untitled part 2: beauty and the east

The second part in a series of attempts at concretizing the notion of interstitiality, this videotape addresses issues of nationalism & the nation state, polarities of time, alienation, the refusal & construction of political identities, ethno-fascism, the body as object & metaphor, agents, monsters & abjectness, subjective affinities, and objective trusts. Material was taped while leaving home, arriving in New York and Vienna, then moving through the former Yugoslavia (stopping in Ljubljana, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Skopje) shortly after the NATO bombing. The subjects conversing come from a range of constituencies; migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, residents (permanent and transient), students, workers, and cultural producers recounting experience, locating sites, shifts, events, and the theorizing and accounting of the issues at stake, and associated ambient imagery forming specific histories of locations, and locations of histories at the intersection of cultures in this/these particular place(s) and time(s). The speakers are framed closely, creating a complicity with and acknowledgement of the ongoing framing/mediation. Boris Buden, Marina Grzinic, Eda Cufer, Renata Salecl, Dunja Blazevic, Zarana Papic, Slavica Indzevska, Mihajlo Acimovic, Ella Shohat, Ammiel Alcalay, and Carmen Aguirre amongst others are featured. Moving landscapes and cityscapes are used to materialize the verbal and localize the discourse through levels of physicality, materiality and immateriality.