Research seminar with Christian Rossipal: "Visual Praxis: Artistic Research and the Black Box of Detention"

Abstract:

In a California detention center, former film student Mohamed X reflects on his four-year confinement. Blocked from filming inside the opaque system, he recounts organizing a labor strike against $1 daily pay and a brutalized hunger strike, revealing the unimaginable realities of immigration detention.

This is a short synopsis for the documentary Mesa Verde (2026), which will be screened during this hybrid screening-seminar. Discussing the process behind the film, I will reflect on the perennial artistic problem (aesthetic and ethical) of portraying violence without reproducing it. That problem gets acutely pronounced in the context of migrant detention. Partly for practical reasons: Cameras are not allowed in facilities and detention centers are veritable black boxes. Partly because the displaced are caught in a double-bind of visibility – between historical erasure and hypervisibility. How to work in a visual medium in the face of all this?

I will discuss different artistic strategies of tackling this problem, through the documentary's production and through my own trajectory of working across moving-image theory and practice: from theoretically informed practice and vice versa, to projects funded in the field of Artistic Research. In addition to Mesa Verde, we will see clips from projects that range from a film installation on Édouard Glissant to an experimental documentary on the former Swedish Caribbean colony of Saint-Barthélemy, that all actualize the problem of visibility, exposure, and opacity.

Bio:

Christian Rossipal is a filmmaker and Sandrew postdoctoral fellow in Cinema Studies at Stockholm University. Christian previously held postdoc positions at Yale and Cambridge and works with artist Salad Hilowle in the ongoing artistic research project The Black Beach: Moving Images between Swedish and Caribbean Shores, funded by The Swedish Research Council. Christian holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University and is a member of the collective Noncitizen.