Crisis, Deceleration, and the Visual Poetics of Refusal. Raphaël Cuomo and Maria Iorio’s “Sudeuropa” (2005–7)

Abstract

Today Photojournalism and Contemporary Art risk to spectacularize Mediterranean migration as crisis and to reaffirm the securitarian control on migrants’ bodies. The visual archive of Mediterranean migration-as-crisis should thus be understood not simply as a collection of representations of border crossings, but also as material sites for the (re)production of borders themselves. Considering this frame, this article will explore an alternative model: the use of deceleration technique in video as a counterforce to the border crisis imaginary and, more specifically, the Raphaël Cuomo and Maria Iorio’s experimental film Sudeuropa (2005-2007).