Arts in Movement: Where are you from?_Stories

original net-art work (2002) | Extranjerias (Argentina, 2009) with selected videos for a curated group exhibition, panel discussion, and scholarly publication by social anthropologist Néstor García Canclini and art historian Andrea Giunta


Where are you from?_Stories is a net-art project made up of fifty videos of three minutes duration, in English, Spanish and French, which were selected from two-hundred and fifty interviews conducted by the artist with passerby in six citieswhere Badani once lived, in her birth city, Buenos Aires, to Mexico City, Toronto, Montréal, and Paris, and in her current hometown, Chicago. On the internet, hyperlinked keywords extracted from the interviews allow viewers to navigate the videos as illustrated by the image above.

At once a self and a collaborative and participatory migratory mapping, the work is particularly relevant for its timely querying into human migration at the juncture of shifting discourses about globalization, when the utopian promises of the internet age of the last decade of the twentieth-century gave away to the nationalist and xenophobic hostility of the post-9/11 internet and mediascape.

On this shift, to ask as a host, “where are you from?” is fraught with the double meaning of the root of hospitality – hostis, meaning both guest and enemy. The other main term at the root of hospitality is hospes, which contain the root word pet, potestas – power. The host/state’s capacity and power to include or exclude who they wish is the impetus of Where are you from?_Stories. Besides an acknowledgement that hospitality is never a given, the work relates hosting to the challenge and the choice of receiving the guest as an Other (stranger or foreigner) in a reciprocal gesture. And it does this the more significantly as net-art, against the xenophobic recoding of global virtual spaces.


Pat Badani is a Canadian artist, writer, and scholar born in Argentina. Known for her material and methodologically diverse works, throughout her densely woven artistic production spanning five decades, she draws upon fields of art, science, and technology to create artistic arguments that chart connections between theories of art as object, medium, and critique of social and technological networks. Recipient of twenty awards, fellowships, and nominations, Badani exhibits projects broadly in museum venues, in galleries, and in media art festivals throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia. She has participated in international symposia with her essays and talks in over 15 countries, and her works have been critically surveyed in conference panel discussions, in academic journals, and in art history anthologies. Former full-time faculty at ILSTU and Editor-in-Chief of Media-N Journal since 2017, she serves on the Board of Directors of ISEA International, overseeing the continuation of the annual symposia.