•  216
    Images of the Real. Introductory Notes 1
    Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 12 (12): 8-21. 2021.
  •  152
    Heterodox Mediations. Notes on Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group
    Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 11 (1): 1-12. 2019.
    The Atlas Group appeals to philosophical thinking in multiple ways—both through its aesthetic figuration and its conceptual references. Presented as a foundation dedicated to the research and the compilation of documents on Lebanese contemporary history and organized in the form of an invented archive, this artistic project deliberately coalesces real and fictitious elements and confronts, subversively, Western views on the socio- political reality of the Middle East with implicit knowledge and …Read more
  •  22
    Although film for Adorno is first and foremost the principal agent of culture industry, he takes on an equivocal stance towards the medium and its aesthetic potentials for reasons inherent to the medium itself. Indeed, its disinterested recording of the empirical world leads to both, a semblance of immediacy easy to instrumentalize for propaganda or advertising purposes, and a non-subjective access to the world of objects, which disclose their societal imprint. Despite (or because of) its techno…Read more
  • On Experience and Illumination: Werner Herzog’s Dialectical Relation with Society
    In M. Blake Wilson & Christopher Turner (eds.), The Philosophy of Werner Herzog, Lexington Books. pp. 187-201. 2020.
    When Werner Herzog states, in his famous Minnesota Declaration, “[fa]cts create norms, and truth illumination”, he not only opposes his own idea of truth as spiritual experience to the notion of factual truth based on a seemingly unmediated representation of reality and purely rational principles. He also points to a societal problem inherent to such hegemonic attributions of veracity as advocated by the representatives of what he calls “Cinema Vérité”: their “truth of accountants” generates a …Read more
  •  14
    The choreography of violence: A discussion between Harri Pälviranta and Stefanie Baumann
    with Harri Pälviranta and Alexandra Athanasiadou
    Philosophy of Photography 14 (1): 95-108. 2023.
    How is violence conventionally portrayed and where does violence lie in representation? How does photography mediate the relationships between different forms and ideas, moments and experiences of violence? These were some of the questions addressed in a conversation between artist Harri Pälviranta and philosopher Stefanie Baumann organized by Alexandra Athanasiadou, founder and director of the online platform Philosophy & Photography Lab (PHLSPH), during the international Photography Festival, …Read more
  •  219
    Chung Kuo, Cina, a documentary film by Michelangelo Antonioni, aroused fierce criticism both in China and in Europe when it was released in 1973. While these objections contradicted one another, they all share a conceptual core : the notion of realism understood in a Marxian sense as a critical representation of reality. Yet by refusing to grant a coherent and essentialist meaning to its images, Chung Kuo, Cina problematizes the presuppositions of such an understanding of realism. In this way, t…Read more
  •  268
    In recent years, documentary formats have entered prominently into the realm of the culture industry, especially since Hollywood and Netflix started to invest in costly productions addressed to the mainstream. Many of these documentaries claim to show reality in its immediacy (“as it really is”), to reveal that which is obscured, or to critically assess societal evils. They use aesthetic strategies that reinforce the appearance of authenticity, while concealing the mediation of what they represe…Read more