Panel 3: Land/Mark

The final panel, Land/Mark, featured media artists Melissa Friedling and Amir Husak, who shared works emerging from the Beyond Borders fieldwork in Barcelona. Friedling discussed walking and filming the Chemin Walter Benjamin with a Bolex camera as a way of sensing the “marks” left by histories of flight and resistance—drawing on Benjamin’s distinction between the mark that emerges and the sign that is imposed. Husak presented material from his forthcoming project The Eye of the Mountain, which examines a European mountain border frequently crossed by migrants. Citing thinkers such as Etienne Balibar and Tim Ingold, he framed borders as assemblages of lines—traced by bodies, landscapes, laws, and stories.

MEL FRIEDLING, Director of Graduate Program and Associate Professor of Filmmaking at The New School, is a media artist, writer, and educator interested in the jumbled layers of media histories.

AMIR HUSAK is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The New School. Combining film, video, sound, interactive media, essay and experimental techniques, his work explores documentary as social practice and investigates representations of history, migration and memory.