Events

UPCOMING EVENTS

SATURDAY, APRIL 13th, 2019, from 15p.m to 18p.m

Georgia Lucas-Going, still from England, 2018, video & royal family thim­bles pre-meghan Markle, 2’54, cour­tesy of the artist.

The Inheritance: visual talk of Elizabeth Povinelli fol­lowed by "A CURATOR ONCE SHOUTED AT ME FOR GIVING HIM FLOWERS" a per­for­mance of Georgia Lucas-Going

Visual talk: "The Inheritance", Elizabeth Povinelli
“This visual talk probes the tem­po­rality of inher­i­tance by taking the audi­ence through a visual his­tory of my paternal family’s move­ment from their ances­tral vil­lage in Austrian-Hungarian Alps to the deep American South of the 1960s and 70s. I ask what are the inher­i­tances of fam­i­lies when what is passed down is passed through a his­tory and vio­lent dis­place­ment but into ongoing forms of set­tler dis­pos­ses­sion and racial/racist oppres­sion. Where is blood, soil, and iden­tity across var­ious modes of belonging to place and being dis­pos­sessed of place.”
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Elizabeth Povinelli is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her writing has focused on devel­oping a crit­ical theory of late lib­er­alism that would sup­port an anthro­pology of the other­wise, informed pri­marily by set­tler colo­nial theory, prag­ma­tism and crit­ical theory. This poten­tial theory of the other­wise has unfolded pri­marily from within a sus­tained rela­tion­ship with her Indigenous Karrabing col­leagues in north Australia and across five books, numerous essays, and six films with the Karrabing Film Collective. In her most recent book, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Povineli finds Foucauldian biopol­i­tics unable to ade­quately reveal con­tem­po­rary mech­a­nisms of power and gov­er­nance and describes a mode of power she calls geon­topower, which oper­ates through the reg­u­la­tion of the dis­tinc­tion between Life and Nonlife and the fig­ures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus. Geontologies exam­ines this for­ma­tion of power from the per­spec­tive of Indigenous Australian maneu­vers against the set­tler state and was the 2017 recip­ient of the Lionel Trilling Book Award. Karrabing films have shown inter­na­tion­ally including in the Berlinale Forum Expanded, Sydney Biennale; MIFF, the Tate Modern, doc­u­menta-14, and the Contour Biennale.

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Performance: "A CURATOR ONCE SHOUTED AT ME FOR GIVING HIM FLOWERS", Georgia Lucas-Going

Georgia Lucas-Going stages her­self in her own videos where she com­bines per­for­mance and work on the visual image. As she leans on simple schemes, she deals with per­sonal and family his­to­ries based on shared sto­ries. The artist and per­former han­dles deri­sion like a com­bative sport. In her video Think Brother Think (2016), she takes on igno­rance on Black cul­ture in the so-said mul­ti­cul­tural British society with provoca­tive humour. Despite their apparent light­ness, her videos don’t cease deeply ques­tioning our rela­tion with History and power, as in Who Ever Heard of a Lord That Wasn’t a Fool (2017).
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Georgia Lucas-Going (b. 1988 Luton, UK) is cur­rently Artist-in-res­i­dence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kun­sten (Amsterdam, NL). She grad­u­ated from UCL’s Slade School of Arts in London (MFA in Fine Art). She has also been recently selected for the Deptford X 2018 pro­gram and received the Berenice Goodwin Prize for Performance. Lucas-Going was Artist-in-res­i­dence at the Alexander McQueen stu­dios in London and Wysing Art Centre (Cambridge, UK) with the col­lec­tive ‘FORMERLY CALLED’ and has exhib­ited notably at the ICA (London, UK) and Tate Modern (London, UK) as well as inter­na­tion­ally.

