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BREM ANNUAL LECTURE: Mocking the Border - Carnivalesque Resistance in Times of Migration
Speaker: Dr Federica Mazzara, Associate Professor, University of Westminster
Date: 15 May 2025
Time: 17:00
Venue: S0.19
Registration Link: https://forms.office.com/e/cqds9XGmk9Link opens in a new window
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ABSTRACT: This paper is interested in identifying forms of creative visual resistance to a prevailing logic of border enforcement aimed at curbing undocumented human movement. These forms of resistance serve to underscore the porosity of borders and the irrational violence that increasingly defines their global management. This phenomenon is perpetuated through policies, rhetorical strategies, speech acts and media narratives that contribute to a toxic discourse of exclusion, effectively immobilising movement. From the perspective of this article, visual forms of resistance serve to ‘mock’ the border, and to enact a form of carnivalesque resistance that subverts and liberates the functional meaning of borders, highlighting their inefficiency, while transforming them into arenas of creative and critical social justice actions. This article undertakes an analysis of two instances of aesthetic digital production that mock the border. Both originate from the US-Mexico border and revolve around the Trump Wall.
About the Speaker: Dr Federica Mazzara is an Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster, London. Her research focuses on migration and its representation across various media. She curated the 2019 exhibition Sink Without Trace at P21 Gallery, which addressed the tragedy of migrant deaths at sea. She is the author of Reframing Migration: Lampedusa, Border Spectacle and the Aesthetics of Subversion (Peter Lang, 2019). Her current research project, Mocking the Border: Carnivalesque Resistance in Times of Migration, continues her engagement with the aesthetics of subversion and the politics of border spectacle.
Please reach out to raksha.gopal@warwick.ac.uk for any queries.