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GoA WORKSHOP in Brussels on The Power of Decolonialization, Art and Interventions

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May 03, 2018, Brussels Workshop
Memory / History: The Power of Decolonialization, Art and Interventions

Workshop with Monique Mbeka Phoba, Laura Nsengiyumva, Womba Konga aka Pitcho, open to the public, at LeSpace

Info WS Bruxelles (French) (PDF)
Info WS Brussels (English) (PDF)

MONIQUE MBEKA PHOBA will present an overview of her 17 masterclasses on the
subject of the taboo of colonization in the Belgian cinema of the last 40 years. The
masterclasses have been presented from 2015 to 2017 in a quite various places: festivals, training institutes as cultural or associative centers (Brussels African Film Festival / FIFAB, BOZAR, Pier 10, women’s film festival, “They spin,” BE-PAX, Point-Culture, Pianofabriek, Ghent Sint-Luca Art Institute, Mission Local of Molenbeek, ULB, Congolese associations etc.).

LAURA NSENGIYUMVA will talk about her project PeopL. This work addresses the figure of Leopold II in the public space of Brussels. And more generally, she refers to his phantasmagorical presence in the Belgian consciousness: in official celebrations, in folklore, in language (he is seen as the king “Builder”). The figure of the King Leopold II becomes theinstrument of a biased patriotism. The king becomes “Builder,” despite the immense destruction of which he was the author. He is the figure of a cynical patriotism, which cannot function without a cruel but indispensable blindness. The project aims to the decolonization of the public space.

WOMBA KONGA known by his artist name PITCHO will present 2 projects: a multidisciplinary festival “Congolisation” and his latest theater/perfomative play with the title “Kuzikiliza.” The term Congolisation is a contraction of the words “Congo” and “Colonisation.” The idea of the festival is to focus on the contribution of the Congolese diaspora in the Belgium cultural landscape. The theater/performance play “Kuzikiliza” that translates in Swahili as “to be heard”—is a plurilingual and interdisciplinary performance that makes communication and its mechanisms to vacillate. Pitcho Womba Konga in this play departs from Patrice Lumumba’s speech at the ceremony of the Proclamation of the Congo’s Independence on June 30, 1960. Pitcho exposes the actuality of Lumumba’s speech today and questions how to reconcile past and present, while the process of decolonization is still fully underway.

Workshop impressions

PUBLICATION: Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia

Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia, edited by Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić (in collaboration with Valerija Zabret, Jovita Pristovšek, Tjaša Kancler, and Sophie Uitz), Centre for Cultural Decontamination CZKD, Belgrade, Serbia; Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria; Peek Project No. AR 439-G24/IBK, 2020, ISBN 978-86-88001-19-9 (CZKD), 312pp.

Download free ebook version here

The book Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia arose from the research carried out by the PEEK Project No. AR 439-G24/IBK, whose full title is “Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality.” This is an interdisciplinary arts-and-theory-based research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and developed at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, from 2018 to 2020. During this time, we created an online video archive entitled “Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia.” It consists of seventy hours comprising eighty-two interviews/positions as well as the recordings of the symposium “GENEALOGY OF AMNESIA: Crushing Silences, Constructing Histories” held at the mumok in 2018, Vienna, thus tying together the three sites that constitute the “Genealogy of Amnesia”: Belgium, Austria, and Bosnia and Herzegovina/Croatia/Serbia and “Republika Srpska.”

This book comprises sixty-six interviews in the form of deep reflections concerning territories and histories of genocides, dispossession, racism, antisemitism, turbo-nationalism, discrimination, silencing, oblivion: Belgium, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina/Croatia/Serbia and “Republika Srpska,” Slovenia and Spain.

We hope this book will contribute to establishing links between the antagonization of racism/fascism and the critique of (neoliberal) global necrocapitalism as a colonial, racial system of dominance. It means that we are calling for the severing of ties between Eurocentric epistemology and its monopoly on the definition of class-sensitive, as well as feminist and LGBT*QI discourses.

Centre for Cultural Decontamination CZKD, Belgrade, Serbia
Austrian Science Fund (FWF): AR439
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Online book launch at Centre for Cultural Decontamination / Belgrade, 20.9.2020

Online Artist Talk Series 2021 “Stories of Traumatic Pasts”

All events will be held in English. The events will take place online!
Registration: info@weltmuseumwien.at

Adela Jušić in conversation with Marina Grzinić
Friday, February 19, 2021, 04:30 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rom, Stockholm, Wien

Adela Jušić was born on 1982 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Jušić has exhibited in more than 100 international exhibitions (Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain; Videonale, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Image Counter Image, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, Balkan Insight, Pompidou Center, Paris). In 2010 she won Young Visual Artist Award for the best young Bosnian artist in 2010, Henkel Young Artist Price Central and Eastern Europe in 2011, and Special award of Belgrade October Salon in 2013.

Martin Krenn in conversation with Marina Grzinić
Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 07:00 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rom, Stockholm, Wien

Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe in conversation with Marina Grzinić
Tuesday, March 30, 2021, 07:00 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rom, Stockholm, Wien

GoA SYMPOSIUM in Vienna: Genealogy of Amnesia – Crushing Silences, Constructing Histories

(image: Christina Jauernik)

November 8-10, 2018

A symposium on the silencing of colonialism, anti-Semitism, and contemporary turbo-fascist nationalism in Belgium, Austria, and former Yugoslavia.

The international and interdisciplinary symposium, open to public audiences, is built as a podium for research and exchange, dissemination of knowledge, and discussion.

The two-day-long symposium hosted invited speakers that cover the central topics of our research in the three respective territories: memory and history, archives, and the axis of power and knowledge. The general objective of the symposium was to denote gaps between processes of institutionalized silencing, hegemonic processes of oblivion and amnesia, and processes of instituting power through building counter-memory and counter-history projects, interventions, and resistance. The aim was to demonstrate how processes for the establishment of counter-memory and counter-history can open up spaces for new ways of forming radicalized constituent politics. Collective struggles and oppositionality were investigated as the basis of a possible dismantling of neoliberal and necrocapitalist societies by means of re-empowering history that crushes silences.

For full symposium program and details click here


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