Symposium: Translating Pasts into Futures
Decolonial Perspectives on Things in Art, Design & Film
Speculations and fictions allow us to journey through time, drawing on the narratives of the pasts to craft and shape possible futures. These narratives have the potential to influence the present, and they call a linear conception of time into question. Stories shatter into fragments, bound together diagrammatically or as a bricolage, queering historical narratives, regimes, and geographies. What sort of futures will be created in the rereading of past eras? Is the future already colonized? What sort of postcolonial strategies are being developed in contemporary design, contemporary art, and film for the shaping and creation of possible futures? The conference focuses on observations of temporality with regard to the function, production, use, and significance of things in colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial contexts. Questions arising from this theme include: How does the temporal interchange of things come about? How should we deal with omissions and absences of things in archives? What sort of transformational potential is inherent in things, or assigned to them? Can things be translated, or do they themselves do the translating? Can things—or the way they are used and perceived—be emancipated from their contexts?
Friday 13.10.2017
Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg, Lerchenfeld 2
Coffee Reception
13:00 Room 11
Welcome
Introduction Round
Translation I – Materials
14:00 Room 11
knowbotique (Zurich): Psychotropic Gold
Lecture Performance
Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou & Sanne Sinnige (Brussels): Copper means Trouble
Screening and Lecture
Coffee Break
Stephan Köhler & Georges Adéagbo (Hamburg, Cotonou): Assemblages as Laboratory of Encounters – The Daily Practice and Diversity of Locations
Presentation and Artist Talk
Discussion
Aperitivo
Translation II – Movements
19:00 Aula
Anne Wetsi Mpoma (Brussels): The Use of Performative Arts as Contemporary Rituals to Demystify Colonial Archives as Ghosts of the Past
Presentation
Alesandra Seutin (London): Across the Souvenir
Performance
Saturday 14.10.2017
Translation III – Objects
10:00 Room 11
Marie Kirchner (Hamburg): Objects Talking back: A Delegation of the Assembly of German Colonial Heirlooms
Performance
Jorinde Splettstößer, Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Marlon Denzel van Rooyen (Berlin): Colonial Neighbours – A Participatory Archive Project on German Colonial History
Presentation
Coffee Break
Jana Seehusen & Veronika Darian (Hamburg, Leipzig): Detournement of Things
Lecture Performance
Alyssa Grossman (Gothenburg): Unfixing Museologies: Seeing Through Objects in the Ethnographic Archive
Lecture
Lunch Break
Translation IV – Archives
14:00 Room 11
Cornelia Lund (Hamburg): Looking Back into the Future. Rethinking Archives in Relation to Decolonial Futures
Lecture
Arine Kirstein Høgel (Aarhus): Re-mediating Danish Orientalism / Film: Glob and the Creation of Knowledge
Screening and Lecture
Discussion
Kitso Lynn Lelliott (Johannesburg): I was her and she was me and those we might become
Exhibition Screening
Concept and realization: Eva Knopf, Sophie Lembcke, Mara Recklies
University of Hamburg and University of Fine Arts Hamburg
Registration:
Participation is free of charge.
Please register via email at mara.recklies@hfbk-hamburg.de
and stay both days if possible.
This event takes place under the auspices of the interdisciplinary Research Group Translating and Framing. Practices of Media Transformations. (Speaker: Gabriele Klein, Deputy Speaker: Claudia Benthien).
The Research Group is funded by the Hamburg Research Funding (Landesforschungsförderung Hamburg) / Ministry of Science, Research & Equalities.