Enclaves, Exception and the Camp as a Counter-laboratory, Florian Schneider

Biography: 

Florian Schneider is a filmmaker, writer, and developer in the fields of new media, networking and open source technologies. In his work he focusses on bordercrossings between mainstream and independent media, art and activism, theory and technology. As a filmmaker he directed several award-winning documentaries and designed and realized two theme-evenings for the german-french tv station arte on the topics of migration and activism. As a writer he has worked for major german newspapers and magazines such as Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

He is one of the initiators of the KEIN MENSCH IST ILLEGAL (no one is illegal) campaign at documentaX and subsequent projects such as the "noborder network". He founded, designed and supported countless online-projects, such as the european internet platform D-A-S-H and the online-network KEIN.ORG. He is the director of the new media festivals MAKEWORLD (2001), NEURO
(2004) and works currently as the director of the multimedia performance project "DICTIONARY OF WAR". He has lectured at universities, museums, and conferences worldwide.

http://www.d-a-s-h.org/
http://www.contrast.org/borders/kein/
http://www.noborder.org/
http://www.kein.org/
http://www.makeworlds.org/
http://neuro.kein.org/

Florian Schneider, Munich
Summary: 

In the night of the 28th September 2005, about 250 migrants decided to climb across the fence that separates the Spanish enclave of Ceuta from Moroccan territory. What was later on reported in the news across the globe as "storming Fortress Europe" was in fact a deliberate collective decision taken by a large and very well organized group of subsaharian migrants that have been hiding for months in the mountain forests of north Morocco.

Florian Schneider took the events around the spanish enclaves Melilla and Ceuta as a starting point to speculate about the practical and theoretical impact of both the transgression and the following scandalization of the european border regime as well as images, imaginations and imagineries in a state ranging from enclosure to exception that becomes a rule...

Florian Schneider gave the lecture about politics of borders on the case study of Spanish cities Ceuta and Mellila. He had shown how western media and governments today’s, threat the issue of immigrants. Florian Schneider was specifically talking about how media images through television and film industries from the west are displaying message of the West to African countries and how these images creating imaginatorium in Africa.