Events

Tuesday, November 15, 6pm-9pm
Opening of the exhi­bi­tion "One cap­tion hides another"
Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research

Wednesday, November 16, 6.30pm - 9.30pm
Evening pro­gramme - “Han­tologie des Colonies" at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris
Event led by Laetitia Kugler, in the pres­ence of Patrizio di Massimo, Brigitta Kuster and Uriel Orlow.
Elaborating on the exhi­bi­tion My Last Life by Belgian artist Vincent Meessen at Espace Khiasma (30 September – 12 November 2011), the asso­ci­a­tion Normal pro­poses a choice of films focusing on the re-emer­gence of the ghost of the colo­nial past in the con­tem­po­rary artistic scene. Organised and pro­duced by Khiasma, “Han­tologie des colonies" spreads out to twelve art cen­tres, inter­me­diary spaces and cin­emas in Paris and its sub­urbs.

Program:
Patrizio di Massimo, Oae, 13 min, french sub­ti­tles, 2009
Brigitta Kuster & Moise Merlin Mabouna, 2006-1892 = 114 ans, 7 min, french sub­ti­tles, 2006
Brigitta Kuster & Moise Merlin Mabouna, À travers l’encoche d’un voyage dans la bib­lio­thèque colo­niale. Notes pit­toresques, 25 min, french sub­ti­tles, 2009
Uriel Orlow, The Visitor, 16 min, french sub­ti­tles, 2007
Penny Siopis, Obscure White Messenger, 14 min, french sub­ti­tles, 2010

Thursday, November, 7pm
Mummy lec­ture: an encounter with the group Artefakte//anti-hum­boldt at the Musée du Quai Branly
In the frame­work of the sem­inar "Under the free sky of his­tory"
Through a film-lec­ture, Artefakte//anti-hum­boldt pro­poses a nar­ra­tive whose cen­tral sub­ject is the figure of the mummy in cinema. The mummy oper­ates on a man­i­fold site of his­tor­ical coin­ci­dence, where the devel­op­ment of cinema, the European impe­rial pro­ject and the dis­ci­plines of archae­ology and psy­cho­analyse meet. As a filmic “chrono­topos”, the mummy deals with the lim­i­nality of the con­cept of “arte­fact”. As a life­less body that colo­nialism and Egyptomania have appro­pri­ated and decon­tex­tu­alised, the mummy opens up a field of attrac­tion and con­flict between sub­ject (human) and object (not human), death and life, nature and cul­ture, real and rep­re­sen­ta­tion. With the his­tor­ical dis­covery of the Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, the creepy along with the mummy’s curse super­sedes the mys­te­rious, the fan­tastic and the curious asso­ci­ated with the mummy of the early films. In the museum or on its way to it, the mummy becomes dis­parate and dan­ger­ously destruc­tive: it/(s)he embodies the undying resis­tance against the idea of objec­ti­fi­ca­tion, reifi­ca­tion. It/(s)he acti­vates diachrony – the curse, the revenge, the unre­solved his­tory. It is only when the mummy’s corpse falls into dust that the mummy in film finds sat­is­fying clo­sure. Artefakte//anti-hum­boldt is a Berlin based group of artists and scholars that was founded in 2008 as part of the event “Der Anti-Humboldt” against the recon­struc­tion of the Prussian castle and the Humboldt-Forum in Berlin. Following this event, Artefakte//anti-hum­boldt pur­sues its ques­tioning of the ethno­graphic museums by orga­nizing among other a work­shop asking ques­tions on resti­tu­tion, a lec­ture and a debate with Françoise Vergès on the “Mu­seum of the pre­sent” and an open-air film lec­ture with mummy films held at the con­struc­tion site of the to-be-built castle in Berlin.