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THURSDAY, MAY 9th, 2019 from 7p.m30 to 9p.m30

photo credit: Untitled (por­trait of Bienvenu Nanga, Mega Mingiedi and Eléonore Hellio, Kinshasa 2013) © Sean Hart

Seminar: Arts in Africa and in its dias­poras: prac­tices, knowl­edges, mobil­i­ties

This sem­inar seeks to offer reflec­tions on the driving forces of forms, prac­tices and artistic knowl­edge of the con­cep­tion and the cir­cu­la­tion of struc­tures, move­ments, ide­olo­gies and polit­ical imag­i­naries on the african con­ti­nent and in its dias­pora. In this frame­work, our researches will focus on the visual and per­for­ma­tive arts, in a broad sense (danse, the­atre, fine arts, pho­tograpy, cinema, music, lit­ter­a­ture, dig­ital arts...) and will follow an his­to­rian, crit­ical and trans­dis­ci­plinary approach.
Anthropology, visual cul­ture and materiel his­tory, cura­to­rial studies his­tory, art his­tory, colo­nial, post­colo­nial, decolo­nial and dias­poric studies, as well as polit­ical sciences... will meet and ques­tion each other . Each ses­sion will be build around a pre­sen­ta­tion by invited speakers researchers or/and designers/prac­ti­tioners, wether they are artists, cul­tural actors or activists. Capturing diver­sity and a large range of view­points, pre­sented works and approaches will have in common to take account that works (on) inter­sec­tions between art(s) and politic(s ) imply to start from a bedrock where reflex­ting and the­o­rising are required.
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2018-2019: Future Arts Practices in the African World and its Diasporas
Future, or better, futures. Futures of cities, of ecolo­gies, of con­struc­tions of gen­ders; futures of tech­nics and sciences; of the vio­lence - polit­ical, eco­nom­ical, social ; of hope; the mere notions of future... Thinking, speaking, give sub­stance to these futures and to others, con­nected, from Africa and its dias­poras: these are cru­cial tasks that - through their prac­tices and reflex­ions - artists, cin­e­matog­ra­phers, per­formers writers, philoso­phers, reserchers, cura­tors, and cul­tural activists who will pre­sent their work during the sem­inar will try to target. Committed, rebel­lious, even rad­ical, the pro­posals that they develop under­mine pre­con­ceived ideas and doxas.

ORGANISERS OF THE SEMINAR :
Anne Doquet, Christine Douxami, Sarah Fila-Bakabadio, Eric Jolly,
Dominique Malaquais.

