Is/Land Life

• Main Author: Romano, Sara (Author)
• Other Authors: O'Connor, Maria (Contributor), Low, Andrea (Contributor)
• Format: Others
• Published: Auckland University of Technology, 2011-03-06T19:37:36Z.
• Subjects: Moving image; Transnationalism; Dislocation; Home; Displacement; Island; Thesis
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 The fluidity of dislocation as an experience of transnational identity through moving images ABSTRACT This research project concerns itself with a paradoxical experience of dislocation as a consistent experience of belonging through the increasing global phenomenon known as transnationalism. Central to this sense of non-belonging belonging are the temporal mediums of film and video. They are the key signifiers for locating my own familial connection to place through a family's process of archiving stories through moving image. The paradoxical nature of this project suggests that it is through movement (moving image, moving homes) that an ontological experience of being "situated" is discovered. The project questions whether others who experience dislocation (whether they be termed transnationals or not), experience also a sense of belonging through the mediums of the image archive - and further, how this experience becomes articulated through spatial installation practice. This project employs or appropriates existing archival family moving-image footage that has been shot in various locations established as my 'home' at one time or another. It is layered with contemporary moving image footage to add a complexity around the question of location in relation to past, present and future situatedness. This work takes up the motif of the island as a topological and allegorical figure. It does so because three locations that establish my trajectory of home-life have been islands. Further, the Island acts allegorically as both a figure of ubiquity whereby islands are generally those spaces that signify floating lives, somehow resort/ing to a life disconnected from the proper flows of larger contemporary and continental progressive urban living. The Island for me becomes an establishing motif governed by water that surrounds it. Its milieu is water and in this sense the fluidity of this condition marks the paradoxical moment of my stability as consistency. This condition finds further currency through critical thinking such as Gilles Deleuze's notion of the fold and Giorgio Agamben's Extra-territoriality. Filmic practices such as Claire Denis and Philippe Grandrieux's sensate cinema provide another conversation of shifting borders for material partipation with moving image. Artists, S. Neshat, Jonas Mekas, Christian Boltanski have concerns and conversations around home and displacement. And, it is H. Naficy that brings together the cinematic and exile as a theoretical question for transnationalism. Language becomes a key inscriptive device in the moving image installation, whereby there exists the hybrid and crypto language of Serbo-Croatian and English that give me my marker's identity.