Friday 23 November / DAI Public lecture performance / The Tired Land - Alien Encounters by Rana Hamadeh (DAI, 2009) / Location: Festival of Independents / Kunstvlaai 2012
Duration: 60 minutes
This performance is based on conversations I had conducted in 2011 with four illegal immigrants from North Africa that I had met in Marseille, and whom I invited for an interview on board of a little boat on the Mediterranean coast. The conversations guide the audience towards the history, architecture and urban/land scape of a mining town in Mauritania, where the men interviewed claim they had been previously detained as illegal aliens, while on their way to cross the sea towards the Spanish Enclaves.
Bringing together elements from science fiction, modernist architecture, contemporary migration and capital flows and colonial legacies, the lecture tries to think through the conjunctions of the legal and the spatial -‐ playing out thereby an intensive scrutiny of the relations of land, sea and outer space.
***This lecture-‐performance is part of Alien Encounters, a research-‐based project that comprises a growing series of (lecture)-‐ performances, mapping projects, and a film-in‐progress. Alien Encounters aims at contemplating and further complicating the notion of 'alienness', where the alien is on one hand viewed as an outcast with regards to the law, and on the other hand understood as an extraterrestrial. This research project is made possible thanks to Fonds BKVB