Krista Lynes

Research project

Superfluous: the movement’s media and places of passage

Project summary

The research project “Superfluous: movement media and places of passage” will focus on the iconography of the “migration crisis” and the mediation of the Mediterranean as a space of contestation around the themes of migration and borders, and will attempt to interrogate how, through various specific media processes and modalities of representation, it has been constituted as an object of political conflict, affective investment and legal maneuvering. The project focuses particularly on the media significance of two events: a) the sinking of a migrant boat off the island of Lampedusa, in 2013, and b) the appearance of images in 2015 (particularly the image of the body of the drowned Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi) that gave shape to the contours of the “crisis” by raising new North-South and East-West tensions within the eurozone, as well as between it and non-member countries. Adopting a broad visual and interdisciplinary cultural approach, the research will examine travel reports and documentaries, new 3D and interactive media forms that illustrate the spatial dynamics of the crisis, the production of selfies and social media networks, the work of activist and artist collectives, and artworks. All these elements of the proposed project seek to understand contemporary social movement media not only in their ability to make visible the sites of political struggle, but also in their mediating action between social actors, their capacity to galvanize political sentiment, for example, or to elaborate new forms of collective identity.