A Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints)

2017 10min

We were huddled in front of the thin light of a fire in an abandoned house on a cold January night in Calais. X was making another cup of very sugary tea. Y, stirring the kindling, yelled as he accidentally grabbed a burning twig. “are you trying to clean your fingerprints?” laughed X. ‘A Rough History’ is a performance lecture, installation and 16mm film following several visits to Calais, that considers a practice by migrants entering the EU of destroying their fingerprints to avoid detection by the Eurodac system, alongside other histories of fingerprinting and fingerprint erasures. It sees the fingerprint as a scaled down landscape, looking at the circulation of the image of the fingerprint, and the different lives and journeys of the migrants whose hands produce such images.

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Storyline

We were huddled in front of the thin light of a fire in an abandoned house on a cold January night in Calais. X was making another cup of very sugary tea. Y, stirring the kindling, yelled as he accidentally grabbed a burning twig. “are you trying to clean your fingerprints?” laughed X. ‘A Rough History’ is a performance lecture, installation and 16mm film following several visits to Calais, that considers a practice by migrants entering the EU of destroying their fingerprints to avoid detection by the Eurodac system, alongside other histories of fingerprinting and fingerprint erasures. It sees the fingerprint as a scaled down landscape, looking at the circulation of the image of the fingerprint, and the different lives and journeys of the migrants whose hands produce such images.

Released
February 28, 2017
Runtime
10min
Director
Ayesha Hameed
Genre
Language
English
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