SPEAKERS : Katja Gentric, Annael Le Poullennec

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Katja Gentric & Annael Le Poullennec
«...... when sud­denly the future came to inter­rupt the fore­seen course of events : shifts and coin­ci­dences in today’s south african art and cinema.»
"Why speak of art to talk about the future?
To live in the pre­sent is, in itself, to live on the verge of the instant when every­thing cap­sizes into the future. All the more so in a country with a con­flictual and vio­lent past, like South Africa for example, where the past re-emerges in unex­pected and strangely deformed ways. Such a society is how­ever obliged to take this past into con­sid­er­a­tion in order to be able to face the future. Past and future appear in the form of images and slip­pages explaining the pre­sent, and vice-versa. Under the sign of this para­dox­ical simul­taneity and these recip­rocal tem­po­ral­i­ties, the pre­sent is a point of inter­sec­tion, a moment when coin­ci­dences and col­li­sions of all sorts may happen, between mul­tiple pasts and futures, expec­ta­tions and hopes – pending hopes? – belated antic­i­pa­tions? Maybe it is the con­stant deferral of the dream promised at the end of apartheid that brings about this belat­ed­ness, this lag, a cer­tain nos­talgia of a radiant future con­tin­u­ally resched­uled, where the solu­tion (the rev­o­lu­tion?) is still to come. In recip­rocal simul­taneity the south african con­text is one of acute aware­ness of a rad­ical about turn, bringing with it redef­i­ni­tion, re-nar­ra­tion on a national level, dis­tancing pro­pa­ganda, because such a cap­sizing moment has already hap­pened, quite recently at that. This mode of con­scious­ness brings with it an acute sense of the fic­tional, of poten­tial­i­ties, i.e. the regen­er­a­tive power inherent in nar­ra­tion, in re-imag­i­na­tion.
Incidentally, fic­tion is inte­gral part of any artistic prac­tice. In the arts tem­poral shifts can be per­son­i­fied by the one who is not in his place or out of sync: the alien, the colon, the expat, the migrant, the dreamer, the dis­tracted, the time trav­eller. Singling out a handful of exam­ples from con­tem­po­rary art and cinema, we will draw atten­tion to tem­poral gaps and shifts, coin­ci­dences and cap­sizing occur­rences. Starting form the dic­tionary of mul­tiple tem­po­ral­i­ties Not no Place, to the film District 9 (Neill Blomkamp), touching on the inter­ven­tions of the Center for Historical Reenactments, we keep a lookout for the moments when the unex­pected comes to inter­rupt the fore­seen course of events, the misun­der­stand­ings – and the pre­con­ceived ideas. Sometimes these may startle us into sur­prised laughter."
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Annael Le Poullennec is an asso­ciate researcher at Institut des mondes africains (EHESS-EPHE-CNRS-IRD-Paris 1 Sorbonne-Aix Marseille Universités). After studying English lit­er­a­ture, lin­guis­tics and his­tory at Ecole nor­male supérieure (Cachan), she passed her higher edu­ca­tion teaching cer­tifi­cate (Agrégation) in 2007. She obtained her PhD in English studies (with a spe­cial­iza­tion in South African cul­tural studies) in 2013; her dis­ser­ta­tion exam­ined the rep­re­sen­ta­tions of “post-apartheid space” in South African fea­ture-length fic­tion films of the 2000s. Between 2007 and 2014, she taught English, British and American his­tory as well as visual studies in her alma mater as well as Université Paris-Diderot and Université de Cergy-Pontoise, before taking on respon­s­abil­i­ties as pro­ject man­ager for research dis­sem­i­na­tion at Ecole nor­male supérieure and Université PSL. Her cur­rent research focuses on issues of space, iden­tity and memory in the post-apartheid and post-Marikana con­texts, par­tic­u­larly as regards cin­e­matic rep­re­sen­ta­tions.
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Artist and art his­to­rian, Katja Gentric has com­pleted her studies in South Africa and in France. She holds a D.N.S.E.P (fine arts) from ENSA Dijon and a PhD from the Université de Bourgogne. She is post-doc­toral fellow in the depart­ment “Art History and Image Studies” at the University of the Free State, South Africa and asso­ciate researcher at the Centre Georges Chevrier, Dijon (UMR 7366 - CNRS uB).

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PAST EVENT

THURSDAY, APRIL 11th, from 7p.m30 to 9p.m30

photo credit: Untitled (por­trait of Bienvenu Nanga, Mega Mingiedi and Eléonore Hellio, Kinshasa 2013) © Sean Hart

Seminar: Arts in Africa and in its dias­poras: prac­tices, knowl­edges, mobil­i­ties

This sem­inar seeks to offer reflec­tions on the driving forces of forms, prac­tices and artistic knowl­edge of the con­cep­tion and the cir­cu­la­tion of struc­tures, move­ments, ide­olo­gies and polit­ical imag­i­naries on the african con­ti­nent and in its dias­pora. In this frame­work, our researches will focus on the visual and per­for­ma­tive arts, in a broad sense (danse, the­atre, fine arts, pho­tograpy, cinema, music, lit­ter­a­ture, dig­ital arts...) and will follow an his­to­rian, crit­ical and trans­dis­ci­plinary approach.
Anthropology, visual cul­ture and materiel his­tory, cura­to­rial studies his­tory, art his­tory, colo­nial, post­colo­nial, decolo­nial and dias­poric studies, as well as polit­ical sciences... will meet and ques­tion each other . Each ses­sion will be build around a pre­sen­ta­tion by invited speakers researchers or/and designers/prac­ti­tioners, wether they are artists, cul­tural actors or activists. Capturing diver­sity and a large range of view­points, pre­sented works and approaches will have in common to take account that works (on) inter­sec­tions between art(s) and politic(s ) imply to start from a bedrock where reflex­ting and the­o­rising are required.
— 
2018-2019: Future Arts Practices in the African World and its Diasporas
Future, or better, futures. Futures of cities, of ecolo­gies, of con­struc­tions of gen­ders; futures of tech­nics and sciences; of the vio­lence - polit­ical, eco­nom­ical, social ; of hope; the mere notions of future... Thinking, speaking, give sub­stance to these futures and to others, con­nected, from Africa and its dias­poras: these are cru­cial tasks that - through their prac­tices and reflex­ions - artists, cin­e­matog­ra­phers, per­formers writers, philoso­phers, reserchers, cura­tors, and cul­tural activists who will pre­sent their work during the sem­inar will try to target. Committed, rebel­lious, even rad­ical, the pro­posals that they develop under­mine pre­con­ceived ideas and doxas.

