“A La Orilla” will be broadcast during Jungle Factory – Symposium on 12th March 2017

The Jungle Factory Symposium 2017 aims to bring together theorists, researchers and artists to explore questions of productivity, political imagination and resistance in the current era.

The signifier “jungle” evokes numerous imaginations, and thoughts. It is in effect a highly coded term criss-crossed variously with imperialism, romantic and spiritual escape and solace, political struggle, significations beyond ‘borders’ of the ‘west’, and raw animality among others.

Yet it is also a place. Not simply an imagination of a fantastical idea of the western subject. The word “dzhangal” was used by Pashto-speaking migrants to describe the refugee camp in Calais, which has seen various “jungles” in the past fifteen years. Demolished during the fall of 2016, the camp has been a battleground: local anti-refugee and pro-refugee protests have occurred reflecting the stand-off between opposing actors in the European refugee and migrant crisis.

This crossdisciplinary event invites activists, academics, artists, and performers to a conceptual engagement with “jungle” and the human factory producing jungles. It can be an inquiry of the notion of jungle, a recording of a feeling, a thought, a situation, a piece of sound or music, or an expression in the mind factory to reflect on the jungle problematique.

CONFIRMED PARTICIPANTS: Alan Read, Gigi Argyropoulou, Gary Anderson, Maria Rovisco, Agnieszka Jakimiak, Marta Keil, Mita Pujara, Debora Minà, Maria Lalou, Grey Filastine, Emma Lee, Manos Karatzogiannis, Georgina Dimopoulou, Kathy O’ Hare, Massimo Conti, Felix Blume.

Questions the Jungle Factory symposium poses:

• What is the relationship of aesthetics to sense of power/powerlessness to structure?
• What is the role of the explorer of the global post-austerity landscape today?
• To what extent do theories, beyond representation/before signification, enable us to theorise contemporary art, culture and performance?
• What are the politics of despair or exhaustion?
• How can a critique of political tourism be effective without reproducing political tourism itself?
• What new spaces of ideological affinity can be proposed, beyond the disillusionment/disempowerment of the standard critique of neo-liberal capitalism?

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The formation of spaces, digital, hybrid, affective reflecting on Jungle and the factories of jungle production in capitalism, currently at structural levels and historically.
• Jungle as a space, a sound, a text, a performance, an analysis of a knotting and unknotting.
• Scholarship, art, performance or analysis engaging with the ideology, mobilization, and organization of the migrant and refugee crisis, the after effects of austerity and the questions of signification which may arise.

An event hosted by the Digital Networks and Communication, as well as Media Cultures clusters and with the Migration Research Network at the School of Media, Communication and Sociology at the University of Leicester, UK (Contact: Athina Karatzogianni), in collaboration with artists Despina Panagiotopoulou (Athens) and Andrew Fremont-Smith (NY).

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jungle-factory-symposium-2017-tickets-28947053416