Goldsmiths, University of London

Faculty Member, Visual Cultures

Thesis Title: Visual Murmurs: Cinema and Processes of Nomination

About

The purpose of my current research is to contribute to the renovation of the theoretical discussion on the relation between the political and the visual arts. In order to do so my research focuses on the problematic of the Name, a critical concept in contemporary re-conceptualisations of the political and its margins. Authors such as Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou or Michel Foucault interrogate the authority of the name and displace in different ways its capacity to enable and/or constrain political processes.

My research focuses on the re-configuration of 'obsolete' political names (worker, factory, people) by contemporary filmmakers and artists. Different discourses have condemned these names as ruined names, irrelevant to read the present and its mutations. Recent works by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Peter Watkins, Harun Farocki or Wang Bing operate a paradoxical resistance to this condemnation. These films do not adapt these names to our digital times or try to restore their grandeur. Very differently these films constitute audio-visual operations that both affirm and detonate these names -  making us see and hear 'worker' or 'people' as paradoxical anonymous names.