Catastrophe in a Bottle: Ellie Ga’s Medial Detritus of Drift
by Christian Whitworth
Abstract:
Contemporary media artist Ellie Ga’s video-essayistic practice documents her maritime travels, interviews, and encounters with antiquated and, at times, lost artifacts of cultural production. But at certain dramatic turns within her narratives, she is forced to confront the dire realities of the humanitarian crisis emerging just off-screen. This paper considers these shifts in perspectives—from material studies of messages in bottles and the ruins of the Pharos Lighthouse to the bodies of asylum seekers—in order to propose a vein of media studies that superimposes populations under duress with the matter of their transnational, oceanic environments. While this study, following Ga’s, partakes in a media archaeological approach by delving into the operations of seemingly obsolescent processes of writing and recording, it draws upon theories of new materialism, namely Karen Barad’s writings on “intra-action” and “diffraction,” in order to reformulate difference within the assemblage of incommensurate ideas, bodies, theories, and matters. Ultimately, Ga’s videos and performances serve to inscribe within media studies and practice an ethics of exclusion which prioritizes uncertainty and intuition.
Keywords: media, materiality, refugee, border, apparatus, object, archaeology
How to cite:
MLA (9th edition):
Whitworth, Christian. “Catastrophe in a Bottle: Ellie Ga’s Medial Detritus of Drift.” MAST, vol. 1, no. 2, Nov. 2020, pp. 173–195.
APA (7th edition):
Whitworth, C. (2020). Catastrophe in a bottle: Ellie Ga’s medial detritus of drift. MAST, 1(2), 173–195.
Chicago (17th edition):
Whitworth, Christian. “Catastrophe in a Bottle: Ellie Ga’s Medial Detritus of Drift.” MAST 1, no. 2 (November 2020): 173–195.
Licensing:
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Copyright:
Authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions and may reuse/republish their article as part of a book or other materials, providing acknowledgment is given to MAST as the original source and place of publication. Authors can also post a copy of their accepted/published article on their websites and on their Institutional repository, citing that the article was originally published in MAST.
© 2020 Christian Whitworth
Issue: vol. 1 no. 2 (2020): Special Issue: Media, Materiality, and Emergency
Section: Article
Guest Editor: Timothy Barker
Submitted: July 31, 2020
Accepted: Sep 18, 2020
Published: Nov 13, 2020
