya, while Eu approved rapid border intervention teams.
source: Fortress Europe
[more]
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06-05-2007 
Lampedusa, Italy
Italian Government opens for the first time to journalists the CPT in Lampedusa.
source: melting pot
[more]
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04-05-2007 
Sangatte, France
Reportage from 'Il Manifesto': journey in the woods near a former CPT close to Calais where still hundreds of migrants live waiting to get to the UK.
source: melting pot
[more]
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.newsarchive.

.RESEARCH.

BiS – independent research media collective- started its activity in March 2006 as result of the cooperative efforts of a curator, a filmmaker and a visual artist. BiS' objective is to explore a series of theoretical and practice-based research directions revolving around the Mediterranean Sea with a constant attention to the relationships between new media practice, visual cultures and politics.

Our aim is to elaborate and complicate the sense of inhabiting and dealing with the Mediterranean basin working on its cultural and political overlappings, on its limits, contradictions and potentialities. Our strategic purpose is to think the Mediterranean as a laboratory and as a practice. In this perspective, we conceive the notion of practice in an expanded modality in which the theoretical components of our investigations are nevertheless integral part of the research.

The other important and crucial objective is to create a collaborative process open towards theorists and practitioners that share an interest in developing an investigation about the Mediterranean area through different points of view. Our aim, starting from this website, is to create a platform and a network of confrontation in order to connect and link together, in a interdisciplinary way, various realities that operate or are willing to take part to our different projects [more]

Summer and Autumn 2006 has been a period of development and research around a series of topics and themes that were the starting points in order to set the priorities and to frame the overall research.

We started exploring two general topics: the first one is concerned with tourism and the notion of the souvenir and the first outcome has been exhibited in Venice, Italy. The title of the work is 'Al-bunduqia: the last venitian souvenir' and it is an attempt to put forward a reflection about Mediterranean historical overlappings and the reformulation of certain stereotypes (in this case the souvenir) precisely in terms of visual practice. In this case, our research focused on the hundreds-years-old economic and cultural exchange between Venice (the Eastern Door of the Western World, as it was used to be called) and the Arab world and, in particular, on the traces left by this exchange at the level of language. In fact, in Arabic 'AL-Bunduqia' is the name used for the City of Venice. It's a unique case because the word in Arabic has no resemblance to 'Venice' (Venezia in Italian) and it's maybe the only city name in Europe that has a word of its own in Arabic. The word 'AL-Bunduqia' has two meanings: a) Rifle; b) hazelnuts sweets (from Bunduq=hazelnut). A straightforward explanation of why this word is used for Venice in Arabic is due to the vibrant trade that took place between the city of Venice and the Islamic Empire. Working on the stereotypes offered by the souvenir as a touristic object, we reformulated its premises, creating, as it were, a souvenir in reverse, in which no elements of Venice were really present, but only the Arabic version of it. We were interested in bringing into play the conditions of existence of this relationship overturning the dynamics of representation: a souvenir built through the gaze of the other.

The second thread of our research was focused on Terrorism. In New York City, September 2006, we presented the first outcome of this project, with a work titled 'Corporate Bomber'. It aimed to tackle the politics of fear spread around our western societies within the strategy against the international terrorist movements. Laymen, normal people, the next to us, will be displayed as suicide bomber in unexpected sites, as they've just missed their target, landing by chance in your backyard. The idea was to bring together the fear appeal, which wants the next to us as the terrorist, and the image of the suicide bomber, also within the context of the Mediterranean basin.

After this period, that functioned as a laboratory, we decided to focus our activity in a one-year project (throughout 2007) about the urgent issue concerning immigration in the Mediterranean Sea. With the title 'Leaving Room', this project reflects on the dramatic experience lived by migrants that try to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe. The research will focus also on Europe and its geopolitical structure. The core structure of 'Leaving Room' consists in a data driven digital installation. On each occasion, 'Leaving Room' will modify its presentation in relation to the specific context it will be exhibited. This project will be accomplished in collaboration with 'UNITED for Intercultural action', European network against nationalism, racism, fascism and in support of migrants and refugees. A small publication, with an extract from the text 'Between Cultures' by philosopher Alexander Garcia Duttmann and a text by the art critic Rian Lozano, will be published in summer 2007. [more]