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Project

The rhythm of revolting aesthetics. A participatory action research in the audiovisual arts of Maghrebi diaspora in Brussels

By engaging with self-affirming autonomous, but too often omitted forms of authorship in the audio-visual arts of Maghrebi diaspora in Brussels, the proposed research challenges the limits of visual anthropology as a field of study. Pursuing the aesthetic turn in political science and postcolonial studies and the decolonial turn in aesthetic theory, it proposes to analyze the rhythm of revolting aesthetics, or the various ways audio-visual art forms are produced and thus spatially and temporally preconditioned in inclusive, autonomous and safer spaces, from 1964 until today. By conducting a participatory action research combining in an original way various methods, such as subjective mapping and archival work, it pushes the boundaries of visual ethnography as methodology, it will. This will allow a better understanding of the constantly renegotiated relations between informal art spaces and formal art institutions, the distribution of roles and modes of participation, its dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Opening up the diasporic sphere of audio-visual to more global, transnational dynamics of solidarity in their intersection with questions of race, gender and class, its hopes to point to the possibility to alter the colonial distribution of the sensible, restructuring what appears to the senses, makes sense or is intelligible, what is disregarded or visible, silenced or audible, what is forgotten or can be remembered about Maghrebi diaspora in Brussels today.

Date:1 Oct 2021 →  Today
Keywords:Brussels, Maghrebi Diaspora, Political Aesthetics
Disciplines:Postcolonial studies, Citizenship, immigration and political inequality not elsewhere classified, Audiovisual art and digital media not elsewhere classified, Anthropology not elsewhere classified