 My paper is called Vanishing Acts Shantel Akramans from the Other Side. Political strategy on the left has long been predicated on an assumed link between visibility and empowerment. While justified in many ways, this approach is not without its limitations. Visibility can lie like a trap, argues feminist historian Peggy Phelan. It summons surveillance and the law, provokes voyeurism, fetishism, and the colonialist imperial appetite for possession. A 2002 video installation by Shantel Akraman tests Phelan's assertion against the frame of United States immigration policy at a time when border surveillance technologies worth more than $2 billion galvanized the link between perceptual and political domination. A time when, for those whose rights are underrepresented, vanishing may paradoxically offer, at least provisionally, more than being seen. I had a little trouble with this. As Akraman's installation from the Other Side demonstrates, if surveillance functions by expanding the scope of the visibly traceable, producing an artwork about the U.S.-Mexico border, an artwork that can stand up on the side of human rights, may well preclude the practice strategy of calling for greater visibility to the hitherto unseen. Akraman's piece reworks the artist's documentary film from the same year, an unsentimental ethnographic record shot in Aguapieta, Muxco, and Douglas, Arizona, and in the surrounding Sonora Desert and Sierra Madre Mountains. The installation juxtaposes dozens of looped fragments from the film with original videography and surveillance footage appropriated from the United States INS. A tremendous surfeit of audio-visual data dispersed in three spatial enclosures across 19 monitors and one wall projection. Despite this sensorial surplus, the installations underto pulls towards a filmic register of critical invisibility. Not without ambivalence, it offers disappearance as a means of undermining the ideological regime of mastery through vision, a fantasy hardwired through centuries of Judeo-Christian thought and reaffirmed ever more in contemporary American political culture. Disappearance functions in Akraman's installation as a mode of resisting the authority vested in three forms of spectatorial power. Ethnographic documentary, surveillance, and art spectatorship, the latter of which we probably won't have time to address in the presentation but maybe in the discussion period afterwards. In taking up Akraman's dialogue with traditions of surveillance and ethnography, what follows here also illuminates the relationship between the trope of disappearance and her shift in this recent work and others from the art of making films for which she is widely renowned to an installation practice melding documentary with multi-channel video display. Akraman has described this shift in pragmatic terms. The art world thirsts for installation but has little appetite for experimental film, and yet the initial fault lines that would lead to this break can be detected in her earliest works dating to 1968. Forming through feminist critique and Marxism in the wake of French New Wave and Jean-Luc Godard, her unmistakable style has distinguished itself from conventional cinema, particularly its naturalization of narrative illusion. In contrast, Akraman's work exposes the medium's material constructiveness through a constellation of formal strategies including frontal framing and disturbances in single point perspective, voiceover and quotation rather than close ups or dialogue, slow moving action and attention to everyday details at the expense of plot driven narrative. In many ways, the market shift to spatially complex multi-channel video installation can be seen as an extension of these techniques. A more decisive response to the reservations her work has long borne towards the strictures of conventional filmic representation. Not insignificantly, each of the films Akraman has transposed in three dimensions are ethnographic documentaries. The installation practice first emerged two years after the 1993 release of her documentary from the East. That film traces the forced migrations of Jewish families including Akraman's own, eastward across Europe through the trauma of the early and mid-20th century. Subtitled bordering on fiction, the installation excerpts various segments from the film and sets them adrift in a multi-channel installation. Even as its slow moving pace recalls the weight of history, the installation seems ultimately to offer nothing but the complete withdrawal of narrative meaning. Indeed, as its voiceover indicates, if the documentary extends from a desire to register some form of truth, Akraman discovered that what the film had in fact recorded borders on fiction. The installation responds to that condition by placing its fictionalness in full view such that all pretends to representational verity, fragments, disperses and finally disappears. Akraman's from the other side proceeds from much the same point of departure. It too reworks a film that lies at the margins of a genre fraught with historical and ideological implications. Ethnographic film is predicated on the assumed transparency and objectivity of the camera's lens. Invoking the real, it reinforces the myths of objectivity and authority conferred to anthropology more generally. A discipline that cannot be understood in isolation from colonial epistemology and the logic of racial difference. If Akraman's documentary on the US and Mexico border proposes an alternative by making use of the counter-traditional strategies that have marked her films since the 70s, it also