Medical propaganda as enabling device of the surveillance apparatus – decolonizing and anarchiving non-fiction at the eye film museum archive

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 analyze the sub-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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Paula Albuquerque

Paula Albuquerque is an artist and scholar with a PhD in Media Studies and a Postdoc in Artistic Research by the University of Amsterdam. She is currently a Senior Researcher and teacher at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Her artwork has been shown at, i.e. Nieuw Dakota Gallery, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Bradwolff Projects Gallery (Amsterdam), International Film Festival Rotterdam and Sheffield DOC|Fest. Upcoming events include a presentation with Uniondocs NY at Looiersgracht 60, and solo exhibitions at Bradwolff Projects and Zone2Source (Amsterdam). She published the books Enter the Ghost – Haunted Media Ecologies (solo exhibition project book 2020) and The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), and regularly presents at conferences, i.e. MIT’s Media in Transition; Visible Evidence and NECS.