Tracing the Periphery

Tracing the Periphery explores the urban character of peripheries - the grown, the planned, the vacant. It maps a moment in time through a matrix of situations and multi-oriented perspectives that observes the becoming of urban space. Scenarios are revealed as traces of urban emergence.  A process, where contrasts, borders and gradients delineate heterogeneities that are continuously redrawn and part of an ongoing transformation from rural to urban.

The video piece questions our rural-urban vocabulary and instigates “new knowledge, fractals, codes, symbols, and sounds” needed in the present future. At once local – the work was filmed during a residence in Marrakech, Morocco – the content speaks about a global situation of emergence. 

Tracing the Periphery combines narrative perspectives of inhabitants walking between streets and their bedrooms, a panoramic video scan, and the flying perspective of a drone in the urban periphery of Marrakech. This in situ footage is merged into a multi-perspectival installation that combines video and sound to translocate the scenarios of the periphery in the festival.

Tracing the Periphery narrates the dynamics of belonging and non-belonging. Urban transformations taking place from rural to urban, to clean, and to more 'efficient' urban forms are portrayed and tensions revealed. Contrasting spatial scenarios in various stages of development in the periphery of the city collide. These moments of encounter are explored through the eyes of inhabitants and their daily paths through the city's periphery.

Format: 3 channel video with sound, 13min.

Screenings: Marrakech Biennale OFF 2016 (Marrakech, Morocco), Chale Wote Festival 2018 (Accra, Ghana)

Funding: University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austrian Embassy Abuja

Authors: Baerbel Mueller, Juergen Strohmayer, Stefanie Theuretzbacher / Post-production: Rangel Karaivanov, Marta Piasezcynska / Sound editing: Linus Miller / Translation: Omar Eddahabi, El Hadji Babacar Sy / Special thanks: Sanaa El Younsi, Cassandre Gil-Frasnier

Chale Wote Festival 2018 (Accra, Ghana)

Marrakech Biennale OFF 2016 (Marrakech, Morocco)