ART + RESEARCH - Mirjana Mitrovic

**Third Space Walk. Flâneuses* between virtual and material urban spaces.**

The interaction between societies and technologies has always shaped our everyday life in urban spaces. At the same time, the boundaries between analogue and virtual worlds are dissolving. What emerges is a hybrid third space between the so-called reality and virtuality. Still, this space is often thought of in dichotomies such as online and offline, which diminishes our understanding of cultural and social changes in today’s cities. Thinking of virtual and physical spaces as intertwined, permits a new perspective to understand, influence, and debate current and future dynamics of digitalization and urban life.
Flânerie has never stopped being en vogue. However, for a long time, it was the white male European flâneur who walked the city. Approaching this tradition from feminist, intersectional, and postcolonial perspectives permits a deconstruction of this figure and opens up possibilities to create alternative stories and otherwise-informed knowledge around it. Grounded in the practice of flânerie, the Third Space Walk functions as a method to broaden access to public urban spaces and overcome the separate imaginations of digital and analogue worlds.
The exhibition presents various artistic and research-based positions that take flânerie as a core element of their exploration of the urban space. Across different media, the works reflect on, create, and shape emerging third spaces. The project lives and continues to grow also in the digital space.

multimedia project (collective exhibition)
mexico & germany, 2022

Project Website:
thirdspacewalk.mirjana-mitrovic.de

Exhibited at:
re:publica, Berlin, Germany, 2022
Galerie im Medienhaus der UdK, Berlin, Germany, 2022

Pink.Glitter.Violence.

Sparkles. The pink glitter and the shattered glass are sparkling together on the asphalt. Symbols that were fused during the protesters’ rage in the night of the 16th August 2019 in Mexico City. This fusion radically changed the connotation of pink glitter but also started a social discussion about violence. On one side, the violence that kills several women in Mexico every day. On the other, the violence of the women trashing bus stations, monuments and police stations as a form of protest. Thereby these mostly young women all of a sudden destroyed the conventional expectations of a woman with a bag of pink glitter in her hands.

photography installation (solo exhibition)
mexico, 2019

Exhibited at:
Mz* Baltazar’s Laboratory, Vienna, Austria, 2022
Galerie des August Bebel Instituts, Berlin, Germany, 2021
Projekt- und Hörgalerie A und V, Leipzig, Germany, 2020
Atelier Automatique, Bochum, Germany, 2020

Internet es nuestra. The current discourses of cyberfeminist movements in Mexico City.

Cyberfeminists primarily act within the Internet, often regarded as a global virtual space without borders. However, the discourses of the Mexican cyberfeminists show that their actions are heavily influenced by the activists’ local contexts. In Mexico City the current cyberfeminist activism is marked by other autonomous urban feminist movements and the politics of the local PRD government. Additionally, “machismo” and violence against women from catcalling to assault to femicides impact the activists’ lives on a daily basis. Within virtual spaces these phenomena reappear, e.g. in the form of “trolls” who insult, threaten and intimidate. Cyberfeminists thus inhabit the hybrid zones on the disappearing lines between virtual spaces and local physical world. Within this framework Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985), which also came to be the cyberfeminists’ manifesto, remains relevant as it further questions these borders, particularly between human and technology, woman and man. In order to grasp these multiple levels of blurred dualisms and dichotomies of spaces and gender constructions, this discourse analysis critically examines the activists’ media creations in form of text, image and audio-visual media as well as the press coverage about their actions from 2015 to 2017. Based on the thoughts of Michel Foucault and the method of Margarete and Siegfried Jäger the paper hence shows how current cyberfeminist movements interpret the hybridities surrounding them. Moreover it is analysed how the societal contexts influence their activism and what impact from the global virtual space onto the constructions of reality within the local population the activists can make.

