Eleventh International Conference on The Image

Abstract

One central question will be entertained in my presentation: What is the role of the artist/intellectual/filmmaker in turbulent times of mass displacement, racial oppression, and an overall state of moral crisis? How can we imagine social change? Drawing on filmed interviews that I have conducted with migrant and refugee families in Houston, as well as footage from my recent films, We are In It (2016), Lessons In Seeing (2017), and Seeds of All Things (July, 2018), I explore communal and individual visions of hope and social change. While migrant and refugee narratives have long been dominated by excessive victimization, interlaced with a heightened sense of decontextualized hyper-sensational heavily mediated image of hysteria and terror, I ask how film (and thus art) can initiate a conversation in spaces that are often dominated by apathy and fear. Moreover, I am interested in extending Walter Benjamin’s noted injunction that “history breaks down into images, not into histories” (or stories, or narratives), and I would like to question the role of the image in the shaping of collective imagination of asylum seeking, belonging, home, and movement across and within borders. Last, I argue that an alternative form of representation and knowledge distribution is central to the remaking of the transitory and fragile archives of marginalized communities, opening a window onto unrecorded feelings and creativity: both radical seeds in claiming untold histories and in catalyzing social change.