Contact Zone

Locative Media Documentary
Contact-zones Locative Media Documentary
project 2018 - still in progress

long-term project curated by Vanessa Vozzo and Laura Romano
photo by Andrea Ballo, Niccolò Mazzon, Federico Primavera


06 October 2018

Contact-zones is a long-term project curated by Vanessa Vozzo and Laura Romano around the concept of “boundaries/borders” as defined by geography, political spaces and as a political device on people and in territories. The physical earth and marine borders between states is fragmented and reconfigured within cities creating a dialogue between new arrivals and long-term residents. Society is the result of displacement, moving, and migration but new migratory influences seem to place urban spaces in physical crisis.

The project, conceived in 2018, concentrates on citizen contact-zones as possible spaces of new interaction.

The project uses locative media and interactive media art to create installations, performance, routes and tracking. The audiovisual contents follow a narrative model and/or one of counter-narrative with the object of redesign the contact-zone through an embodiment process of re-perception of urban spaces.

The project includes narrative compositions both indoor (museums, using locative media), and outdoor (using GPS).

RESEARCH

The research, that has been developed as a collaboration between Vanessa Vozzo and Laura Romano, includes:

  • urban studies/critical geography on the concept of boundaries/borders;
  • studies on new narrative/counter-narrative
  • studies on positioning (the point of view of the researcher, point of view of the user, and the breaking point of old systems of positioning);
  • studies on displacement (crowding out/ moving/ physical dislocation)

The project includes phases of action-research with in-depth field surveys.

Contact-zones Locative Media Documentary
project 2018 - still in progress

long-term project curated by Vanessa Vozzo and Laura Romano
photo by Andrea Ballo, Niccolò Mazzon, Federico Primavera


Laura Romano is a documentary producer and a PhD fellow in Urban Studies at DICEA – Dept of Civil, Building and Environmental Engineering at the Sapienza University of Rome, working on internal borders related to migratory spaces and the visual representation. Ms. Romano graduated with a thesis entitled The Border Talk, the process of doing frontiers as a spatial and narrative event. (Palermo, a case-study).