Online event · Nov 4 2022, 5pm CET
Disruptive Fridays: Opening Prisons
Art as Investigation & Deconstruction of Carceral Spaces
With Sean Vegezzi (Visual Artist and Researcher, US) and Fiamma Montezemolo (Artist and Anthropologist, IT/US). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Founder & Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).
Live & online chat: https://www.disruptionlab.org/fridays
Part of the series SMART PRISONS: Tracking, Monitoring & Control
This Disruptive Fridays launches a series of events heading to the SMART PRISONS: Tracking, Monitoring & Control conference, that will take place on March 24-26 at Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin. At the core is the investigation of recent developments in the creation of prisons and detention centres, with attention both on technical and ethical implications of tracking, monitoring and control.
New York based artist and researcher Sean Vegezzi introduces his investigative artistic project on an obscured part of New York City’s carceral infrastructure – as an artistic production commissioned by Disruption Network Lab, whose results will be presented at our conference during a keynote speech. The focus of his investigation is the Vernon C. Bain Center (VCBC), an 800-bed, 191-meter floating detention facility moored in the East River within the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx. VCBC functions as an auxiliary of the Rikers Island jail complex and is the primary facility for the criminal court intake in the Bronx. Worldwide, it is the only floating structure that was ever purpose-built as a detention facility. Vegezzi’s work with Disruption Network Lab in 2022-2023 will present the history of this structure through a curated selection of archival materials gathered thus far, and a commissioned video installation that will bring the “ship” into more expansive public view from its current state of “offshore obscurity” (Mike Ricketts, 2015).
Sean Vegezzi’s talk for Disruptive Fridays starts with an extract of the film Edgelands: VCBC, made in collaboration with Laura Poitras and grassroots organization Take Back the Bronx / TBBX (IG, TW). Edgelands: VCBC is one three films in the Edgelands series. Through this film, Vegezzi and Poitras investigated a public health crisis aboard the vessel during the COVID-19 pandemic by intercepting radio transmissions from prison staff. The upcoming work with Disruption Network Lab will be based on discovered materials related to the construction of VCBC in the archives of Avondale, the now-defunct Louisiana-based shipbuilder contracted to create the facility. The archives include never-before-seen documentation of the facility’s interior, financial and budgeting records, and correspondences within the company. Furthermore, it will also support his ongoing legal inquiries about the current infrastructure implemented, and whether the facility uses smart technology.
Fiamma Montezemolo works at the intersection between contemporary art and anthropology, creating site-specific, interdisciplinary, and cross-genre interventions that build on her long-term exposure to borderlands and border zones. In this talk, she will focus on specific issues related to the border as a sign of confinement and the possibility of overthrowing its constraining connotation through certain acts of imagination. Montezemolo will present Project Perucatti, in which, working with architect and designer José Parral, she transformed the historical Santo Stefano prison on the island of Santo Stefano from an architectural center of power (the panopticon) into a volume populated with poetic still images. Located on an island, this ex-prison is notorious for its confinement of political dissidents. On a scale model of the prison, the artists have replaced the guard in the central tower with a digital screen, offering the viewer a stream of images inspired by the wishes and desires of prisoners.
Montezemolo will also discuss Exit Only, in which 'Exit Only’ is the Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History’s exit ticket. There are of course no entry tickets to the Museum. This exit ticket is valid only once per year: on March 9th. The date marks the anniversary of the first official exit from Guantanamo, in 2004, of the Tipton Three, the three British citizens from Tipton (England) who were held for two years by the US government in extrajudicial detention. The piece meditates on the deferred temporality of a facility whose promise to be closed never arrives, except for those in possession of the ‘Exit Only’ ticket. As more visitors deliberately choose to enter in possession of this yearly ticket and with it to access and create an art critical space, the emergency measures of wartime are gradually disabled.
Sean Vegezzi (Visual Artist and Researcher, US)
Sean Vegezzi is an artist and researcher who examines urban topographies through image-making, sculpture, and writing. Vegezzi's research studies spatial politics' effect on the individual, blending personal experience with narratives of autonomy, privacy, and security. Vegezzi’s work dreams of alternative models of living in cities, where undefined areas give a semblance of solitude, the limitations of the city-as-bureaucracy are exposed, the all-encompassing damage caused by over-development is reversed, and the mission-creep of security apparatuses into everyday life is undermined, reconfigured, or even inverted by its subjects. Recent exhibitions include Circles at Neue Berliner Kunstverein in collaboration with Laura Poitras. Circles featured a series of collaborative works titled Edgelands, which examined obscured nodes of New York City's violent carceral and policing infrastructure.
Fiamma Montezemolo (Artist and Anthropologist, IT/US)
Fiamma Montezemolo is both an artist (MFA, San Francisco Art Institute) and an anthropologist (PhD, University Orientale of Naples). She is an established scholar in border studies and Professor in the Department of Cinema & Digital Media at the University of California, Davis. She has exhibited in various institutions among which: Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2019), Herbert Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (2019), Munich Jewish Museum, Germany (2019), La Galleria Nazionale, Roma (2019), Headlands Center for the Arts, California (2018), ASU Art Museum, Arizona (2019), Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco (2016), Armory Center for the Arts, Los Angeles (2014). She is represented by Magazzino gallery in Rome. She is widely published and the author of two monographs: on Zapatismo and on Chicano/a politics of representation, as well as co-author (with Rene’ Peralta and Heriberto Yepez) of Here is Tijuana (Blackdog Publishing, London, 2006) and co-editor (with Josh Kun) of Tijuana Dreaming, Life and Art at the Global Border (Duke U. Press, 2012).
Moderator:
Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director & Founder, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE)
Tatiana Bazzichelli is founder and director at Disruption Network Lab. Her focus of work is whistleblowing, network culture, art, and hacktivism. She is author of the books Whistleblowing for Change (2021), Networked Disruption (2013), Disrupting Business (2013), and Networking (2006). In 2011-2014 she was programme curator at transmediale festival in Berlin. She received a PhD degree in Information and Media Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Aarhus University in Denmark in 2011. Her PhD research, Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking, was the result of her 2009 visiting scholarship at the H-STAR Institute of Stanford University. In 2019-2021 she was appointed jury member for the Capital Cultural Fund by the German Federal Government and the city of Berlin, and in 2020-2022 jury member for the Kulturlichter prize, a new award for digital cultural education in Germany.
This Disruptive Friday is funded by Allianz Kulturstiftung, as part of the project “SMART PRISONS: Tracking, Monitoring & Control” (July 1, 2022, to June 20, 2023), curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli.
