Postcards

Nika Autor

experimental film, PAL DVD, color, 9', 2010

The footages are taken from the National Archive of Radio and Television of Slovenia. I was collecting the archive documentation from media reports on a migrant questions taken from 2001-2008. I was interested in a construction of the representation of asylum seekers, which is made by a dominant institution involved in a production of images and meanings. I wanted to show how images in itself (in a montage , way of filming..) implicates criminalization and victimization of the asylum seekers. Images of shapless and nameless people are reestablishing a discourse, which victimize or criminalize those people. Throughout the panopticum of the gaze, the production of dominant state images establishes the Other. Postcards are the first part of the fim pair „Postcards and Report on the situation of asylum seekers in Republic of Slovenia, January 2008 – August 2009“

Report on the situation of asylum seekers in Republic of Slovenia, January 2008 – August 2009

Nika Autor & Maja Cimerman

documentary film, PAL DVD, BW, 36'', 2010

The Film is trying to expose struggle and life of the asylum seekers in Slovenia. Asylum seekers are more and more becoming object of systematic physical and psychological violence. The Asylum Center has become an instrument for averting asylum seekers’ and dismantling the right to asylum, rather than being an instrument of their protection. Ever more present repression over asylum seekers coincides with the trend of asylum law. Film exposes the structure of the asylum legal regulation, it’s transformation, dissapearance of the right to asylum, criminalization of asylum seekers, sistematic physical and psychological violence over asylum seekers, emergement of european apartheid system, system of production of “sans papieres” while pointing out the self-organization of asylum seekers themselves and the meaning of social centres and open autonomous spaces that self-organized asylum seekers and their supporters are using in their everyday organizing. The film is the second part of the film pair „Postcards & Report on the situation of asylum seekers in Republic of Slovenia, January 2008 – August 2009“

Nika Autor (born 1982; lives and works in Ljubljana) works in the following media: film, performance art, photography, graphic prints, painting and video. The object of her artistic interest lies in the relation between the artist and his surroundings; www.autor.si