Part of this research is the exhibition project „Enlaces | Links“.

academic research
mexico & germany, 2018

Presented at:
“Conocimiento, poder y transformación digital en América Latina“ Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutsche Lateinamerikaforschung (ADLAF), Munich, Germany, 2021
“Plataforma de Diálogo: Nuevos discursos de odio y sus contradiscursos en América Latina” Sede Regional Merian CALAS Cono Sur, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2019
“4S 2018. TRANSnational STS” Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sydney, Australia, 2018
“LASA 2018. Latin American Studies in a globalized World” Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Barcelona, Spain, 2018
“Congreso Internacional Perspectivas de los jóvenes frente a las crisis. Identidad, violencia, desigualdad social y medio ambiente”, Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Mexico, 2018
“XXIV Coloquio Internacional de Estudios de Género. Ciencia, Tecnología y Género” Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico, 2017
“Nachwuchstagung: Aktuelle Entwicklungen in Lateinamerika” Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Akademie der Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Weingarten, Germany, 2017

Related publications:
Mitrović, M. (2018): “Contra la violencia en línea y por una #InternetFeminista.” In: Heinrich Böll Stiftung México.
Mitrović, M. (2017): “La cyborg, la Malinche y las (e)stereotipas.” In: Heinrich Böll Stiftung México.
Mitrović, M. (2017): “La Esperanza de que la binaridad de género se difumine en Internet.” In: Pillku, pp. 123-125.

„Volksverräter“

This stop motion essay short film is a reflection about the ongoing rise of extrem right wing movements in Germany, questioning how to react and debate (or not) with them. (In German only)

Zur Diffamierung aller Andersdenkenden wurde in Deutschland die Bezeichnung „Volksverräter“ unter „besorgten Bürgern“ zum verbreiteten Ausdruck. 2016 wurde es zum Unwort des Jahres gewählt. In ihrer Begründung nannte die Jury die klaren Bezüge des Begriffs zum Nationalsozialismus sowie das implizierte ethnisch-biologistische Verständnis des Wortes „Volk“. Darüber hinaus wurde verdeutlicht, dass das Wort „die für Demokratie notwendigen Diskussionen in der Gesellschaft abwürgt”.
Aber wenn keine Diskussion stattfindet, stattfinden kann oder stattfinden soll: Was nützen mir meine Argumente?

Regie, Kamera, Text: Mirjana Mitrović und Jan-Holger Hennies
Deutschland 2017, Full HD, 3 Minuten

stop motion essay short film
germany, 2017

Award:
“Förderpreis”, Kunstwettbewerb, “Was nützen Ihnen die Tatsachen? Wenn sie nicht wissen, was sie damit anfangen sollen!”, Willi Muenzenberg Forum, Berlin, Germany, 2017

Exhibited at:
FMP1, Berlin, Germany, 2017

Screened at:
Lichtblick Kino, Berlin, Germany, 2017

Hybrid worlds: flânerie between analogue and digital realities in urban spaces.

Digital technologies are shaping our everyday life in urban spaces and the boundaries between analogue and digital worlds seem to dissolve. A new hybrid space, characterized by mobility and constant networking, has emerged. How can we understand these enmeshed spaces in cities to be able to influence their current state and imagine their futures from a diverse perspective? The „Third Space Walk“ is a new method that I am working on in my PhD at Berlin University of the Arts to critically and attentively enter today’s public urban spaces and to overcome separate imaginations of „real“ and „virtual“ worlds. I gave workshops with women* in Mexico City and Berlin and invited them to participate by rethinking the figure flâneur (Walter Benjamin) from a feminist and postcolonial perspective, imagining the urban space as hybrid, a third space (Homi K. Bhabha) between analogue and digital realities, seeing their body in the context of the cyborg (Donna Haraway) and presented the results in an exhibition in Berlin. Hence, the method is an experiment about how to rethink our relationship to and wishes for digital processes in urban spaces and to create a platform that expresses and discusses the outcome of the method from diverse perspectives in an open, fragmented and more accessible way that shows the process itself.

