UC Berkeley

Vision in Ruins explores the practice of art, video, and visuality in an era of globalization. In contrast to past writings on video beholden to its mechanisms and the legacy of western modernism, my inquiry approaches video from a philosophical, postcolonial, and feminist perspective. Sourced to its Latin root, the word video translates as "I see," a statement that illuminates how video encloses a sense of vision that is not only solely bound with the eyes, but is more broadly entwined with the transparency of a subject, its sight, and its presence. Video (I see) is the understanding of vision as an open field, one that is coupled with power and that I relate to both the visualities of modern warfare and liberal thought as it pervades the discourses of art and human rights. Against such understanding of vision as an open field, my dissertation approaches vision as a restricted site. With each assertion of video, I suggest that a boundary is drawn. My dissertation approaches video from the other side of this boundary, from the position of subjects displaced by the political histories of global war, migration and exile, and describes their attempt to rework the field of vision. Rather than treat video as an object, I treat video is as a lens onto the themes of vision, aperture, passage, opacity, disappearance, calling, and ruins. Vision in Ruins problematizes the openness of vision and seeks to write a different story of video. It reworks the visual as one attuned to the conditions of invisibility and unspeakability that often become elided in favor of 'appearance' in the forms of liberal thought. It suggests that when one works from the ruins, one invites a renewal of politicized practice, where appearance is not an object but a modality and where each appearance is also, always, a disappearance. The orientation is not to the 'appearance' of alterity but rather, but to the invisible, the unspeakable, and to the temporality of other life worlds. In order to rethink visuality in an era of globalization, I suggest we must learn to work in a gap between visuality and alterity. It is a gap that shifts art's relation to the cinematic, to war, to human rights, and to conceptions of the global-- all of which I reconsider in light of a visuality of relation that works in a space where what remains invisible and unspeakable might direct us toward a different sense of world and how we see it.