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.
Opening: Karin Riegler, Vice-Rector for Teaching, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (image: Christina Jauernik)
Opening: Marina Gržinić, head of the research project “Genealogy of Amnesia,” Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (image: Christina Jauernik)
Opening: Sophie Uitz, researcher "Genealogy of Amnesia" project, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (image: Christina Jauernik)
Opening Keynote: Gloria Wekker (Utrecht University), "A Genealogy of Amnesia in Europe" (image: Christina Jauernik)
Opening Keynote: Gloria Wekker (Utrecht University), "A Genealogy of Amnesia in Europe" (image: Christina Jauernik)
Gloria Wekker (Utrecht Unviersity) in conversation with Birgit Sauer (University of Vienna) (image: Valerija Zabret)
Friday/Saturday, November 9-10
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Marina Gržinić (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna): Burdened by the past, re-thinking the future (image: Dominik Szereday)
Marina Gržinić (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna): Burdened by the past, re-thinking the future (image: Dominik Szereday)
Collectif Mémoire Coloniale et Lutte contre les Discriminations (Brussels): The Challenges of De-Colonial Movements – The Afrodescendants Facing the Colonial Denial and the Mutations of the Colonial Propaganda in Belgium (image: Dominik Szereday)
Kalvin Soiresse Njall and Geneviève Kaninda (CMCLD) (image: Dominik Szereday)
Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur (Howard University, Washington DC) (image: Dominik Szereday)
Ruth Beckermann (Vienna) in conversation with Michael Loebenstein (Austrian Filmmuseum Vienna) (image: Dominik Szereday)
Sefik Tatlić (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) (image: M. Gržinić)
Pedro Monaville (New York University Abu Dhabi) (image: Sophie Uitz)
Ruth Wodak (Lancaster University and University of Vienna) and Markus Rheindorf (University of Vienna) (image: Gržinić)
Sophie Uitz (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) (image: Christina Jauernik)
Max Silverman (University of Leeds) (image: Christina Jauernik)
Nejra Nuna Čengić (University of Graz) (image: Uitz)
Shirley Anne Tate (Leeds Beckett University) (image: A. Sekulić)
Shirley Anne Tate (Leeds Beckett University) (image: Aleksandra Sekulić)
March 11, 2019 – March 26, 2019 Vienna Workshop: on Hannah Arendt’s political thinking
Workshop with Ruth Kager and the students of the Art Studio for Post-conceptual Art Practices (PCAP) and the students in general of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, at AkBild, Vienna.
Hannah Arendt’s political thought centers around a political space that draws on common action. Starting from this insight, each session of the workshop is dedicated to one of Arendt’s basic notions: the public realm, the societal and the private, action, power and judging. Building on these notions, the workshop investigates the constraints and potentialities of politics as thought by Arendt.
The contents are elaborated interactively, based on the sources below. The following questions will guide, amongst others, plenary discussions and group activities.
11/3/2019 // INTRODUCTION // THE PUBLIC REALM What is the public realm? Sources: Arendt, Hannah (1973) [1958], The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 50-57. Arendt, Hannah (2010) [1960], Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (München: Piper), 62-73.
12/3/2019 // THE SOCIETAL AND THE PRIVATE What are the relations between the social, the private and the public realm? Sources: Arendt, Hannah (1973) [1958], The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 68-72. Arendt, Hannah (2010) [1960], Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (München: Piper), 81-89.
18/3/2019 // ACTION What are the characteristics of action? How is action connected to politics? Sources: Arendt, Hannah (1973) [1958], The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 175-180. Arendt, Hannah (2010) [1960], Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (München: Piper), 213-222.
19/3/2019 // POWER What is the difference between power and violence? How is power connected to different forms of government? Sources: Arendt, Hannah (1973) [1958], The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 199-206. Arendt, Hannah (2010) [1960], Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (München: Piper), 251-262.
26/3/2019 // THE DESTRUCTION OF POLITICAL POWER // JUDGING How is political power destructed? What is judging? Sources: Arendt, Hannah (1951), The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace), 123-134. Arendt, Hannah (2014) [1955], Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft. Antisemitismus, Imperialismus, totale Herrschaft (München: Piper) 286-307. Arendt, Hannah (1961), “The Crisis in Culture. Its Social and Its Political Significance”, in: ibid., Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking), 217-226. Arendt, Hannah (2012) [1960], “Kultur und Politik”, in: dies., Zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft. Übungen im politischen Denken I, herausgegeben von Ursula Ludz (München: Piper), 296-302.
A book review on the edited volume “Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism” was published on May 9, 2021 by Saša Kesić in the Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culturejournal.