Part of this research is the exhibition project „Third Space Walk. Flâneuses* between virtual and material urban spaces.“.

academic research
mexico & germany, since 2019

Presented at:
“4S 2022. Reunion, recuperation, reconfiguration: Knowledges and technosciences for living together.” Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)/ESOCITE, Cholula, Mexico, 2022
“Urban Spaces And Landscapes“ (II) Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria, 2022
“Shocks, Turmoils, and Transformations: Symposium Feminist Geographies“ AK Feministische Geographie, Berlin, Germany, 2022
“EASST 2022. Politics of Technoscientific Futures“ European association for the study of science and technology (EASST), Feria de Madrid, Madrid, Spain, 2022
“Geomedia 2021. Off the Grid“ Universität Siegen, Siegen, Germany, 2021
“IPCC 2021. Collaborations“ Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey, 2021
“4S 2021. Good Relations” Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Toronto, Canada, 2021
“Urban Spaces And Landscapes“ (I) Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria, 2021

The limits of the fall and other red lines

During the official commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall two buses with dozens of journalists and activists were traveling to the European border in Bulgaria. Protesting against the European migration politics the art collective Centre for Political Beauty had called for the „First Fall of the European Wall“.
Mirjana Mitrovic was part of the organizing team and accompanied the trip. She captured her impressions on analog film.

photography exhibition
europe, 2014

Exhibited at:
Museo Casa de la Memoria Indómita, Mexico City, Mexico, 2020
Bezirk, Guadalajara, Mexico, 2020

Related publications:
Mitrović, M. (2021). „Los límites de las caídas y otras lineas rojas. Die Grenzen des Falls und andere rote Linien.“ Guadalajara (Mexiko): Navegante Arte Múltiple.

Enlaces | Links

A multimedia exhibiton project about feminist activism and internet(-technology) in Mexico and Germany. (In German and Spanish only)

Das Projekt ist über feministischen Aktivismus und Internet(technologie) in Mexiko und Deutschland. Herzstück ist die in Zusammenarbeit mit Aktivist*innen und Kollektiven erstellte multimediale Ausstellung “Wir sind vernetzt | Estamos Conectadas”. Diese wurde 2017 im Museo de la Memoria Indómita in Mexiko-Stadt und 2018 in der Galerie salonlabor bauchhund in Berlin gezeigt. Begleitet wurde die Ausstellung von Vorträgen und Workshops mit Gästen aus beiden Ländern. Im Anschluss wurde sie in weiteren Städten in Mexiko und Deutschland ausgestellt. Die Dokumentation, die digitale Ausstellung sowie weitere Informationen sind hier einsehbar: enlaces-links.net

El proyecto es sobre activismo feminista e Internet en México y Alemania. Pieza central es la exposición multimedia “Estamos conectadas | Wir sind vernetzt” que se realizó en colaboración con activistas y colectivos. En marzo del 2017 se mostró en el Museo de la Memoria Indómita en la Ciudad de México y en 2018 en la Galerie salonlabor bauchhund en Berlín. La exposición fue complementada por ponencias y talleres con invitadas de ambos países. Después fue montada en otras ciudades en México y Alemania. La documentación, la exposición digital y más información se puede consultar aquí: enlaces-links.net

Created and artistically directed together with Jan-Holger Hennies

multimedia project
mexico & germany, 2016-2019

Project Website:
enlaces-links.net

Exhibited at:
Atelierhaus im Anscharpark, Kiel, Germany, 2019
Galerie bauchhund salonlabor, Berlin, Germany, 2018
Atelier Farbfieber e.V., Düsseldorf, Germany, 2018
Bezirk, Guadalajara, Mexico, 2018
Centro Cultural Alemán, Monterrey, Mexico, 2018
Museo Casa de la Memoria Indómita, Mexico City, Mexico, 2017

En Búsqueda De La Identidad De Costa Rica

A multimedia project in search for the national identity of Costa Rica. (In Spanish only)

El proyecto multimedia surgió en el marco de un intercambio de julio a diciembre 2013 en la Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR) en San José, Costa Rica. Por el intercambio con estudiantes de la UCR en forma de fotografías análogas, entrevistas en forma escrita y audio se trataba de acercarse al constructo de una identidad nacional. El proyecto multimedia se presentó en la Universität Potsdam y resultó en la investigación „Ticos. El constructo artificial de una identidad nacional“ en la Universität Potsdam, asesorado por Prof. Dr. Ottmar Ette y Dr. Geraldine Spiekermann.

multimedia project
costa rica, 2013

Project Website:
salon.io/identidad