Day for night : landscapes of Walter Benjamin
Solo exhibition of film and photography, investigating Walter Benjamin’s personal and intellectual affinity with natural landscapes, through historical and contemporary experiences of immigration and exile in the Mediterranean.
- Submitting institution
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Kingston University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32-32-1687
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck, University of London, U.K.
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first exhibition
- September
- Year of first exhibition
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Photographer Diego Ferrari presented his photographic and film solo exhibition Day for Night – Landscapes of Walter Benjamin at Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck, University of London, 21 September–31 October 2018. Conceived by Ferrari together with Canadian author and academic Jean McNeil (University of East Anglia), the exhibition brought together for the first time a body of practice-based research investigating Benjamin’s personal and intellectual affinity with natural landscapes, through historical and contemporary experiences of immigration and exile in the Mediterranean – specifically, the border-zone of Portbou in Catalonia, Spain, where Benjamin died.
By following the lives of Portbou’s growing Senegalese migrant community, Ferrari exposed the contradictory nature of borders within the officially borderless European Union, building on the Benjaminian evaluation of history as radically fragmented and irrational. The exhibition comprised four photographic projects, two short films and a catalogue co-edited by McNeil and author Julia Bell. Ferrari developed the photographic and film works through a collaborative methodology that incorporated both the subjects of the works – the Senegalese illegal migrants – and the works’ production processes. The latter took place with creative practitioners whom Ferrari invited to contribute to elements ofthe research. Specifically, Ferrari collaborated with McNeil on the exhibition’s concept, two films, and catalogue; Dutch artist and photographer Bas Losekoot on the photographic series More than a Sign; he invited Barcelona-based art director Bernard Arce to produce and edit the exhibition’s two films. The research methodology was further supported by secondary literature reviews, site visits to important sites for Benjamin’s life, and in-studio experiments to transfer to the digital camera the analogue ‘day for night’ photographic technique, without the need to add any post-production effects. Through this hybrid visual approach, Ferrari revealed how the Mediterranean is experiencedby contemporary migrants as a site of liminality, aligned with Benjamin’s conception of ‘now time’.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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