Saturday, December 10, 1pm-5pm
Study day around the exhi­bi­tion « One cap­tion hides another »: The cir­cu­la­tion of objects as a post­colo­nial lever.
With Lotte Arndt, Françoise Vergès, Larissa Förster, Bernard Müller, Malick Ndiaye fol­lowed by an assembly invited by Agency.
Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research

Program of the after­noon;
1.30pm-1.45pm : brief intro­duc­tion to the day (Lotte Arndt)
1.45pm-2.45pm: lec­ture by Larissa Förster « These skulls are not enough ». Engaging with colo­nial vio­lence, the his­tory of science and post­colo­nial muse­ology in Germany and Namibia. (in English)
3pm-4.30pm: roundtable dis­cus­sion with Françoise Vergès, « Subaltern strate­gies: mem­o­ries, objects, imma­te­rial cul­ture » and Malick Ndiaye, « Memories and migra­tions of the object: the example of the her­itage of the slave trade and slavery ». Moderated and intro­duced by Lotte Arndt.
5pm-7pm: Assembly (One cap­tion hides another). In Assembly (One cap­tion hides another), Agency calls forth Thing 001635 (Australian Coat of Arms), spec­u­lating on the ques­tion: "How can objects be included within art prac­tices?" Thing 001635 con­cerns the con­flict between indige­nous elders and the Commonwealth about the use of totems in the Australian Coat of Arms. On 10 December, Thing 001635 (Australian Coat of Arms) con­venes an assembly at Betonsalon in order to bear wit­ness. Agency invited a diverse group of con­cerned guests to "respond" to Thing 001635 (Australian Coat of Arms): Diana-Gabriela Ciobanu / Aurelie Foisil / Johann Morris (trans­la­tors), Fiona Fouquin (lawyer), Beatrice Fraenkel (anthro­pol­o­gist), Barbara Glowczewski (anthro­pol­o­gist), Maurizio Lazzarato (philoso­pher and soci­ol­o­gist), among other par­tic­i­pants.

