Remapping Europe, A Remix Project (2013): Intermedial Sampling and Transcultural In-betweenness

his paper studies the creative practice of intermedial sampling as an aesthetic strategy to represent transcultural in-betweenness by taking into consideration the participatory initiative Remapping Europe, A Remix Project (DocNext Network, 2013) and specifically the live-cinema performance Eurovisions by the artist collective European Souvenirs. Eurovisions aims at deconstructing dominant media discourses and negative stereotypes about migration in Europe by sampling found footage, film archives, TV news and broadcasted iconic moments from the song contest Eurovision that the title of the live-cinema show parodies and critically re-appropriates. Released via a mixture of VJ and DJ software, the performance involves multi-screen projections and live music score, while its recurring visual motifs feature imagery of borders, technologies of surveillance and EU’s migration control apparatus. Simultaneously, the fusion of different medial textures including footage of abstracted landscapes and sonic fragments from personal narratives evokes crossing of physical borders and creates the aesthetic experience of transcending cultural boundaries. The paper contextualizes Eurovisions within the intermedial work of earlier art collectives, such as Black Audio Film Collective – BAFC and Virtual Migrants (UK), as well as ZEMOS98 (Spain). The analysis explores the conceptual parallels between “cut’n’mix” aesthetics (Hebdige) and “third spaces” of in-betweenness (Bhabha) employed by European Souvenirs as a creative approach to ‘re-map’ Europe.