Duration: 36' 22''
Format: PAL DVD, bw, 2010
Short clip from movie:
The Film is trying to expose struggle and life of the asylum seekers in Slovenia. Asylum seekers are more and more becoming object of systematic physical and psychological violence. The Asylum Center has become an instrument for averting asylum seekers’ and dismantling the right to asylum, rather than being an instrument of their protection. Ever more present repression over asylum seekers coincides with the trend of asylum law. Film exposes the structure of the asylum legal regulation, it’s transformation, dissapearance of the right to asylum, criminalization of asylum seekers, sistematic physical and psychological violence over asylum seekers, emergement of european apartheid system, system of production of “sans papieres” while pointing out the self-organization of asylum seekers themselves and the meaning of social centres and open autonomous spaces that self-organized asylum seekers and their supporters are using in their everyday organizing.
Nika Autor in colaboration with Maja Cimerman
Production:
- IRZU Institute for sonic arts research
The film pair Report on the state of the asylum policy in the Republic of Slovenia from January 2008 to August 2009 and Postcards by Nika Autor critically deconstructs the dominant discourse of the asylum and migration policy, lucidly pointing to the principles of exclusion behind it. The films are a reflection upon discourses that legitimise the modus of the disciplining practices which regulate the social situation of asylum seekers, constructing their subjectivity and identities. Further, they point to marginalization and discrimination. From a completely different perspective, Nika Autor legitimises exactly what the dominant regime of representation has hidden and supplanted, revealing that what has been concealed from us is the practice of segregation. Her breaking down of how the social hegemony is inscribed into the regime of representation allows her to crucially transform the existing discourse of the asylum policy. This of course meaning that what is taken apart is the stereotypical representation since a stereotype is regarded as a crucial point of legitimating subjection and preclusion. And this is where the point of resistance comes into play, pointing to mechanisms of power and control and unveiling the ruptures in the dominant construction of reality. By unearthing the hegemonic paradigm, Nika Author seeks to show what failed to be represented and what remained unseen and omitted. Representation therefore is not a politically neutral event, for it legitimises distinctively its object of vision, functioning simultaneously as a social practice the narrative of which is clearly connected to the territory of power, interests and politics.
Ljubljana, 5. 5. 2010 Sergej Kapus