reproduces some of ethnographic film's most characteristic pitfalls. Its use of interviews for instance, interrupts Akraman's consistent preference for voiceover, quotation and other forms that avoid and discredit the assumed transparency of frontal address. Instead, as in this frame, Akraman's camera here performs just the kind of illusion ethnographic film is designed to produce. A face-to-face encounter whose aura of authenticity rests on the viewer's absence as an unseen voyeur. That the installation includes these confessional sequences suggests a retrospective impulse to rethink the film's unwitting attachment to the power relations implicit in documentary filmmaking. By including some of the film's most classically ethnographic sequences, the installation draws that relationship into sharper relief in order to question its authority. For a film whose ethnographic subject is also the object of military surveillance, as is the case here, the drive to engage critically with ethnographic form takes on certain urgency. Established during the colonial era and coinciding with increasing administrative needs to know, represent and thus maintain authority over the other, both surveillance and ethnography aim to track and render the other as a visual object of study. Both construct and represent economies, excuse me, both construct their representational economies as transparent making heavy claims to realism, authenticity, completeness and truth. Such is the ground plane against which Akraman's installation from the other side poses its critique of visibility. If the move from film to installation allows the trope of disappearance to be articulated through dispersal and fragmentation, since through fragmentation, ethnographic coherence vanishes from the representational field. The primacy of the invisible gains potency through a critical simulation developed in the second of the installation's three enclosures. It contains 18 television monitors arranged on waist-high plinths in six staggered rows. A walkway divides the rows three to a side. Arranged thus, the screens present a shifting and disjointed montage, some dozen looped sequences of identical duration, roughly 10 minutes, but strikingly varied content, drawn from the documentary and other sources, a wind-torn desert marked by a sign portending dead end, lines of cars inching towards a border checkpoint, neighborhoods built of concrete and corrugated aluminum, spoken testimonials of local residents, the crosshairs of infrared surveillance. With this multi-screen format, what is seen depends fundamentally on the spectator's shifting point of view in time and space as he or she moves along a chosen trajectory. Crucially, from no one vantage point, are all 18 screens simultaneously visible. Drawn in by one sequence, the spectator misses all simultaneous sequences that cannot be seen in peripheral vision. The rows of monitors thus become physical obstructions, blocking lines of sight, and thwarting any attempt to absorb or synthesize the totality of audio-visual data at play. Queued by the clips appropriated from the INS and by a structural reference to the banks of monitors in a communications patrol station, this sensorial confusion gives the lie to the fantasy of surveillance. The manic surplus of moving images exposes the sheer impossibility of perceptual authority, the fiction of the truth effect, of a dominant discourse of the real. Notwithstanding the fact that new data technologies by now vastly surpassed capacities for data analysis, since 911, the mystery of mastery, the myth of mastery through vision has only gained momentum, building on a centuries-old ideological foundation in Judeo-Christian culture where the understanding of divine omnipotence derives from notions of omnivoyance, as in the phrase, God is watching. Power and sight bind together etymologically in Ackerman's native French, where the word, power, povoire, shares a root with the word to see, voire. The link between vision and power extends equally meaningfully through the history of representational form, political culture, and military technology, emerging now most distressingly in the US Gulf Wars and its policy towards the border it shares with Mexico. In Ackerman's installation, however, by calling attention to the fact of the unseen, the piece works against totalization, against the gaze that admits no point of view, a perceptual assumption that has remained central to the construction of surveillance technology, as well as classical cinema, not to mention mainstream current events representation. Ackerman's ellipses disrupt that gaze, splintering it, dispersing it spatially as well as temporally and frustrating its claim to a comprehensive view. If the dialectics of ellipses and surplus destabilize the logic of surveillance, the piece takes the trope of invisibility much further in four spatial iterations of a 10 minute looped sequence introduced in the first enclosure and repeated three more times in the second and third rooms. The sequence is shot at night from the windshield of a car traveling north towards Los Angeles. Tail lights of commuters stream red towards the horizon, highway signage rushes past green overhead. The loop closes with a sudden cutaway to a shard of INS aerial surveillance. Throughout a voiceover in Ackerman's monotone, heavily accented English, recounts again and again the story of a woman from Mexico who after immigrating to the US illegally and working without documentation for some time loses contact with all those who once knew her and is never seen nor heard from again. The