Film seminar
Film seminar: Documenting the Unresolved Borders of Europe
12 november 2009
19:00 – 21:30 uur
Sprekers: Ann-Sofi Sidén and Maria Iorio & Raphaël Cuomo

Deze tekst is vooralsnog alleen beschikbaar in het Engels.

In this film seminar, two art documentaries about two different unresolved border phenomena within Europe were presented and discussed. Ann-Sofi Sidén’s video installation 'Warte Mal!' dealt with prostitution villages on the German-Czech border, while Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo’s video 'Sudeuropa' dealt with the problematics of African boat refugees landing on islands in the Mediterranean. The full version of the latter video and a selection of the materials of the former were shown in the seminar. 

Warte Mal! (1999)
by Ann-Sofi Sidén
Drivers on the road from Dresden to Prague, crossing the German border into the Czech Republic, pass through the frontier town of Dubi. In all seasons, day and night, they will see women lining the roadside. Desperate to attract attention, these shriek at the drivers of passing vehicles, shouting ‘Warte Mal!’ (Wait a Minute!). Dubi was once a resort, renowned for its spas. In the wake of the ‘Velvet Revolution’ – the events leading to the collapse of Communism in Czechoslovakia –, economic instability and Dubi’s location close to the economic powerhouse of Germany transformed the town into a notorious destination for sex tourists from the West. Throughout 1999, exactly 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ann-Sofi Sidén, a visual artist and filmmaker, made several prolonged trips to Dubi, documenting her stay by means of video, photography, a written diary and an extensive series of video interviews. This is the material featured in Warte Mal!, a 13-channel DVD installation that has been shown as a ‘walk-in documentary’ in several major museums in Europe.

Sudeuropa (2006)
by Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo
The video Sudeuropa examines the ways in which European and Italian immigration policies materialise on location by reconfiguring space, time and daily life on the Italian island of Lampedusa. It portrays several workers involved in the tourism economy, who arrived in Italy before the Schengen agreement, and evokes the presence on the island of undocumented migrants, caught far off at sea by the police and coast guards, excluded from social life and made invisible in their detention in a camp. At other times, tourists or goods cross these same sites, such as the airport and the port. Two voice-over narratives – one relating anecdotes told by islanders, – the other describing the representations of migrants produced in the same location at the spectacularised moment of debarkation and deportation – problematise how the political force of will, as expressed in official discourses, renders the migrants invisible on the island, while at the same time generating their over-visibility in national and European media.