Welcome to the third screening of Afrofilm & Diasporic Realities!
Afrofilm is a self-organised monthly screening of films telling the lives and experiences of African and Afro-descendant people from various geographical locations. We will be showing films for us by us, which means that the screening is for a closed audience of African and Afro-descendent people.
There is a lot to know and learn from all of us and we think that films are a relevant and efficient way of making this possible.
Join us for the screening of Denise Ekale Kumseasons short film tetralogy to then end the evening with a discussion round to share and create knowledge on Black realities we weren’t yet familiar with and not least to connect with each other.
WINTER SOLSTICE (2014, 6:43min) A young man wakes up in the middle of the forest, disoriented, lost. Overwhelmed by fear he finally runs away. But then after a short time steps, loud and heavy, can be heard at his heels… Winter Solstice shows and interprets fear, which is directed against oneself, controlling dreams, behavior and being.
NATSU NO TAKARAMONO (ENG: Treasures of the Summer, 2017, 14:40min) A little Black girl moves through the uniformed crowds of the megacity Tokyo. She wanders through parks and temples, presses her nose against the window pane of a pet shop, and goes to the sea at dusk. And every now and then she bows down and picks up glittering fragments of the discarded from the floor. For her silent wandering follows one goal – to regain a treasure that was thought lost.
RESPRINGENDO (2019, 25:36 min) Suza, eighteen, lies between textbooks on jazz music, dirty laundry and French fries and doesn’t want to go outside. Her once beloved guitar, an inheritance from her father, is now a symbol of her inadequacy. But isolation is a challenge, when you are besieged by a hysterical mother, a cunning blackmailer as best friend and a strange old guy screaming insults in front of the window of all places.
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Denise Ekale Kum is a self-taught filmmaker from Berlin who has lived in Cameroon, Brazil and Japan. In addition to visually powerful music videos, Denise is currently working on the completion of her seasons short film tetralogy and on her first feature-length film project.
The Living Archives is an online platform, which will primarily be used to document, archive and make available knowledge and content, that is generated within BIPoC communities. Integrating and referring to this knowledge, the platform will also be used as a learning space for these communities. In this event the project The Living Archives will be presented to the public for the first time.
We are looking forward to welcoming words by Peggy Piesche (Federal Agency for Civic Education, Germany – Diversity, Intersectionality and Decoloniality – D.I.D.) and two keynote talks by Fatima El-Tayeb (University of California, San Diego) and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (Justus-Liebig-University, Gießen) and a panel discussion with Arike Oke (Black Cultural Archives, London), Tayo Awosusi-Onutor (RomaniPhen Archive, Berlin), and Nicola Lauré al-Samarai (historian, author, curator) within the framework of this presentation.
The aim of the project is to capture and make accessible content and knowledge generated within BIPoC contexts in past and present. xart splitta understands The Living Archives as a “Resistant Knowledge Project” (Patricia Hill Collins). Archiving and documentation is therefore seen as a decolonial act – concepts and practices of archiving are redefined in terms of their colonial, racist, and heteronormative context of origin and used as a medium of “counter-narration”.
The first content for the site will be provided by the ongoing work of xart splitta as well as by texts, conversations and content that was created in the context of the project “Passing it On”. A project that was carried out by xart splitta in 2019 by Nicola Lauré al-Samarai and Iris Rajanayagam; and in the context of which the idea for the online portal was born. The website will however remain a work in progress and we are looking forward to the collaboration with a variety of individuals and communities in the further development of The Living Archives.
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Programme
6:00pm: Welcoming words: Peggy Piesche (Federal Agency for Civic Education, Germany – Diversity, Intersectionality and Decoloniality – D.I.D.)
6:15pm: Presentation The Living Archives with Iris Rajanayagam and Juliana Kolberg (xart splitta)
6:30pm: Keynote talks by Fatima El-Tayeb and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez
7:15-8:45pm: Panel discussion with Arike Oke, Tayo Awosusi-Onutor and Nicola Lauré al-Samarai. Moderation: Iris Rajanayagam
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This event will take place online and will be held in spoken English and German.
The access information to the event will be sent out on November 18th, 2020.
The link to the website will be available from November 19th, 2020 onward at www.xartsplitta.net
The Living Archives is funded by the Federal Agency for Civic Education/bpb.
