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Migrasophia (migration+philosophy)
== Migrasophia (migration+philosophy) is a term developed by the British artist and philosopher Zeigam Azizov to address the movement of people not determined by economics only but as it is the matter of knowing the world. It is developed as the multi-media project and initiated as a series of visual and textual essays consisting of films, drawings and texts. Starting from 1998 and until now the project continuously addresses different phases of this movement. == Migrasophia consists of the idea that the recognition of equality in relation to people’s movement is the minimal solution to the current crisis, as the Earth itself  constantly deformed topological continuity, people’s movement is inevitably leading to changes. Isotopologics is a science of studying this change. Isotopologics is also a methodological critique of a non -equality and the recognition of it as it are brought about by new geographies according to the trajectory of people’s movement. In order to escape dividing the World to the West and the East, it is important to think a new classification according to peoples’ movement. The division such as the East or the West itself is the conditional,   a scientific convention which may be conditionally reformed according to new subjects.

The style of his work is based on the montage like essays. He is “a virtuosic editor, cutting video, text and music to fit an infinitive, panoramic stream of images.”[1]   He also uses the alphabetic ordering and indexing intrinsic to the cultures of programming in order to engage with the idea of ‘the recorded memory’. It also includes the use of ‘morphemes’ or ‘word- formations’ that is developed into a new meaning often  as  a combination of two different words or based on mistakes, like in Migrasophia  or TransformNation. It addresses the degree of classification which divides people into categories like “we” and “them” is functioning as the third element, alongside with borders and camps and it is the carefully coded knowledge. These codes motivate   the ‘internalised control’. The basics of the control resided not in places   like camps or borders but in the attitude which emerges from the controlled codes of knowledge. It is crucial to remember that it is not the only role knowledge plays and I am far from seeing in knowledge only this function and there is the other side of knowledge,   which can use these codes in order to improve defaults and the imperfection which occurs during the trans-individuation. Like in Plato’s ‘pharmacy’ it has a double -sided effect:  on the one hand it is a poison on the other it is the remedy. In order to search for a ‘positive’ aspect Migrasophia has been focused on the understanding of questions brought about by globalisation and its effects on these codes of knowledge of the world differently. For example classification of the population into nations, races, genders is stipulated for the recognition of differences, unfortunately it is not always works simply for this reason, but used for strengthening the control.[2]

On this conceptual basis his work explores a variety of themes and subjects related to time, movement of people and technologization of the image in order to question the phenomenon of unequal world. In words of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, “the thematic of what Zeigam Azizov calls ‘the migration paradigm’-boundaries and border-crossings, luminal and disrupted places, voyaging and displacement, fault lines and states of emergency-are surfacing and intruding ‘within the work’ everywhere as the costs of living in one deeply uneven, interdependent but dangerous and unequal world make themselves felt”.[3]   These questions are articulated in different film-essays, texts, objects and drawings that “superimposes his personal experience of migration with a theoretical discourse”.[4]   This work “reveals both the impossibility of a return to (…) origins and the hopelessness of striving to reinstate cultural and social terms that are oriented towards the obvious differences of oneself and  the Other”.[5]  Migrasophia was used as a framework for an exhibition curated by Sara Raza for Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah in the year 2012.[6]

The part of Migrasophia is the multimedia installation Symposium, at the 54th Venice Biennale, which imposed these questions as an expansion of the subjectivity into the ‘mass symposium’ by the media and “considered the power relations at play when non-European artists living in the West return to their homelands and capture images of otherness, thus perpetuating ideas of difference supporting hegemony while saving dominant figures the guilty task of collecting such images personally”.[7]

[1] Brigitte Huck, Routes, Grazer Kunstverein, Artforum International, May 2003
[2] Zeigam Azizov, Migrasophia, Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, 2012

[3] Stuart Hall: Three ‘Moments’ in post-war History, History workshop Journal. Oxford University Press, 2006, p.22

[4] Eva Maria Stadler,   Foreword to the catalogue of Routes Exhibition,  edited by Christian Kravagna, Revolver books, Frankfurt and Grazer Kunsverein

[5] Christian Kravagna, General Travel Conditions (Specifications), ibid. p.29

[6] See, the catalogue of the exhibition: Migrasophia:migration+philosophy, edited by Sara Raza, Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, 2012 [7] Milean Placentile, The 54th Venice Biennale, akimbo.ca, 2011