beauty and the east
60', 2000
by Jayce Salloum
In the spring and summer of 1999 I planned an elaborate tour through former and present Yugoslavia with stops in New York, Vienna, Karlsruhe, Brussels, and Paris. I was interested in looking at/recording sites of emigration, places that people had or currently were leaving from as well as immigrating to. I also wanted to videotape conversations with people that were working in areas related to or theorizing/writing on these threads of movement and trans/cross or intercultural circumstances. I developed an extensive network of writers/theorists, activists, artists, anthropologists, architects, academics, musicians, human rights workers, and organizations. During the trip the project continued its stages of refining to include articulations of interstitial being, and illuminated how that could be a central theme of the project. This project works with issues of dialogue, recognition/misrecognition, alienation, transnational/local identity, subjective affinities and, objective trusts. The subjects of the video will be come from many different constituencies; immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, community groups, residents (permanent and transient), political prisoners, students, workers, cultural producers, and others interested in focusing on the recording of histories (oral and visual) and the intersection of cultures in particular places and times. The dialectical relationship of the speaker and the spoken will be highlighted, the speech laid bare and layered between the story, the fields of images, the suggested frames and the butted fictive and documentary process. Difference will be articulated in and around the literal and metaphorical spaces of displacement/placement and dwelling, the constitution of this being viewed as cultural meanings rather than only as an extension of (an)other locale/space or subjective relationship. The project will also investigate what types of freedoms allow people to stay home and what types of powers force people to move and vice versa. Histories of movement will be specifically examined along gender, class and race lines, taking into consideration the legacies of empire, conflict and capital, and the contested and conflicted notions of home (Heimat), homeland, nation, diaspora, exile, travel, integration, assimilation, refuge, native, and other.
