Made in Transit: Politics and Representation in Adrian Paci, Contemporary Art and the Migration Issue

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  • Presentation speakers
    • Pedro David Massena Carreiro, Faculdade de Belas Artes, Lisbon University, Portugal
  • Download presentation
    • Pedro Massena - Made in Transit - Politics and Representation in Adrian Paci.pdf

  Abstract:

  Narratives of place and displacement, and their relationship with the identity making process, occupy nowadays a central position towards the definition of contemporary art. The aim of this article is to analyze the current relationship between economic, social and political conflicts and representational systems in the realm of contemporary art. The work of Adrian Paci, his creative thought and process question, among other issues, the realm of transitional belonging as we can see in projects such as The Column (2013) or Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (2007). These reflections generate a new poetical and sensitive matrix on the debate about conflict in a global era and the edifice of identity. The current geo-political situation, in which multitudes are reduced to what Giorgio Agamben calls bare life, the loss of political identity caused by an extraction and that was exposed to a non-mediated application of power by the state, sustains an emergent paradigm of a recently empowered sovereignty. Defining a dimension on which not everybody can contain life, this sovereignty has been globally expanded, creating areas of transmigration and statelessness. Planetary entanglement established by the phenomenon of remote borderization has created a segmented world, with very different speeds, governed by absence, on a war, and even in the stasis notion of Agamben, against mobility and circulation. More than ever we are ruled by abstractions. The human brain has lost his place of reason and technique, as in the Greek sense, is now a place of weaponized reason, anchored on advanced technology, algorithmic capitalism, artificial intelligence and massive digital security systems and databases, creating a planetary redistribution based on the impossibility of mobility. Security has become the sacrament of our time, blessed by the omnipresence of borders that transformed our own skin into a partitioning device, generating latitudes that have become silent, blocking prisons.

 

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