June 2005, the forest of Benyounes in Morocco, 2 km from the fence that separates Ceuta from Morocco. As happens every week, we come across African citizens who are hoping that here they will find an opportunity to cross into Spanish territory, into Europe. Two people from our collective meet with our working group and we talk about many things that worry and affect us. After sharing our stories, we decide to make a documentary that will show the realities that we experience in Morocco as a country of transit.

In Benyounes forest, “la foret” as they called their habitants, was the last stage of a long trip for thousands of people coming from Sub-Saharan Africa. Close to the fence that divides Ceuta (Spain) from Morocco, they establish in a variable time, before flank the last obstacle in they way to Europe, looking for a better life. Sometimes running away from wars, politics persecutions, hunger or a precarious economy situation. Lots of times of all of this. In years, the migrants pass across this forest and after some weeks or months they manage to arrive to Ceuta. In finals of 2004, European union start agreements of subcontract Morocco in the control of the Spanish – Moroccan border. The habitants of the forest, started to feel the effects of this agreements: the increase of illegal devolutions, the abuses from the civil police, they install police controls near the forest, they forbid the access to current water, military attacks to the camps in with they made mass arrests and rapes as a war weapon. The border it's close. Systematic violation of human rights, financed with the tax of the democratic European Union citizens. The migrants organize themselves in spaces like this and construct spaces; support nets in Moroccan territory, confronting and resisting this way the European politics. In the forest of Benyounes, they organized themselves from origin communities. In February of 2005, decided between all the community's, record this video, to made visible their situation, in with they report the systematic violation of their human rights, the absolutely abandonment from the NGO's, Associations an Human Rights Institutions, an they demand their citizens condition and they require their rights as human beings.

Document on the transnational and about those who succumb on the border of dreams. 6th Independent Vídeo & Interactive Phenomena Show

Map compilation: The Palestine-Israel area. The Ottoman Empire. Ottoman provinces in the Middle East. Jewish and Arabic towns in Palestine under the Ottoman Empire. The Middle East divided up between France and Great Britain. The Palestine – Transjordan division. The UN partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews. A Map of the main aquifers in the area. Jewish and Arab towns in Palestine before the partition decreed by the UN. The creation of the State of Israel. Maps of the area after successive wars and crises. The Israeli control matrix of the territory. Map of Greater Jerusalem reclaimed by the state of Israel. Those under Palestine autonomy acknowledged by Israel. Annexations by the wall.  

A series of videos that trace the routes of several African immigrants through Italy to France where they have ultimately joined the French Foreign Legion. An emigrant draws on a map of the world the route he has followed. In this way, creates a bridge between the feelings of an emigrant being tossed back and forth and the superficiality of a geographical map.

From 4th to 6th November

Decolonizing Vision  - Migrant Knowledge

To decolonize vision would be to return it, to integrate it into the body and the other senses, to integrate it into place, its forces and emptiness... to rescue it from the tyranny of the merely optical and open it up to the “other eyes” of the body and the mind, to make it whole. Also, to open up dialogue with the power of vision that the dominant culture in the West excluded or dissected until it was extinguished.

Toni Serra *) Abu Ali

The selection of videos presented in the Migrant Knowledge project puts forward alternative constructions of thought, analysis, and reflection concerning migrations. It does so through a plurality of views, experiences, memories, and stories that converge in a three-day program live at the Centre Civic Can Felipa, and a two-week online audio-visual menu, based on a selection of videos from the Archives OVNI – Observatory of Unidentified Video.

In the face of an understanding of multiculturalism as a space that is predefined and negotiated by power, the institution, and violence, the “other” is partitioned and enclosed. Thus, it is increasingly urgent and necessary to come together and exchange knowledge and experiences so as to bring about a profound transformation of the notions that have shaped the globalized world. This entails a radical redefinition of the notions of time, work, culture, and of the persistence of a single model with totalitarian tendencies. To start a process of decolonization by deconstructing and transforming the notions and beliefs that have shaped our societies.