ORGANISERS OF THE SEMINAR :
Anne Doquet, Christine Douxami, Sarah Fila-Bakabadio, Eric Jolly,
Dominique Malaquais.

SPEAKERS :
Eva Barois de Caevel, Katja Gentric, Annael Le Poullennec

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SESSIONS

Thursday, 11th of APRIL, 2019 from 7p.m30 to 9p.m30
«Here I have every­thing I need» with Eva Barois de Caevel

Thursday, 09th of MAY, 2019 from 7p.m30 to 9p.m30
«...... when sud­denly the future came to inter­rupt the fore­seen course of events : shifts and coin­ci­dences in today’s south african art and cinema.» with Katja Gentric & Annael Le Poullennec

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SESSION 1: THURSDAY, 11th of APRIL, 2019
7p.m30 to 9p.m30

Eva Barois de Caevel
«Here I have every­thing I need»

"I work from — and beyond — the “African” con­ti­nent. With artists, with stu­dents; with insti­tu­tions. Mostly as curator. I will come to relate sto­ries, short nar­ra­tions, appearing as many thumb­nail images likely to con­jure up some aspect of the future(s) of Africa(s) and of their dias­poras. My sto­ries are about places, people and art; but they also speak of epis­te­mology, of the notion of the uni­versal, of what is referred to as “bar­barian”, of aes­thetics and rep­re­sen­ta­tions, of legit­i­macy, of the idea of pro­gress, of the sexual ori­en­ta­tions of “others”, of vio­lence and pre­da­tion, of the sense of accom­plish­ment and self-esteem, of the mul­ti­plicity of nar­ra­tives, of dis­place­ment, of fear and of love."
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Eva Barois De Caevel (1989, France) is an inde­pen­dent curator, writer and editor. She works in the research areas fem­i­nism, post-colo­nial studies, body and sex­u­ality, crit­ical re-read­ings of occi­dent-cen­trist his­tory of art and renewal of writing and of crit­ical speech. In approaching her work, she is ded­i­cated to “al­ways keeping in mind the power-rela­tions between con­ti­nents, coun­tries, per­son­al­i­ties”, she has pledged to attempt to trans­form them as soon as the slightest posi­tion of power becomes apparent. Eva Barois De Caevel grad­u­ated from Paris Sorbonne Paris IV in Art his­tory, she is assis­tant curator for RAW Material Company and coor­di­nator of RAW Academy (Senegal); editor and con­sul­tant for the Institute for Human Activities (Congo, Holland, Belgium); invited curator for LagosPhoto Festival (October-November 2018, Nigeria). Eva is a founding member of the inter­na­tional col­lec­tive of cura­tors Cartel de Kunst, cre­ated in 2012, based in Paris. She was the winner of ICI Independent Vision Curatorial Award 2014 and has pub­lished a great number of texts in exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logues and spe­cialised jour­nals (IAM, AFRIKADAA, Offshore, Something We Africans Got). She was the curator of the exhi­bi­tions L’élargissement des fan­tasmes (March - April 2017, Maëlle Galerie, Paris) and Every Mask I Ever Loved (September - January 2018, ifa Galerie, Berlin). In her capacity as curator and researcher she has pre­sented her research in a great number of inter­na­tional con­fer­ences and sym­po­siums, some­times per­forming her own texts. Amongst others she has pre­sented her work at Musée des civil­i­sa­tions noires in Dakar, at Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille, at l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris, at La Colonie in Paris, at the School of Arts in Ghent, at Creative Time Summit 2016 in Washington, at the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Köln, at Bétonsalon in Paris, at Centre Pompidou in Paris, at Sint Lucas University of Art and Design in Antwerp, at the FRAC Basse-Normandie in Caen, at l’Université Paris Diderot, at Villa Médicis in Rome, at the Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette in Paris, and WIELS in Brussels.