Participants:
 Larissa Förster, researcher at the Centre for Advanced Studies Morphomata at the University of Cologne, is a social anthro­pol­o­gist with a regional focus on Southern Africa. In her PhD, enti­tled “Post­colo­nial Landscapes of Memory. How Germans and Hereros Commemorate the Colonial War of 1904” (Frankfurt 2010; orig­inal title in German), she has looked at con­tem­po­rary ways of remem­bering colo­nialism in post­colo­nial Namibia by means of a com­par­a­tive study of oral his­tory and com­mem­o­ra­tive prac­tices among German-speaking and Herero-speaking Namibians. Another field of study of hers is the his­tory of ethno­graphic col­lecting and of eth­no­log­ical museums, with a par­tic­ular focus on most recent trans­for­ma­tions. In her cur­rent research she looks at how colo­nial vio­lence is rep­re­sented in art works and museums and at pro­cesses of resti­tu­tion and repa­tri­a­tion between formerly colonising and formerly colonised coun­tries/ com­mu­ni­ties. Larissa Förster is also a co-curator of major exhi­bi­tions such as “Namibia – Germany: A Shared History. Resistance, Violence, Memory” (Cologne 2004 and Berlin 2005) and “Afropolis. City, Media, Art” (Cologne and Bayreuth 2010/2011).
 Bernard Müller is a researcher who also elab­o­rates cul­tural pro­jects. With an aca­demic basis in anthro­pology, his main area of activity is the­atre, artistic per­for­mance and var­ious live cre­ations. Apart from his research, he con­cep­tu­ally develops var­ious cul­tural and intel­lec­tual pro­grammes: exhi­bi­tions, con­fer­ence cycles, mul­ti­media pro­grammes. He co-ordi­nated the activ­i­ties of CURIO, an inde­pen­dent struc­ture con­tributing to the dif­fu­sion and to the de-com­part­men­tal­i­sa­tion of knowl­edge.
Since 2002, he has co-ordi­nated a research pro­ject on objects looted during colo­nial wars, seen as frag­ments of his­tor­ical nar­ra­tive. One of the most impor­tant objec­tives of this pro­ject is to grasp the cul­tural and pop­ular expres­sions of colo­nial memory by col­lecting nar­ra­tives linked to colo­nial events during which objects were looted as mil­i­tary leverage. Special interest is reserved for the “memory of places”, that is the way in which the memory of colo­nial combat is trans­mitted today. Bernard Müller is the author of numerous arti­cles on colo­nial memory. www.bro­ken­memory.net
 Malick Ndiaye holds a PhD in History and Criticism of the arts from the University of Rennes 2. He is a spe­cialist in con­tem­po­rary African arts and post­colo­nial the­o­ries and has been a researcher for the pro­gramme « Art et Mondialisation » (“Art and glob­al­i­sa­tion”) of the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (National Institute of Art History), France and now is an intern / curator at the Institut National du Patrimoine (National Institute of Heritage). He co-ordi­nates the gen­eral inven­tory of her­itage of black slave trade and slavery, under the direc­tion of the depart­ment of strategy, research and sci­en­tific policy of the General Direction of Heritage of the Ministry of cul­ture and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. He is the author of « Réinventer les musées » (« Reinventing museums ») (2007), he col­lab­o­rates with a variety of jour­nals (afri­cul­tures, cri­tique d’art, cahiers d’études africaines, ethiopiques…) and par­tic­i­pates in numerous inter­na­tional meet­ings on con­tem­po­rary art, museums and post­colo­nial soci­eties.
 Françoise Vergès is Consulting Professor at Goldsmiths College, London and pres­i­dent of Comité pour la Mémoire et l’Histoire de l’Esclavage (Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery, www.cpmhe.fr). Françoise Vergès has pub­lished in French and in English on slavery, abo­li­tionism, post­colo­niality, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, the worlds of the Indian Ocean and post­colo­nial museog­raphy. Her last book: « L’Homme pré­da­teur. Ce que nous enseigne l’esclavage sur notre temps » (« The predator man. What slavery can teach us about our time »), edi­tions Albin Michel (april 2011).
 Lotte Arndt is a PhD stu­dent at the Universities Paris VII, Denis Diderot and Humboldt Universität Berlin. A member of the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies, she col­lab­o­rates with Bétonsalon on the series of monthly con­fer­ences Under the free sky of his­tory. She is a cul­tural activist and works on and within mul­tiple post­colo­nial con­flicts, notably a pro­ject with the Berlin-based group arte­fakte/anti-hum­boldt on resti­tu­tion as a pos­sible strategy for the con­tes­ta­tion of colo­nial archives and of their con­tem­po­rary reper­cus­sions, which leads her to ques­tion the col­lec­tions of ethno­graphic museums.
 Agency is the generic name of an agency that was founded in 1992 by artist Kobe Matthys and is based in Brussels. Agency con­sti­tutes an ongoing list of things that wit­ness hesi­ta­tion in terms of the split of nature into the onto­log­ical clas­si­fi­ca­tions "nature" and "cul­ture".

Tuesday, January 10, 7pm-8pm
Aide-Mémoire (v.8) : a lec­ture per­formed by Uriel Orlow
Fondation d’entreprise Ricard
In Aide-Mémoire Orlow pre­sents sal­vaged visuals of a pos­sible film, reflects on blind-spots of his­tory and explores the ter­ri­tory between trav­el­ogue, slideshow and immer­sive sound-scape. Chains of asso­ci­a­tion, visual clues and nar­ra­tive frag­ments are woven into new con­fig­u­ra­tions of past and future and recon­structed mean­ings. Biblical Mount Ararat, a Ghost Town in Northern Armenia on the site of an earthquake, a Kurdish vil­lage in Turkey built out of the rubble of an ancient Armenian monastery, death masks of Soviet lumi­naries – all con­jure sym­bols, ghosts from the past and the future of History.