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Welcome to a Global Media Café event 

“A Second Home: Mediating Borders and Hospitality – A symposium bringing together academic and artistic perspectives on refugees, migration and citizenship”

The event starts at 9:00 am, followed by 4 sessions and roundtable discussions, and ends at 5:30 pm.

The event is hosted by The Department of Media Studies, and funded by the Leading Research Environment: Global Media Studies and the Politics of Mediated Communication.

Organizers: Miyase Christensen and Isabel Löfgren
Supported by: Media Studies department, Stockholm University
In partnership with Botkyrka konsthall/Residence Botkyrka and Vision Forum

PANELS, ROUNDTABLES, PRESENTATIONS include

Fataneh Farahani, Jonathan Corpus Ong, Christian Christensen, Rebecca Bengtsson, Anna Roosvall, TomአRafa, Florencia Enghel, Temi Odumosu, Erik Berggren and Kosta Ekonomou, UNICORN – artists in solidarity, Abir Boukhari, Macarena Dusant, Jon Brunberg, Anusha Caroline Andersson, Per Hüttner and Jasper de Rycker, Andrea Hvistendahl and other invited guests.

The event is free of charge and open for students and the general public.

Image: Painting workshop with Roma children in Secovce, Slovakia, 2016.
Photo Credit: ®Tomas Rafa/Art Aktivista NGO

Panel 1

About

A “Second Home” is a metaphor for what Sweden and a number of other host countries have aspired to become during an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe: a second home (and homeland) for hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war zones and political conflict. Definitions of “home” and “homeland” have been increasingly entangled with escalating violence and public debate, resulting in polarization around conceptions of territorial and cultural belonging while new nationalisms and geopolitical realities arise. The recent case of the Syrian refugees has been a poignant example, revealing the widespread fields of tension. 

This symposium brings the concept of hospitality to bear on some of the most pressing social, cultural and political questions of our time. Hospitality implies an ethical relationship and pertains to which degree we are open to receiving the Other in a framework of civic duties and entitlements, but also with reverberations in the politics of representation, language and the creation of an aesthetic materiality. It necessitates ongoing public deliberation on how conditions of membership are created and sustained, and how peoples, cultures and difference can coexist, resources be shared, actions taken, and histories remembered.

Against this backdrop, the symposium will be constituted of four parts, each attending to mediated and artistic dimensions of hospitality with a view toward contemporary realities:

1) Perspectives on hospitality takes on broader questions such as “is hospitality a utopia, a form of “madness” in times of conservative extremism, or could hospitality engender greater understanding and respect?;

2) Mediating Hospitality addresses the significance of history and geography vis-à-vis the notion and practice of hospitality, media strategies in documenting displacement, social movements, and emancipatory activism in the face of new nationalisms;

3) Experiencing hospitality brings together examples of hospitality as performed, experienced, documented, designed, practiced and narrated in contemporary art;

4) Hospitable Futures, focuses on life after displacement and the place of hospitality in current educational and artistic strategies at home and abroad.

See the full program

Panel 2

Program

PROGRAM

9-9.30 am – Introduction and Welcome – Miyase Christensen and Isabel Löfgren, event organizers

1) PERSPECTIVES ON HOSPITALITY

9.30-10.15 am – Fataneh Farahani (Stockholm University Dept. of Ethnology)
“Hospitality and Hostility in an Era of Displaced Responsibility”

2) MEDIATING HOSPITALITY

10.30-11.45 am – Chair: Anna Roosvall (SU Dept. of Media Studies)

with presentations by

Jonathan Corpus Ong (Univ. of Leicester, UK)
“Belonging after the Storm: Compulsory Cosmopolitanism and Queer Recoveries”

Rebecca Bengtsson (PhD student at SU Dept. of Media Studies) –
“Lost at sea? Mediating spaces of hospitality in times of crisis”

Christian Christensen (SU Dept. of Media Studies)
“Overcoming Information Precarity: Smartphones as Tools for Newly-Arrived Refugees and Migrants”

—
11.45- 12.45 LUNCH

Performance: “Checkpoint Citizen” by Andrea Hvistendahl (in the foyer)
—

1 – 2 pm – “Artist as Activist. Video as a Form of Communication”

Tomas Rafa, visual artist (SLO/POL) in conversation with  Florencia Enghel, Researcher (Post-doc SU Dept. of Media Studies)

3) EXPERIENCING HOSPITALITY 

2.15 – 3.45 pm – Chair: Dr. Temi Odumosu, Malmö Högskola

with presentations by

Erik Berggren (REMESO/LiU and Kosta Ekonomou (LiU)
“Is this the Time for Art”?

UNICORN – artists in solidarity (Anna Wahlstedt and Andreas Larsson)
“Together we dare more” 

Abir Boukhari, Independent Curator
“The Museum of Preserving City”

4) HOSPITABLE FUTURES 

4 – 5.15 pm – Chair: Macarena Dusant, art historian and writer

Jon Brunberg, Artist
“Activity: Art”

Anusha Caroline Andersson, Writer and Cultural Producer
“Historieberättarna: A Storytelling Project”

Jasper de Rycker & Per Hüttner (Vision Forum)
“Riding the Donkey Backwards in Monochrome”

5.30 pm – Drinks

See abstracts
See speaker bios