Marchandage politique can be loosely translated to political bargaining. This tactic is often employed to distract the body politic from humanitarian, mineral or economical crisis by offering alternative spectacles as a distraction.
Free trade, the Bou Craa phosphate mine, Telecom market access, self-determination rights and EU fishery policy are some of the elements obfuscated by the marchandage politique at the core of the externalisation and hyper-technification of the European border. Border surveillance technologies are producing modes of ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ reliant in automatic identification systems, remote sensing, system of systems architectures and machine learners. This automated gaze remotely controls and executes human and non-human bodies by performing modes of power, endorsing innovation, structuring international stewardship and the administration of human rights.
A distinctive Euro-futurism is emerging, which celebrates border surveillance technology, war on the non-European bodies and the financial acceleration of the military-industrial complex. This Euro-vision conflates spectacle with boredom, evidence with anecdotes, witnessing with deception and ground-truths with counterfeit-paradises. Marchandage politique requires strategies of unpacking that examine the ecology of practices embedded in political distraction.
Euro-vision, or the Making of the Automated Gaze was a collaboration that included ethnographic and archival research in Morocco to investigate the different stakes in the increasing funding in the securitisation of the EU border. The project team developed a method, décollage, to critically chart the affective modes of power entangled in this discussion. Décollage is an artistic method which inscribes itself within criticaltechnical practice, concerned with uncovering obfuscated material conditions of production.
You can watch a film and listen to a podcast about the project here
Dr Btihaj Ajana - academic lead
Dr Btihaj Ajana is an international scholar in the fields of digital culture and social analysis. Her academic research is interdisciplinary in nature and spans many areas of expertise including the critical study of new media technologies and identity systems, digital health and self-tracking technologies, museum developments and curatorial processes, immigration and citizenship governance, and the socio-political and ethical dynamics of surveillance culture.
Geographically, Btihaj’s work has covered the UK, UAE, Denmark and the rest of the EU. She was Marie Curie Fellow (2015-2017) at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies where she has been researching the phenomenon of the Quantified Self and health tracking culture. Find out more about this ongoing project on www.metriclife.net.
Btihaj has a BA (Hons) with First Class in Media Studies and Computing Science from London South Bank University, an MA with Distinction in Digital Media from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a PhD in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to joining King’s College London in 2010, she taught sociology at the LSE and worked with media organisations specialising in factual programming about the Middle East.
FRAUD - artistic lead
FRAUD is a métis duo of artist-researchers (Dr Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo) currently resident in Somerset House Studios. Their backgrounds include computational and software culture, environmental history, postcolonial feminism, cultural studies, disruptive design, performance and space systems engineering.
The duo focuses on exploring forms of slow violence and necropolitics that are embedded in the entanglement of archiving practices and technical objects, the negentropic logic of global logistics, and erasure as a disruptive technology in knowledge production. They also belong to networks of artist-researchers such as the Critical Software Thing (CST) exploring the critical face of "execution".
FRAUD has received the Wellcome Trust People Award (UK), TapCity (US), Catedra Holdim (SP), Interactivos? ’10 (BR), Disonanzias (Basque Country), Emergent Geographies (SP), the architectural award for the Madrid Civil Registry building in collaboration with OSS, and funding from the Economic and Social Science Rearch Council (UK), the Canada Art Council, and the Danish Art Council (DM).