IVSA Showcase

“Is it possible to predict what will happen in the future?” Street art as socially engaged art. Reality 2020 – photos taken in 2012 on Chmielna Street in Warsaw. The artist of the posters is unknown.

Inspired by studies of historical memory, its transmission and, in particular, the legacy of the Gulag, aspects of the spread of prison culture throughout the body of the former Soviet Union, the authors of the movie decided to see how this history was interpreted in Georgia.

This is a multimedia project featuring 70 profiles of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians 70 years after Newfoundland an dLabrador became a province of Canada. The profiles reflect demographic, geographic and, to some extend, occupational distribution of the population. This is an on-going series modelled on the concept of photo-roman- and engaging form of story telling combining still photographs and sound and voice.

Although there are many ways that neighborhoods such as my own, often described as Super-, or otherwise Gentrified (Halasz 2018). the fact remains that many of its residents fall on the liberal and left-leaning spectrum of American politics. It is also a place that has been an area accurately described as exhibiting Super Diversity (Vertovec 2007). Although the area is “diverse,” People of Color, mostly a diverse collection of Latino residents, tend to dominate in sections that are slowly undergoing displacement pressures as the rapid construction of high-rise “luxury” apartments continues unabated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The protagonists of this film have spent their lives searching for freedom, while at the same time escaping loneliness. The choices they made each time led them to new trials, and life punished them again and again. They come into conflict with the law, their parents turn their backs on them, their partners abandon them, but they carry on with their lives without really knowing where to or what for. The stories of their lives are similar and at the same time the path of each was different. What does it mean to live properly, to be “like everyone else”, not to fall by the wayside, how to find the one and those who need you?

The ‘liquid supermarket’ displays its wares for all to see, at the southern most part of the city the canal becomes a catchment area for the plastic floating down with the sewage and waste water- the remnants of the city’s numerous lives. Metal cages keep the plastic within the boundaries of the city whilst allowing the water to pass under a road and out into the countryside to the Mekong river.

“La sociologie comme elle s’apprend” is the filmic narrative of a learning process—both of a discipline (with its scientific norms, analytic frames and methods) and of critical thinking on the social. Emphasizing the articulation between the international circulation of sociological theories and the localised reality of fieldwork in a provincial town in Russia, this documentary follows Russian students engaged in a French curriculum at the State Universities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg during a week of fieldwork internship.

This book presents a critical and aesthetic defence of ‘non-place’ as an act of cultural reclamation. Through the restorative properties of photography, it re-conceptualizes the cultural significance of non-place. The non-place is often referred to as “wasteland”, and is usually avoided. Employing a deliberately allusive intertextuality, the book provides a unique insight into the contested notions surrounding landscape representation, collective memory and place.

Blooming sunflowers on stone walls, mosaic flowers and swimming carps on stairs, wing of lost angel next to a house—these beautiful pictures of Ihwa Mural Village initially lured me into visiting. On my actual visit, however, it was not the cute little paintings on the wall that greeted me but aggressive messages painted in a violent red color by an angry villager— “The Rights to Rest”; “We Are Not Monkeys in the Cage”.

The nineteenth-century is characterised by an energy for, and an enthusiasm about, the representational which has outstripped anything before, or indeed since, in its general range and basic inventiveness. During a handful of decades the representational was, to an unprecedented degree, mechanised, democratised, popularised, and humanised. For instance, the mechanisation of the representational is most readily pegged out between markers such as the discovery of photography in the 1830’s; the first recording of sound in 1877; and the invention of wireless and cinematography in the 1890’s.