Modern colonialism is not only a historical phenomenon, it is primarily an attitude towards life and the world. A way of looking that divides and dissects all things, a way of looking that creates and projects ”otherness”, and sees it as a space to be occupied: as territory, culture, even time, to be colonized. By its very nature it can neither understand nor put into practice an organic unity of things, or of life, let alone of economics. It perpetually needs the “other”, to the point of severing it from itself.

The selected program of videos includes resistances from various origins and languages, which are deployed against the imposition of single, hegemonic thought. Stories that make it possible to think, to build other worlds and to discover existing ones that are often hidden by screens of ignorance and prejudice, and by stereotyped images of the “other.”

The video selection is curated by Toni Cots. The program is organized by Jiser and the OVNI Archives, and is part of the process of reflection carried out by the Migrant Knowledge collective.

Jiser, which means “bridge” in Arabic, is a non-profit association based in Barcelona, whose objective is to promote artistic creation and the use of art as a tool for social transformation in the Euro-Mediterranean space, by carrying out activities that promote the exchange and rapprochement between different artistic and cultural realities in the region.

The OVNI Archives compile and document a three-decade history, from analog video to digital video in the time of ‘social’ networks. The materials contained in the Archives are the result of various thematic research projects, a whole constellation of titles with the common denominator of free expression and reflection on individual and collective fears and pleasures, coming together to build a multi-faceted vision, like thousands of small eyes that deepen and explore our world, or announce other possible ones. A research process in which the main values are heterogeneity, contradiction, and the subjectivity that the Archives spring from. In itself, they are an antidote for cloning and repetition in the era of hyper-connectivity.

Migrant Knowledge is a group made up of activists, artists and researchers who bring their diverse experience and background to a process of critical and collective reflection on the symbolic and institutional violence that affects migrants and/or racialized people. It aims to create communal spaces that draw attention to and fight against the mechanisms that legitimize the exercise of this violence, and create narratives of resistance that support the right for people who migrate to have rights.

This process is woven together by connecting artistic practice and reflection. It is open to a plurality of stories, and it is flexible in its path... It defends not only the exercise of critical consciousness, but also the carrying out of actions that transform situations of discrimination, racism, and inequality.

Thursday, 4th November 18:30h - 21:00h

VIOLENCE <> RESISTANCE

London "I don't call it rioting, I call it an insurrection"

BBC, 2011. UK, VO Eng 5Min.

An interview with writer and local resident Darcus Howe on the events that took place in London in 2011. "Have some respect for an old West Indian 'negro' " "I don't call it rioting, I call it an insurrection...of the masses of the people!»

Göran Hugo Olsson, 2014. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, USA, VO English,  85Min.

An archive-driven documentary covering the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation in the Third World, as well as an exploration into the mechanisms of decolonization through text fragments from Frantz Fanon’s T he Wretched of the Earth .

Friday, 5 November 18:30h - 21:00h

Le problème algérien et l'economie française

Jean Pierre Gambarotta, 2006. VO French. 5Min.

A French government report explaining the reasons why it was impossible to accept Algeria’s independence.

Pierre-Yves Vandeweed 2011.Belgium, Western Sahara. VO Arab, 74Min.

Drawing from stories of flight, exile, interminable waiting and arrest, and persecuted lives on both sides of the wall that divides the Western Sahara, Territoire perdu bears witness to the Sahrawi people, their land and their entrapment in other people’s dreams. The film juxtaposes sonorous landscapes, black-and-white portraits and nomadic poetics.

Session in collaboration with the Barcelona Independent Film Festival, l'Alternativa.

Lettre à la Republique

The U.S.-Mexican Border is the site of a disturbing increase in violence and racial intolerance. Along the border there are now a number of autochthonous groups that have organized with the stated purpose of ending undocumented immigration. “Natives” follows the individuals involved in San Diego's anti-immigration movement. Relying principally on a direct cinema style and an eye for the absurd, the film critiques the autochthonous position by contrasting their professed love of country with their racist and anti-democratic attitudes. Though the US has long maintained a reputation as a haven for immigrants, there is nonetheless a strong tradition of xenophobia. In the decade of the 1990s, there was a new surge of anti-immigrant sentiment. This film examines the autochthonous discourse along the US-Mexico border, a place that brings issues of nationalism and intolerance into sharp focus.