narrative continues as an incessant stream continually recalling the last woman to mind. The woman herself, however, never once appears on screen and as the voiceover affirms, never appears to those who search for her neither to her son, David, nor to her former landlord whom the narrator interviews for leads. Further distancing the fate of the last woman from the spectator's mind's eye, Ackerman refuses to grant complete access to the story. While the voiceover repeats again and again from four sets of speakers dispersed throughout the three rooms, in each case a medium projection volume continuously subjects its integrity to the jarring interruptions of multiple soundtracks emitted from the many other sound assemblies in the space. The muted shutter of a helicopter, the static of walkie-talkies, the wind coursing through tall desert grasses, spoken testimonials, and so on. The voiceover is itself quite garbled, textured, and at times difficult to decipher. By these measures, the narrative's audio presentation denies all efforts to grasp the sign of the last woman. As Peggy Phelan shows of Yvonne Rayner's 1985 film The Man Who Envied Women, by displacing the last woman from the frame of the visible, and by stressing the fact of her disappearance within the narrative, Ackerman ensures that her invisible protagonist saturates not only the psychic space of the narrative characters who search for her, but also the cognitive and psychic space of the spectator, who is left to wait in vain for some fragment of the protagonist's figure to appear on screen, which it never does. It is not insignificant that Ackerman has chosen a female protagonist to articulate the trope of disappearance. As feminist film theory has long maintained, heterosexual male gaze and its gratification remain integral to the structure of cinematic pleasure. It is a gaze that fetishizes cinema's female heroine as an object of desire and possession. Instead, Ackerman's installation locates its protagonist in a figure who refuses to be represented visually, a female subject who eludes the gaze and obstructs its reifying operations. The pertinence of this feminist refusal as it functions here may be usefully expanded as a critical reference to the instrumentalization of marginalized people and mainstream representation, including ethnography, but also news media and its account of border crossers and migrant workers from south of the border. The mark of invisibility deepens further in the 90 minute wall projection shown in the installation's third and final enclosure. When the projection begins, it appears to fill no more than a small square centered in the middle of the wall. Within this restricted field, the by now familiar highway sequence repeats in loops. The night, the streaming taillights, the steady automotive progression, the voiceovers, the gubrius and monotone account. As the projection continues, however, the darkened wall around this small square slowly begins to lighten and take on color. It soon becomes clear that the 10 minute highway sequence, along with its voiceover describing the fate of the vanished woman, is in fact being projected repeatedly on a large outdoor screen installed in the rugged foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountains. This, in turn, is filmed in nine cycles during the 90 minutes before and just after dawn. As the sky brightens gradually, the early dawn begins to bleach the light-dark contrast required for the looped highway sequence to remain visible on screen. With each 10 minute cycle, the light brings the surrounding landscape to life, but drains more and more content from the increasingly ghostly highway sequence before finally reducing the outdoor screen to a blank expanse that reflects nothing at all, a tabula rasa that denies the spectator the illusion of a privileged view through a window onto the world. If the voiceover, which persists through the 90 minutes at an unchanged volume, continually recalls the last woman to the spectator's mind, as the voiceover's visual analog finally dissolves into the light, Ackerman removes even the deferred possibility of tracking the missing woman of surveying her visual trace. In her evanescence, she defies surveillance. Ackerman's insistence on invisibility is not free of ethical ambiguities. Her protagonist's absence on screen in some ways serves implicitly as an affirmation of the undocumented status and social invisibility of illegal guest workers. More concerning still, aspects of the voiceover and the absent woman's defiant absence seem even to signal the possibility of her death. Perhaps Ackerman intends this uncomfortable parallel not to affirm but rather to expose conditions of social invisibility. Somewhat troublingly though, the installation ultimately leaves that question open for debate. But immigrant empowerment is perhaps not Ackerman's principle impulse here. The project seems more than anything to reexamine the politics of vision itself. In this sense, the protagonist's disappearance, well deeply concerning, is also the story of a potentially radical evasion, one that defies surveillance and spectatorial authority and that by its invisible, by its invisible, not here, refuses interpolation. Furthermore, as a critique informed by feminist theory, by working against a visually oriented social and economic order, the installation suggests an intriguing counter-model that rather than granting perceptual gratification, opens up new lines of inquiry by restricting representation to the less trampled space of cognitive, psychic, and imaginative experience. Thanks.