Exposition

मृगतृष्णा, Mirage: Reengaging socio-spatial peripheries through site-specific film (last edited: 2018)

Lasse Mouritzen
Lasse Emil Larsen Mouritzen
open exposition

About this exposition

In this essay I will discuss how social engaged and site-specific filmmaking has a potential to reengage socio-spatial peripheries. Based on my recent residency at Flame University, February 2019 in Pune, I will describe how socio-spatial distinctions and peripheries are formed during processes of urbanisation. Following Ananya Roy and her description on the antagonism of utopia (Roy, 2011) I will look at the ambiguity between the blue print and the process of the build environment, and describe how the build environment and its function responds to its own process; the construction workers, the labor camps surrounding it. I will explain how my research evolved into a site-specific social-artistic film installation. Furthermore I will describe the potentials and advantages of using art-based research while working with social minorities through methods of non-conventional dialogues, soft interventions and visual communication. I will argue how the social-artistic film, both during the process of the research, filmmaking and screening, can be seen to open up new reflections of socio-spatial peripheries. My argument is that site-specific social-engage art and research should not try to exchange understandings, facts or categories between different socio-spatial peripheries, like for example news, media or documentaries would do. Rather, site-specific social-engage art and research should form awareness of the complexities and questions relating to social inequality and complexity, not by exposing or translating knowledge from socio-spatial peripheries but by blurring or disguising it, as a mirage; encouraging interest and questions instead of answers. In this regard, I would argue in elaboration of Gayatri Spivak’s essential essay ‘Can the subaltern speak’ (Spivak 1988), that giving voices to the subaltern or the socio-political excluded has an inherent danger of remarking socio-spatial peripheries. My argument is therefore, instead of forming facts on socio-spatial peripheries or facilitating voices of the other, site-specific social engaged art can form questions, imaginations and curiosity even auto-fictions to open the peripheries instead of closing or confirming them.
typeresearch exposition
keywordssocially engaged art, participatory filmmaking, Site-specific art, social peripheries, India, mirage
date24/02/2019
last modified01/11/2018
statusin progress
share statuspublic
licenseAll rights reserved
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/573320/573321
external linkhttps://vimeo.com/316606160/bc02d32df9


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