Lonnie Van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan

Mobilities Visiting Speakers:

Lonnie Van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, April 21st, 12:30-2pm

MacAlister Hall, Suite 4020 (CoAS Dean’s Conference Room)

Film-makers to speak at Drexel, followed by a Film Screening at 7pm at the Ibrahim Theatre, International House

Migration: Artistic Formations – Lonnie Van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan

Migration plays a significant role in the development of numerous modern artistic ideas and representations. This series examines the changing movements that transplant artists from one culture to another, intensifying migratory distinctions, and sharpening the conception of the creative role of displacement and estrangement within modern art.

Lonnie Van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan in person. Introduced by Professor Mimi Sheller, Director, Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, Drexel University.

Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers

dir. Lonnie van Brummelen in collaboration with Siebren de Haan, The Netherlands, 2007, 16mm, 63 mins, color, silent

Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers explores subsidized economy, the globalized sugar market, and how artistic practice can disrupt and reverse economic policies. Upon the discovery of anti-competitive policies set by the European Union to protect its native sugar production, and the detrimental impact of this on other countries, van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan staged an intervention. Their goal was to work around EU restrictions on sugar importation by turning European sugar dumped into Nigeria into sculptures, and returning it as an artistic product: a Monument of Sugar.

Grossraum (Borders of Europe)

dir. Lonnie van Brummelen in collaboration with Siebren de Haan, The Netherlands, 2004-2005, 35mm, 35 mins, color, silent

Grossraum is a “triptych” filmed along three sensitive crossing points on the European Union border: Hrebenne, a border post between Ukraine and Poland; the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in Morocco; and the green zone which splits Cyprus in two. By directing our gaze to the demarcations of the geopolitical “greater area” or “Grossraum” of the European Union, van Brummelen reveals the paradox of a zone of freedom whose development is dependent on the strength and policing of its borders.

For more info contact:

Mimi Sheller

Center for Mobilities Research and Policy

Drexel University

mimi.sheller@drexel.edu

 

Robert E. Cargni

Program Curator, Film

Ibrahim Theater @ International House

Mobilities Visiting Speaker: Cati Coe

Children’s (Im)mobilities: The Effects of Transnational Migration on Children’s Circulation in Ghanaian Households

The Center for Mobilities Research and Policy will host a lecture by Dr. Cati Coe as part of the Mobilities Visiting Speaker Series, on Monday, November 8, 2010 from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Paul Peck Alumni Center (32nd and Market Streets).

In Ghana, children, like adults, are often mobile, visiting a variety of different households and changing their residence often. As in the Caribbean, many children live with adults other than their parents, such as with a grandmother, uncle or family friend. Often, children move from poorer to richer households in situations sometimes seen as mutually beneficial and at other times as exploitative. International migration of parents and other relatives, however, changes children’s patterns of mobility. Despite their wealth relative to their relations back in Ghana, international migrants are more likely to leave behind or send back their children to live with relatives than to bring their relatives’ children to live with them, as would be expected. This lecture explores the residential mobility of children vis-a-vis adults; how their residential mobility is linked to their relative status, power and relationships and what such mobility or immobility means in how the joys and costs of raising children are distributed between households and across the globe.

Cati Coe, associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University-Camden,  has written on children and Ghana and examined how children understand nationalist projects, as presented in school. She has also published The Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools, Nationalism, Youth and the Transformation of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Her latest project, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, explores the effects of international migration on Ghanaian family life. Coe has been involved in editing two collections on the topic of children, youth and international migration to be coming out this year.

The Mobilities Visiting Speaker Series is a forum for leading scholars invited by the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy to present new research in the fields of mobilities research, tourism studies, migration and border studies, mobile communications, new mobile media and related interdisciplinary areas.This lecture is open to the entire Drexel community and invited guests from the region. Refreshments will be served. For more information, email Dr. Mimi Sheller at mimi.sheller@drexel.edu.