FROM MARCH 26th TO MARCH, 30th, 2019

Workshop Shapes of the Radical

As part of Position latérale de sécu­rité (Lateral Recovery Position), this one-week work­shop will gather a group of par­tic­i­pants with a variety of back­grounds over daily ses­sions. The pro­gram will include anal­yses and dis­cus­sions about the cura­to­rial pro­cess of the exhi­bi­tion, con­cep­tual con­stel­la­tions, and indi­vidual art­works, in addi­tion to close read­ings of the dis­cur­sive and edi­to­rial pro­grams. The work­shop will focus on verbal exchanges and body prac­tices in order to elab­o­rate a shared reflec­tion on some of the vis­ible and invis­ible affects at work in the exhi­bi­tion. The pro­gram will include a series of daily work­shops led by writer and the­o­rist Ana Teixeira Pinto about the matter of crypto­fas­cism, and con­ver­sa­tions with the artists and cura­tors of the exhi­bi­tion.

The work­shop Shapes of the Radical is cen­tered on the exhi­bi­tion itself end encour­ages a dynamic exchange with the staff of Bétonsalon — Center for Art and Research, cura­tors, con­trib­u­tors, and par­tic­i­pants. The pro­gram takes as its pri­mary sub­ject matter the param­e­ters, resources, and tools offered by the exhi­bi­tion Position latérale de sécu­rité (Lateral Recovery Position) itself and exam­ines the exhi­bi­tion as a com­plex net­work of mate­rial, polit­ical, and aes­thetic con­tin­gen­cies. It focuses on it vis­ible and invis­ible alliances and rela­tions, using the exhi­bi­tion as a site of encounter and study.

REGISTRATION
Registration is required at: public­s@­be­ton­salon.net.
Please send a short email intro­­ducing your­­self and your rea­­sons for par­tic­i­­pating, with the sub­­­ject "Registration: Shapes of the Radical".
Registration is pos­sible until March 15th, 2019 at 11 a.m.
Participants will receive the detailed work­shop pro­gram after reg­is­tra­tion.

GUEST CONTRIBUTORS
The work­shop Shapes of the Radical acts as a close reading of the exhi­bi­tion, with unique inter­ven­tions from selected con­trib­u­tors. Guests include: Ana Teixeira Pinto, Alice Diop, Adrian Mabileau Ebrahimi Tajadod, and Hamid Shams.

PUBLIC SESSIONS - No reg­is­tra­tion required

Thursday, 28.3.2019
6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Screening of Vers la ten­dresse, by Alice Diop
Alice Diop in con­ver­sa­tion with Guslagie Malanda

Saturday, March 30th 2019
From 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Final dis­cus­sion with the con­trib­u­tors & Ana Teixeira Pinto

All public events are held in English and French and are free of charge.

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Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer and cul­tural the­o­rist based in Berlin. She is a lec­turer at the DAI (Dutch Art Institute) and a research fellow at Leuphana University, Lüneburg (Germany). Her writ­ings have appeared in pub­li­ca­tions such as Frieze, Afterall, Springerin, Camera Austria, e-flux journal, art-agenda, Mousse, Domus, Inaesthetics, Manifesta Journal, and Texte zur Kunst. She is the editor of The Reluctant Narrator (Sternberg Press, 2014) and, together with Eric de Bruyn and Sven Lütticken of a forth­coming book series on counter his­to­ries, to be pub­lished by Sternberg Press.

