trans/BORDER/ing: The Aesthetics of Disturbance and Undocumentary Flight

As thousands of asylum seekers and migrants are forced into lethal crossings as a result of post-1994 “prevention through deterrence” strategies in the ever expanding U.S.-Mexican borderlands each year, the pan-Mediterranean Sea in the early twenty-first century has been reinvented as one of the globe’s deadliest border regions of impeded passage. This convening compares and contrasts these two distinct literal and imaginary necropolitical zones. Activist scholars and artivists on both sides of the Atlantic will reflect on strategies of disturbance and resistance in place to assist border crossers. Decentering aid narratives and regimes of visualization that support surveillance and capture, the goal will be generative transdisciplinary dialogue on flight facilitation, “undocumentary” aesthetics, and the ethics of witnessing after humanitarianism/s.

Featuring the work of Electronic Disturbance Theatre 2.0, the Watch The Med Alarm Phone project, the Forensic Empathy project at UCLA, among others, and postcolonial perspectives on the Black Mediterranean.

• Amy Sara Carroll, Associate Professor of Literature & Writing, UCSD
• Ricardo Dominguez, Associate Professor of Visual Arts & Principal Investigator at CALIT2/QI, UCSD
• SA Smythe, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies & African American Studies, UCLA
• Maurice Stierl, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Warwick, UK
• Maite Zubiaurre, Professor of European Languages & Transcultural Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, Digital Humanities, and Urban Humanities, UCLA

Moderated by:

•  Veronika Zablotsky, Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy

Presented by the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, the Winter 2021 Virtual Residents at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy