Mission Report | 2008
VIDEO ESSAY, 2008
When my previous videos have examined extraterritorial zones from borderlands to sex tourist resorts, this new project tackles the logic of the camp as a translocal space under international law where refugees and stateless persons are held and administered. At the example of the Palestinian case, the video looks at the figure of the refugee, at the camp as a philosophical and spatial entity challenging the nation state, and speculates with new models of extraterritorial nation. While the focus of the visual material is on the Palestinian camps in the Middle East, the video makes more general reflections on the growing citizenship gap, on humanitarian work, on refugee management and the politics of image making. It includes video footage from Afghanistan 1987 and 2001 and from more recent refugee waves in Iraq. Linking these major refugee sites in the Muslim world, the project establishes an “axes” of a different kind but one that equally operates in the shadow of September 11.
"Mission Report" will be released for the Gwangju Biennial, September 2008