Sara Eliassen in conversation with Jan Verwoert on shifting grounds and material related to her Phd project Screened Visions/ National Visions

Conversation on material related to Eliassen’s Phd project The conversation will have as starting point material related to an ongoing inquiry by the artist on how filmmakers, media-activists and others were responding to the Mexican government’s handling of the 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in 2014. Considering the proclaimed «verdad historica» by the then government regarding what had happened to the students, the investigation initially sought to examine whether the massive social mobilisation in the aftermath of the incident was leading to new and alternative ways of subverting official narratives constructed to shape public opinion. As the project expanded, the inquiry turned into a larger investigation on what tools can be used by artists, activists and others to counter dominant versions of recent histories - what would be efficient strategies in different moments of social and political urgencies? The project consists pr.today of a set of documents; mapping out the field with sound, images, video and text, a display of complexity rather than a documentation of reality; unstable elements where constellations can be shifted and various relations made and remade.