Course Description

The Native and the Refugee is a multimedia research project by Matt Peterson and Malek Rasamny that investigates the spaces of the American Indian reservation in the United States and the Palestinian refugee camp in the Middle East.
The workshop will begin with a presentation about the refugee camps and reservations as spaces of exception within the prevailing nation-states in which they are located, as repositories of very particular histories of displacement, and as locations where the logic of modern nationalism is thoroughly excavated, scrutinised and deconstructed.
After the presentation, the workshop will focus heavily on questions of methodology, with an examination of the film as a political document, and will consider interdisciplinary media as a tool to explore questions of audience and the contexts of exhibition. What does it mean for a film to actually be a conduit of communication between peoples rather than an object for an imagined spectator? What is the liberatory value of treating film as an instrument of pedagogy rather than an end in and of itself? With these questions in mind, the workshop will examine the spatial specificities of documentary practice and approaches to its representation on screen.