On Practices of Reappropriation in Digital Environments

Dr Marianna Liosi is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Essex, Visiting Fellow at the ViDi – Visual and Digital Cultures research centre, University of Antwerp, and a curator. In her research, she explores activist practices online and offline, focusing on social networks as digital archives, more-than-human as site of memory, digital environments and justice, and the question of the expanded spectator. She has published essays in edited books, such as Visual Activism in the 21st Century: Change and Resistance in an Unpredictable World (2022); Image Testimonies: Witnessing in Times of Social Media (2019), and Written in the Margins: Shubigi Rao (2017); and e-Journals, such as MAP – Media, Archive, Performance. She edited a collection of artists’ essays, as part of the exhibition Techno-Ecologies and Bodies of Memory: The Environment as Battleground. Liosi curated art exhibitions, film screenings, workshops, and seminars in art organisations and academic institutions, such as the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; Between Bridges, Berlin; Weissensee Fine Arts Academy, Berlin; University of Cologne; the eSseda.lab project space, Sousse; La Boîte Hors les Murs, Tunis; and Goethe-Institute Tunis.

In what ways do artists politically engage through the potential of the digital, and challenge its embedded ambiguities?

Observing digital environments as a grounded and territorialised yet ubiquitous space defined by relationships between organisms and their habitats, Marianna Liosi explores the ways in which diasporic Arab artists perform practices of reappropriation of lands, stories, and memories, reimagining and enacting possible futures. Referring to a timeframe spanning from the post-Arab Uprisings to the Gaza genocide, the presentation will explore a selection of artworks as case studies that explore colonial violence through AI-generated images and texts, retrofuture, and video games as “spatial stories” (Jenkins, 2004).

The artworks raise crucial questions on the role of AI in the fabrication of knowledge, history, identities, and models of being, as well as censorship and erasure; and gaming as a performative gesture of worldbuilding, in which modding turns into a tool of self-determination.

Events are free and open to all unless otherwise stated. The seminar will take place from 5-6pm and is followed by a drinks reception in the English Social Space from 6-7pm.

If you have specific accessibility needs for this event please get in touch. We will do our best to accommodate any requests: https://www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/events/42031