Speakers
Arike Oke is the director of the Black Cultural Archives, in London. She has been working in the field of memory and heritage for over 15 years. She has been involved in the “Connecting Histories” project in Birmingham, UK and in the development of the archive of the “Wellcome Collection” and co-organised the first Black History Month in Hull. She is a board member of the strategic initiative “Unlocking Archives” of the National Archives, Richmond, UK and is a Fellow of the programme “Museums and Resilient Leadership” of the Arts Council England. https://blackculturalarchives.org/
Tayo Awosusi-Onutor is a singer, author, director, political activist, mother and lives in Berlin. She describes herself as Afro-Sintezza. She interprets her music in English, German and Romanes. She also lends her voice to film and TV as a dubbing singer and voiceover artist. Tayo studied German and Multimedia. She is a board member of RomaniPhen e.V. and a member of the IniRromnja. She deals with the topics education, history and the civil rights movement. In 2017 she published the documentary “Phral mende – Wir über uns. Perspectives of Sinti and Roma in Germany”. Tayo is also politically involved in various Communities of Colour. Further information can be found at www.tayo-online.de and www.romnja-power.de.
Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez is professor of sociology at the Justus-Liebig-University, Gießen. Her teaching and research focuses on issues of global inequalities and their local expression, particularly in Germany, Spain and the UK. She is also interested in (post)Marxist and decolonial perspectives on feminist and queer epistemology and its application in the fields of migration, labour and culture. She is currently working on affective labour/materialities, institutional racism, racist capitalism and the coloniality of migration. She is a member of the advisory board of “Wagadu. A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies” and the Research Group on Migration and Human Rights. She is also editor of the series Anthem Studies in Decoloniality and Migration.
Nicola Lauré al-Samarai is a historian and cultural scientist. Her areas of interest include Black and Diaspora studies, Critical Race Feminism(s), concepts of creolisation and poetics of relationship, and decolonising memory and cultural policies in the context of intersectionality and experience. She works as author, editor, mediator and curator. She was involved in the following projects, among others: Labor 89: Andere Perspektiven auf die Wendezeit (2019/2020), Grenzgänger*innen: Schwarze und Osmanische Präsenzen in der Metropole Berlin um 1700 (2018/2019), Decolonize ’68 (2018), conzepte. Neue Fassungen politischen Denkens (2010/2011), Homestory Deutschland. Schwarze Biografien in Geschichte und Gegenwart (2005–2012).
Fatima El-Tayeb is professor of literature and ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. In her work, she focuses on the deconstruction of structural racism in “colour-blind” Europe and centres resistance strategies among racialised communities. In addition to numerous articles, she has published UnDeutsch. The Construction of the Other in Postmigrant Society (transcript 2016), Anders Europäisch. Rassismus, Identität und Widerstand im vereinten Europa (University of Minnesota Press 2011) and Schwarze Deutsche. Der Diskurs um „Rasse“ und nationale Identität 1890– 1933 (Campus 2001).
**This screening will take place on-site and online!**
Welcome to the first screening of Afrofilm & Diasporic Realities!
Afrofilm is a self-organised monthly screening of films telling the lives and experiences of african and afro-descendant people from various geographical locations.
We will be showing films for us by us, which means that the screening is for a closed audience of African and Afro-descendent people.
There is a lot to know and learn from all of us and we think that films are a relevant and efficient way of making this possible.
Join us for the screening of Preta by Poliana Baumgarten and My Jewish Family by Yagi Taffere to then end the evening with a discussion round to share and create knowledge about Black realities we weren’t yet familiar with and to connect with each other.
Pls. note: Due to Covid-19 we can only admit a very limited number of people to the on-site screening. Please register via: afroscreening@tutanota.com
This event will take place in spoken English
Find more Information about the Afrofilm screenings on Instagram: @afro.film
With Alana Lentin (Western Sydney University) and Anaheed Al-Hardan (American University of Beirut)
Chair: Inna Michaeli and Nahed Samour (Humboldt-University Berlin)
Following our two-part workshop on Jewish–Muslim relations and solidarity (www.xartsplitta.net/en/radical-solidarity/) we will be holding a panel discussion with Alana Lentin and Anaheed Al-Hardan. The panel discussion will open with two respective short inputs by Alana Lentin and Anaheed Al-Hardan. Alana Lentin will be giving a talk on her newest publication Why Race Still Matters (Polity, 2020), here a focus will be laid on the 4th chapter of the book: „Good Jew/Bad Jew“.
