Venue:Online
The event is part of the project "Broken Relations: Infrastruktur und Unterbrechung"
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Binta Diaw's visual art embraces a strongly intersectional, Afro-diasporic and feminist methodology based on a physical, personal experience that simultaneously references the social body and the infrastructures of migration and immigration. Corona has once again highlighted migration as a broken relation, as an infrastructure that is torn between political forces of nationalism. At the same time under the conditions of the pandemic it became abundantly clear, that the food supply depends on migrants and is maintained under necropolitical conditions of neo-slavery. By portraying the Black body as vegetation like tomatoes and watermelon seedlings Diaw references not only the dehumanizing history of colonialism as extraction, but also the present of especially Italy’s exploitive politics of agriculture though sticking to it’s nationalistic attitude towards its own culture of agricultural cultivation.
At the same time, as Katrin Köppert has elaborated in a contribution dealing with Diaw's work Chorus of Soil, with seedlings fields and soil can be understood as infrastructures of care, so that imaginings of a Black future become possible in the midst of the present of anti-Black violence.
Katrin Köppert and Binta Diaw will, thus, talk about infrastructures of care as well as about Diaw's other installations and visual works that questions perceptions of Italianness and Africanness in relation to her own cultural heritage and upbringing.
Binta Diaw is a Senegalese-Italian visual artist based in Milan (IT). She studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan and obtained an MA at ESAD Grenoble-Valence in France. Her research aims at creating installations of various dimensions and works that comment on social phenomena such as migration and immigration, anthropology, her body in relationship with nature and notions of identity.
Katrin Köppert is an art and media scholar. Since October 2019, she has been junior professor of art history / popular cultures at the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts. Her work focuses on Queer Media Theory, Affect Studies and Political Feelings, Digital Feminisms and Art, Postcolonial and Decolonial (Media)-Theories of the Anthropocene, Gender, Race and Photography. Together with Julia Bee, she heads the DFG research network Gender, Media and Affect. Recent publications include the monograph Queer Pain. Schmerz als Solidarisierung, Fotografie als Affizierung, Berlin: Neofelis.