Alice Diop, born in 1979, from Senegalese par­ents, is a french doc­u­men­tary film­maker, who makes films about con­tem­po­rary French society. After soci­ology studies, she embarked into pro­ducing mostly doc­u­men­tary films. Her most notable pro­duc­tions include La per­­ma­­nence (2016), a movie about the life of migrants in France, and La Mort de Danton (2011) which won the Prix des Bibliothèques au Cinéma du Réel and the Grand Prix du 7ème Festival du film d’éducation d’Évreux as well as the Étoile de la Scam in 2012. Diop movies received numerous awards. Her film Vers La ten­dresse (Towards Tenderness) won the best short film award at the French César Awards in 2017. When receiving her prize she ded­i­cated the film to vic­tims of police vio­lence.

FRIDAY, MARCH 22th, 2019, from 12.30 a.m to 2 p.m

Screening: Animacies

Screening of the video pro­duced as part of the work­shop pro­gram led, at the Paris Diderot University and the Poissy prison, by artist Julie Ramage and archae­ol­o­gist Olivier Royer-Perez (Inrap).

What can archae­ology teach us about life in prison? How does this science of traces, remains and archives inter­sect with notions of proof, iden­tity and tes­ti­mony? The orig­inal pro­ject, focusing on aging bodies, was soon sub­verted by the working group formed at the Poissy prison, which chose to study daily strate­gies of “sur­vival”. These dis­cus­sions and exper­i­men­ta­tions, the sci­en­tific anal­ysis of tech­niques and arti­facts and the explo­ration of archae­o­log­ical con­ser­va­tion and restora­tion pro­cesses arose broader ques­tions on wounds, healing, care and the integrity of the incar­cer­ated body. It also inter­ro­gated everyday ges­tures of micro-resis­tance, con­flicts of power and com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

Collective cre­ation: ANIMACIES
Directed by Julie Ramage

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This work­shop was orga­nized with the Students in Confinement Section of Paris Diderot University and the Ateliers Lettres pour l’oral et l’écrit (ALOÉ) of the Education and Research Unit in Literature, Art & Cinema. It ben­e­fited from the sup­port of CERILAC at Paris Diderot University, the Yvelines Integration and Probation Penitentiary Service, the Poissy prison, Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research, the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, and Région Ile-de-France, as a grantee of the FoRTE fund. On this occa­sion, a pro­gram of inter­ven­tions and research was devel­oped at the Poissy prison and the Paris Diderot University, in part­ner­ship with Inrap – Centre Île-de-France. The archae­ol­o­gist Olivier Royer-Perez par­tic­i­pated in the work ses­sions from September 2017 to April 2018.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 2019, from 6 to 8 p.m.

Artist talk
For this first artist talk in the exhi­bi­tion space, we wel­comed two mem­bers of the Liverpool Black Women Filmmakers artist col­lec­tive, as well as artist Rehana Zaman. The dis­cus­sion started with a screening of A Tribute to Black Women (They Don’t Get A Chance), by Ann Carney & Barbara Phillips (The Black Women’s Media Project, WITCH), 1986, UK, 20 min. This sem­inal work from the 1980s fem­i­nist video scene, shot in Liverpool, was an inte­gral part of the film­making pro­cess.
The artists and the exhi­bi­tions cura­tors Guslagie Malanda and Lucas Morin dis­cussed the pro­cess of making this col­lab­o­ra­tive work in Liverpool, as well as the polit­ical impli­ca­tions of the video. The talk gave an oppor­tu­nity to dis­cuss the per­cep­tion of minori­ties in both France and the United Kingdom, as well as mat­ters of rep­re­sen­ta­tion within the art scene and more broadly in cul­tural ref­er­ences.

We would like to thank Cinenova Distribution for their sup­port in the screening of A Tribute to Black Women (They Don’t Get a Chance).

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2019, from 7 to 8 p.m.

Le Petit Tour (A Short Ride) #2 Greece
Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research hosts Le Petit Tour (A Short Ride): Europe, land­scape or ter­ri­tory? for a per­formed pre­sen­ta­tion of the pub­li­ca­tion by its mem­bers and authors. Le Petit Tour (A Short Ride) con­nects research and inves­ti­ga­tion, bringing together stu­dents, aca­demics, artists, philoso­phers, his­to­rians… working on the ques­tion of the ter­ri­tory they operate on, namely: Europe.
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