Saša Kesić is an art teacher and independent researcher from Belgrade. He received his PhD in 2016 from the Department of Theory of Arts and Media, University of Arts in Belgrade. In 2020, he published the book That’s How the Queer Grew… in Contemporary Eastern European Art and Culture, in which he connected queerness, performativity and presentation.
“This volume provides a very comprehensive analysis of what was going on in former Yugoslavia, before the 1990s, in the time of the Balkan war, and after the 1990s. This is a very brave and difficult task as it is not possible to rely solely on the historical distance, as well as on the archives and documents of the past. This is the first time that such an analysis is put in parallel with the two other genocides. Furthermore, a very detailed analysis is presented regarding the changes in Europe at the fall of the Berlin Wall and then in the 1990s until today. The post-Srebrenica genocide time showed an even more bestial situation: that the Serbian society and “the Republika Srpska,”5 instead of reflecting on what happened, pushed a new dimension of amnesia. What we learn is that in Serbia oblivion changed into the glorification of the genocide. This is supported by hyper-populist and monstrous political’ nomenclature all the way to our present day when this volume is published. In the meantime, the same glorification is central for the imperial global capitalist forces – Trump is a very good case. Former Yugoslavia, in its belatedness, is another case, as it repeats on a smaller scale the Trump model. The politicians from Serbia to Slovenia (Aleksandar Vučić and Janez Janša) are such two cases.”
Excerpt from the conclusion of Saša Kesić’ review of “Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism: Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality” (Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, and Sophie Uitz (Eds.), 2020); https://identitiesjournal.edu.mk/index.php/IJPGC/sasakesic.
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.
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
at Weltmuseum Wien October 8th, 2020 to April 3rd, 2021
Curated by Marina Gržinić, Christina Jauernik and Sophie Uitz
Trailer-teaser of the exhibition in Weltmuseum Wien
The exhibition Stories of Traumatic Pasts: Counter-Archives for Future Memories focuses on three European regions, their stories, and their current experiences of collective amnesia in relation to traumatic events from the past: Belgian colonial rule in the Congo, Austria after the “Anschluss” in 1938, and the denial of war crimes since 1990 after the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Participating artists Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe Lana Čmajčanin Bojan Djordjev Dani Gal Siniša Ilić Adela Jušić Martin Krenn Monique Mbeka Phoba Nicolas Pommier Anja Salomonowitz Joëlle Sambi Nzeba Arye Wachsmuth Valerie Wolf Gang
Posters and works developed by students of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (workshop with Arye Wachsmuth): Negra Bernhard Henrie Dennis Iklim Doğan Robert Jolly Lars* Kollros Shaya Safaisini Hiba Shammout Sophie Anna Stadler Pia S. Weissinger Ondrej Zoricak
The digital archive: COUNTERING THE GENEALOGY OF AMNESIA
7.10.2020 Opening speeches and performance (closed for public due to Covid-19)
Speeches: C. Schicklgruber (director Weltmuseum Wien), J. Hartle (rector Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), S. Uitz and M. Gržinić (curators). Opening performance by Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe and Mani Obeya.
8.10.2020 Symposium (closed for public due to Covid-19)
Taking part in situ or via zoom:
Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe Lana Čmajčanin Bojan Djordjev Dani Gal Siniša Ilić Adela Jušić Martin Krenn Nicolas Pommier Anja Salomonowitz Joëlle Sambi Nzeba Arye Wachsmuth Valerie Wolf Gang Lars* Kollros Mika Maruyama Shaya Safaisini Pia Weissinger
Moderation by Marina Gržinić Organisation by Sophie Uitz
Digital Research Travelogues through European Archives creates an interdisciplinary platform for art and science to explore the current politics of forgetting in relation to three traumatic events of the 20th century: Belgium (colonialism in the Congo), Austria (antisemitism in World War II and the post-war period), and the former Yugoslavia (turbo-nationalism, Srebrenica genocide). The platform departs from the research conducted as part of the FWF-PEEK project Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality (AR 439). It was presented as a digital format to promote emancipatory politics in the humanities through the 2020-2021 exhibition at the Weltmuseum Wien, Austria. It consisted of 42 interviews presented as 42 posters with QR codes. This part of the exhibition was a unique artistic-scientific and collaborative research work, presented as an interactive digital installation. The 42 QR codes were divided into three sections, each with a description and content, and accessible to the viewer via mobile phone. Each user could listen to the interviews in English. As a second level of interaction, an interactive table was presented in the exhibition space, allowing the viewer to spend hours exploring the connections between the three sections presented in parallel through images and texts, as a kind of double index, footnotes and hypertexts through European trauma histories.