Angela Melitopoulos presents 'Cino(so)matic Cartographies', a lecture on key themes and methods underpinning her practice. How do audio-visual artistic research projects enable multi-folded storytelling, questioning how one positions themselves within contemporary geographies?

 

How can audio-visual artistic practice advance understandings of the landscape as a mode or container of knowledge, as a changing and speaking entity? How does a media practice of ‘mapping’ relate to the idea of a machinic animism; and further, how can we understand it as a “migrant work”? Such questions generate a new meaning of the politics of migration across aesthetic and geographic forms that intervene in contemporary fabrications of the social-political body. Globally enacted normative production of subjectivities resonate with other comprehensions of corporeality that are more animist, mobile and that refuse subject-object and nature-culture divisions.

 

In this lecture, Melitopoulos shows excerpts, and unfolds cinematic and cartographic practices, from different projects – including the iconic video essay Passing Drama (1999), the audio-visual research project Assemblages (developed with Maurizio Lazzarato, 2011) and her documenta14 project Crossings (2018). The latter is a complex installation-as-cartography, crystallising major stratifications and realities of the delirious, quasi-schizophrenic condition emerging in the current state of the debt crisis in Greece, where capitalism forces neoliberal deregulations and a civil war against its populations.

 

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Angela Melitopoulos is an artist based in Berlin who has made experimental video-essays, installations, documentaries and sound pieces since 1985. She studied at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf with Nam June Paik and holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths University in London. She is a professor in the Media School of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. Melitopoulos’ work focuses on mnemopolitics, time, geography and collective memory in relation to electronic/digital media and documentation. Within her research projects she works on collaborative geopolitical projects, organises international seminars and creates activist media projects. Her videos and installations have received awards and been shown in many international festivals, exhibitions and museums such as Berlinale, Berlin; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Antonin Tapies Foundation, Barcelona; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Manifesta 7; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Whitney Museum, New York. Her recent project Crossings was shown at Documenta 14 in Kassel.

In conjunction with this lecture, Angela Melitopoulos presents a workshop on her new project Matri-Linear B at UNSW Art & Design from 11am–1pm on Wednesday 30 October 2019. 

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Angela Melitopoulos is presented in association with ANU School of Art and Design, Australian National University, Canberra.

This UNSW Art & Design Research Forum is organised by Dr Verónica Tello, Jasmin Stephens, and Catherine Woolley.

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Image: Angela Melitopoulos, 3rd Conference on Contemporary Greek Film Cultures, 2018