Anaheed Al-Hardan will be speaking on the topic: “Anti-colonial and radical solidarity in the context of south-south alliances”.
Besides dealing with questions regarding both inputs, the aim of the panel is to discuss topics that came up during the workshop with references to a broader, transnational perspective.
The event will take place online and in spoken English. Please register via: contact@xartsplitta.net and include 2-3 lines regarding the motivation for your participation, in order to receive the access information. Please also be informed that, due to technical restraints, we can only admit a restricted number of participants.
Dr Alana Lentin is Associate Professor in Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University. She is a Jewish woman who is a settler on Gadigal land (Sydney, Australia). She works on the critical theorization of race, racism and antiracism. In 2017, she was the Hans Speier Visiting Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York. She is co-editor of the Rowman and Littlefield International book series, Challenging Migration Studies and former President of the Australian Critical Race & Whiteness Studies Association (2017-20). Her books include Why Race Still Matters (Polity 2020), The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a neoliberal age (with Gavan Titley 2011), Racism and Sociology (2014 with Wulf D. Hund), Racism (2008) and racism and Anti-racism in Europe (2004).
She has written for The Guardian, OpenDemocracy, ABC Religion and Ethics, The Conversation, and Public Seminar.
Dr. Anaheed Al-Hardan is an assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. Her research is concerned with coloniality and resistance in relation to counter-memory, decolonial knowledges and south-south thought in the Arab World, and has appeared in Journal of Palestine Studies, Qualitative Inquiry, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies and International Sociology. She is the author of the award-winning Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (Columbia University Press, 2016), joint winner of the 2016 Academic Book Award at the London Palestine Book Awards. Her current book project examines Arab decolonial theory within the context of south-south philosophies of liberation and decolonization. She is a Principal Investigator on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded research program Afro-Asian Futures Past.
Previously, Anaheed Al-Hardan was the Arcapita Visiting Professor of Arab Studies at the Middle Institute at Columbia University (2018), Visiting Scholar at the Bandung Humanism Initiative at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University (2018), Visiting Fellow at the Berlin Graduate School for the Study of Muslim Cultures and Society at the Free University of Berlin (2017), Research Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2011-14) and a Doctoral Fellow of the Palestinian American Research Center (2008).
Dr. Inna Michaeli is a sociologist and feminist activist. Her PhD from the Humboldt University of Berlin focused on the field of “Women’s Economic Empowerment” and explored the intersections of economic citizenship, gender and ethnicity in neoliberalism. For the past 20 years she takes part in feminist, LGBT*QI and anti-colonial struggles, political education, and organizing by and for migrant women.
Dr. Nahed Samour studied law and Islamic studies at the universities of Bonn, Birzeit/Ramallah, London (SOAS), Berlin (HU), Harvard and Damascus. She was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt/Main. She clerked at the Court of Appeals in Berlin, and held a Post Doc position at the Eric Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Helsinki University, Finland and was Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advance Study. She is Junior Faculty at the Harvard Law School, Institute of Global Law and Policy.
Welcome to the second screening of Afrofilm & Diasporic Realities!
Afrofilm is a self-organised monthly screening of films telling the lives and experiences of african and afro-descendant people from various geographical locations.
We will be showing films for us by us, which means that the screening is for a closed audience of African and Afro-descendent people.
There is a lot to know and learn from all of us and we think that films are a relevant and efficient way of making this possible.
*In Wolof and French without subtitles*
Join us for the screening of La petite Vendeuse de Soleil by Djibril Diop Mambéty to then end the evening with a discussion round to share and create knowledge about Black realities we weren’t yet familiar with and to connect with each other.
La petite Vendeuse de Soleil: A disabled Senegalese girl, Sili, decides to do a boys job and starts selling newspapers on the streets of Dakar. Sili does a great job but the boys are not happy, the story tells her battle about daring to imagine what she can be and not caring about what anyone else thinks.
Djibril Diop Mambéty was a Senegalese film director, actor, orator, composer and poet. Born to a Muslim family near Dakar, Senegal’s capital city, Mambéty was Wolof. Though he made only two feature films and five short films, they received international acclaim for their original and experimental cinematic technique and non-linear, unconventional narrative style.
The screening will take place in Wolof and French spoken languages and will be without subtitles.
Following our two-part workshop on Jewish–Muslim relations and solidarity (
Welcome to the second screening of Afrofilm & Diasporic Realities!