STRANGE AND BEAUTIFUL FUTURE
Imagining migration with key border actors beyond narratives of securitization and division. Lecture by Carolyn Defrin

Tuesday, 2 December 2025, 19:00 h
Location: < rotor >, Volksgartenstraße 6a, Graz

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This talk explores how participatory art practices can open imaginative and relational space within Europe’s bordering regimes. Drawing on her work with asylum seekers, local residents, and humanitarian actors in Samos, Greece, Carolyn Defrin shares how speculative design methods and micro-artworks create opportunities for shared understanding across past memories, present realities, and future possibilities. In a landscape shaped by surveillance, containment, and the social frictions of the EU's hotspot approach, these small creative interventions surface layered temporalities and counter-narratives that interrupt dominant stories of dehumanization.

In dialogue with < rotor >’s STRANCI exhibition—which probes the shifting legal, political, and cultural dimensions of the “stranger”—the talk highlights how border actors articulate complex, often uncategorizable forms of attention, belonging, and hope. Together, these practices gesture toward strange and beautiful futures that resist securitized logics and reimagine what collective life at the border can be.

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Carolyn Defrin is an artist-researcher working across migration, borders and the visual and performing arts. She is currently a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Graz, where she is carrying out a comparative study between Samos, Greece and Tenerife, Spain about the socio-relational impacts of art made in response to border and migration practices. A recent Karl Kaser exploratory research grant enabled her to return to her home country in the US to extend her research to US/Mexico border.

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In the frame of the exhibition
STRANCI – Of Being A Stranger

With contributions by:
Mladen Bundalo • Mirza Cizmic • Suada Demirovic
Sanela Jahic • Amer Kobašlija • Mirko Maric
Irma Markulin • Mladen Miljanovic • Aida Šehovic
Endi Poškovic • Saša Tatic
Photographs by anonymous migrants

Duration of the exhibition:
Until 20.12.2025

Opening hours:
MON–FRI 10:00–18:00 h, SAT 12:00–16:00 h
WEDNESDAY TILL 22:00 h
Closed on Sundays and public holidays

Dialogic tours through the exhibition for school classes and other groups by prior appointment:
rotor@mur.at, 0316/ 688306

Admission free!

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