Notes on Orientalism

Curated by Silvana Fiorese and Simone Frangi

Notes on Orientalism. Video practices at the age of radical difference is a temporary cinema organized into four different sessions, 2 hours long each, that will be screened at Viafarini space, Fabbrica del Vapore.

Taking as a starting point the physical and virtual archives of Lo Schermo dell’arte, the selection curated by Silvana Fiorese and Simone Frangi attempts to re-enact the notion of Orientalism as formulated by the theoretician of Palestinian origins Edward W. Said in 1978, trying to intercept it in recent audiovisual productions which deal with postcolonial issues and anti-imperialist postures. While introducing the idea of Orientalism, Said unveils in an extremely analytical and polemical way that typical European modality of establishing relationships with its geopolitical otherness through the affirmation of Europe as a special pole of the processes of identity construction. In the frame of the analysis of European colonial dynamics, Orientalism emerges as a cultural and political project aiming to dominate and exercise influence on East – understood as a metaphor of everything that is not Europe – thanks to economical, political and military power structures. This idea of the positional superiority of Europe, which seems to be supported by the imagination of a factitious Eastern World and by its partial and non radical difference, supports in fact  the priority given to Europe in the field of geopolitical identity-making.

Starting from an attentive analysis of the pivotal work of Edward Said and its segmentation, Notes on Orientalism takes the shape of a program of screenings of artists that try to undermine, rectify or denunce the predatory and coercitive process of the “vampirization” of the difference, taking into account its actuality.

INFORMATION

May 14th – June 9th 2015
Viafarini
Milan, Fabbrica del Vapore
Via Procaccini 4

Free entrance /
All films are in original version