An island under surveillance? Meriem Bennani’s Party On The CAPS (2018) and the poor image in the digital age

ABSTRACT

The Western gaze instituted by the cinematographic apparatus constructs racialized subjects and supports processes of dispossession. My present transmedial artistic research project engages with the biopolitics of representation in archival film material, from a decolonial perspective. By drawing from academic and non-academic sources on relations between colonialism, capitalism, and technologies of control, this paper studies manifestations of surveillance in non-fiction film, to analyse the proto-genre of medical propaganda in former European colonies. Moreover, it proposes to scrutinize the long-term impact colonial cinema and its structures of representation had and still have on processes of subjectification, haunting present-day gender and race-determined profiling by mainstream film, CCTV, and drones.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonial
• archive
• anarchive
• gaze
• surveillance

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Martin Bartelmus

Martin Bartelmus is a Postdoctoral Scholar of German Literary, Media, and Cultural Theory at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He studied German Literature, Philosophy, Political and Social Studies at Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg and received his PhD in Media and Cultural Studies as part of the DFG graduate program ‘Materiality and Production’ from Heinrich Heine University. His PhD-Thesis is entitled Cultural Born Killer: Poetics of Killing around 1900. Before joining the department of German Literature at Heinrich Heine University for his current postdoctoral position, he worked as a curator for the Museum of Natural History of the Benrath Palace and Park Foundation and as a freelancer for the Julia Stoschek Collection. He is interested in Animal and Plant Studies, time-based media and French theory.