2025–2027 VLC Fellow Joyce Joumaa’s practice begins from a simple but radical premise: that collapse is not an event to be witnessed but a condition to be inhabited, and that the image, once it ceases to document a crisis with a beginning and an end, becomes a technology for living inside one instead. From the ruined fairground in Tripoli to the intelligence tests of Ellis Island to the stadium as a site of contested citizenship, each work treats space as an apparatus through which power decides who counts as visible, functional, or fit to belong. What results is less a documentary than a meditation on the impossibility of documentation itself, on the paradox of bearing witness to something that refuses, structurally, to conclude.

For the Parsons Fine Arts Visiting Artist Lecture, co-sponsored by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, Joumaa shares recent and upcoming projects, including her VLC Fellowship project, Calibrated Alien.