This postgraduate seminar proposes a speculative reading of a journalistic photo documenting the drowning of 13 migrants trying to reach Europe from the northern coasts of Africa. Showing their bodies covered by white sheets and lined up on the sand, the photo was taken from the dunes surrounding the Sicilian beach of Sampieri. Barely visible within the frame, the dunes are a well-known cruising site. The lecture poses the question of what it would mean to shift the orientation of the camera by acknowledging the proximity of the cruising site to the scene of migrant death.  Placing this image alongside the documentary Lesvia (T. Dadjimitrou, 2024) and Barbara Visser's photo series The Beach Belongs to Early Risers (2002), the talk will argue that this speculative gesture allows the apprehension of what we may call a 'spectral proximity' that implicates queerness within the scene.  

Rigoletto presents this seminar as a participant in the Visual Cultures Postgraduate Seminar which hosts seminars with a desire for interdisciplinary sites of connection. This talk is presented in collaboration with VIAD’s RADICAL | OTHERS, the South African Research Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture (SARChI) and the Design Studies Unit at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA), University of Johannesburg (UJ). 

VIAD’s Radical | Others is a dynamic research stream in the Visual Identities and Design Research Centre at FADA, UJ. Radical | Others is dedicated to exposing, disrupting and reframing systems of othering through/with/in African and African-Diasporic creative practice and critical theory. In a constantly changing, yet fundamentally untransformed world, RADICAL | OTHERS promotes forms of decolonial world-building through five recuperative focus areas, namely, Radical Feminisms; Radical Mobilities; Radical Planetaries and Radical Digitalities. 

Prof Brenda Schmahmann is the South African Research Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture (or the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture). Hosted by the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA) and integrated with its work, this prestigious position is funded by the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) and administered by the National Research Foundation (NRF).  

The SARChI Research Chair serves as a forum for initiatives in research by not only Prof Schmahmann but also postdoctoral fellows, postgraduate students and others working with her. 

​The Design Studies Unit is a vibrant multidisciplinary unit within FADA, committed to pioneering critical, theoretical, and research-led engagement across the design disciplines. While we provide undergraduate teaching to students in Graphic Design, Multimedia Design, Industrial Design, and Fashion Design, we are also tasked with cultivating advanced postgraduate research across all FADA disciplines. 

Join the Visual Cultures Postgraduate Seminar at the spacious facilities of the SARChI Chair, including a small art gallery, located at 33 Twickenham Avenue, Auckland Park, 2092 (opposite UJ Kingsway Campus). 

BIOGRAPHY

Prof Sergio Rigoletto is currently Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He was previously Associate Professor in Cinema Studies and Italian at the University of Oregon, USA. Alongside his rich scholarship, Rigoletto is a film critic and curator with an interest in the fields of film, television, screen art and digital media.  

Rigoletto’s research focuses on the politics of film aesthetics and its relation to social change, queer media cultures, affect, stars and performance studies along with Italian cinema. Writing in both Italian and English, Rigoletto is the author of two books: Masculinity and Italian Cinema: Sexual Politics, Social Conflict and Male Crisis in the 1970s  (Edinburgh University Press: 2014) and Le norme traviate  (Meltemi: 2020). His current book project, titled Queer from the South: Film, Video Art and Media Activism in the Mediterranean, examines the contributions of contemporary filmmakers, visual artists and media activists to the emergence of a transnational queer imaginary that engages the material conditions of life in the Mediterranean region. His second book project considers the significance of stardom within Neorealist cinema alongside the post-WW2 Euro-American migration of film professionals, productions, styles and promotional practices. The project focuses on actress Anna Magnani, one of the figures that participated most prominently in these transnational developments. The book considers questions around gendered labour in the Italian and Hollywood film industries.