The screening will be followed by a debate with the filmmaker Daniela Swarowsky moderated by Amal Khalaf from the Serpentine Galleries' Centre for Possible Studies.
Messages from Paradise #2 opens a door into the lives of young people and how they experience their home in relation to „the other side“. Every summer, Dutch youths of Moroccan origin spend their holidays in the native lands of their parents and grandparents in the Moroccan Rif area. Whereas the young Moroccans from the Rif dream of migration and travel to Europe. What happens when both sides meet each other in Morocco during the summer holidays? What do they expect from one another? What do they dream of, and where is home for them?
Messages from Paradise #2 is the second part of a trilogy about the myths and dreams of migration and the search for a better life elsewhere. The Messages from Paradise project is a series of fictive dialogues where participants tell their story in front of the camera in an imaginary conversation with an unknown other. Swarowsky also invites the participants to react to the stories of others, creating a dialogue that brings places and people together who would otherwise never meet and connects different stories that would otherwise never be told as one story.
Daniela Swarowsky is an Austrian artist and cultural producer living and working in Berlin. After seven years in New York and eleven years in Rotterdam, she has developed over the past thirteen years a series of art-projects and films related to universal questions around migration. Her film trilogy, Messages from Paradise — About the Permanent Longing for Elsewhere, is a series of fictive dialogs around imaginaries of a better life and myths associated with migration. Since 2002 she is the artistic director of the Rotterdam based ZiM foundation. 2010-2014 she was associated researcher at the Berlin based research institute ZMO for the research/art project In Search of Europe and was curator of the In Search of Europe/ISOE? exhibition at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin. In this framework she has developed Our Foreign Agenda consisting of different formats reflecting the biased notions of North:South collaborations. She has lectured, curated and/or shown her work in Europe, the U.S., Canada, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Senegal.
www.insearchofeurope.de
www.messagesfromparadise.nl
In addition to the screening at the ACF the film will also be shown at SOAS followed by a debate.
Wednesday 23 April, 5-7pm
OAS, Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies, Russell Square: College Buildings, Khalili Lecture Theatre
