Each year, the Guggenheim Foundation awards approximately 175 fellowships to “exceptional individuals” to enable “scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions.” Applications for 2025 are due in mid-September 2024. In any given year a few UC Berkeley faculty are recipients of the prestigious fellowship, including, in 2021, French professor and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) Debarati Sanyal.
Sanyal has completed the book, Arts of the Border, Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges (forthcoming 2025, Fordham University Press) that received support during her Guggenheim year. She took that time to complete a self-directed crash course in security studies, learning how “smart” border technologies like biometrics, scanners and surveillance work; to contextualize these in relation to prior histories of colonialism and racialized violence; and to discover and explore the work of artists in the field such as John Akomfrah, Zach Blas, and Trevor Paglen. Thinking back to that year Sanyal says, “just having the space to do that kind of reading and thinking and learning new vocabularies was amazing. I was able to write this new chapter that I don’t think I would have been able to write otherwise.”
As part of her project, Sanyal coined the term “kino-aesthetics” for evolving migrant practices of resistance at the borders and for artistic representations whose forms convey the force of bodies on the move. According to Sanyal, “kino-aesthetics draws together the senses, the body in motion, and the image in its capacity for circulation…[it] designates an art of motion, and metamorphosis that is routinely practiced by those on the move and by their accompaniments in cinema, fiction, or photography.”
During the past few years CICI has also hosted a number of events on related topics, including its inaugural symposium, Borders and Crossings: Contemporary Arts and Techniques of Migration (March 10-11, 2023); a lecture, The Neofascist Moment in Neoliberalism: Illiberal France and Beyond, by Éric Fassin, one of France’s leading intellectuals, in conjunction with an international symposium titled Demos Anxiety: “Great Replacement” Theory and Democracy (October 2023); and a series of events on contemporary forms of authoritarianism.