Invisible Borders & Participatory Documentary in Contested Spaces ||Nitin Sawhney

In this talk Nitin Sawhney, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The New School, will reflect on recent experiences from participatory urban workshops and documentary film projects conducted in Moscow, Gaza and Guatemala.

He will share outcomes from a workshop conducted at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow this summer. The Invisible Borders Lab (moscow.bordr.org/) engaged designers, urbanists, researchers, and performance artists in revealing the unusual borders, social conditions, and thresholds of transformation in Moscow. Participants investigated people’s perceptions of borders in the city through techniques such as urban mapping, social research, game design, location-based digital narratives, social network analysis, visualization and performance.

In the second part of the talk, Sawhney will discuss participatory media projects he has been undertaking including two recent documentary films, Flying Paper (FlyingPaper.org) about creative DIY kite making and flying with youth in Gaza and Zona Intervenida (zonaintervenida.org) about memory, body and genocide through performance with artists in Guatemala. We will consider methodologies, technical and aesthetic challenges in engaging participants in such creative visual investigations through the medium of documentary film.