MONIQUE MBEKA PHOBA will present an overview of her 17 masterclasses on the
subject of the taboo of colonization in the Belgian cinema of the last 40 years. The
masterclasses have been presented from 2015 to 2017 in a quite various places: festivals, training institutes as cultural or associative centers (Brussels African Film Festival / FIFAB, BOZAR, Pier 10, women’s film festival, “They spin,” BE-PAX, Point-Culture, Pianofabriek, Ghent Sint-Luca Art Institute, Mission Local of Molenbeek, ULB, Congolese associations etc.).
LAURA NSENGIYUMVA will talk about her project PeopL. This work addresses the figure of Leopold II in the public space of Brussels. And more generally, she refers to his phantasmagorical presence in the Belgian consciousness: in official celebrations, in folklore, in language (he is seen as the king “Builder”). The figure of the King Leopold II becomes theinstrument of a biased patriotism. The king becomes “Builder,” despite the immense destruction of which he was the author. He is the figure of a cynical patriotism, which cannot function without a cruel but indispensable blindness. The project aims to the decolonization of the public space.
WOMBA KONGA known by his artist name PITCHO will present 2 projects: a multidisciplinary festival “Congolisation” and his latest theater/perfomative play with the title “Kuzikiliza.” The term Congolisation is a contraction of the words “Congo” and “Colonisation.” The idea of the festival is to focus on the contribution of the Congolese diaspora in the Belgium cultural landscape. The theater/performance play “Kuzikiliza” that translates in Swahili as “to be heard”—is a plurilingual and interdisciplinary performance that makes communication and its mechanisms to vacillate. Pitcho Womba Konga in this play departs from Patrice Lumumba’s speech at the ceremony of the Proclamation of the Congo’s Independence on June 30, 1960. Pitcho exposes the actuality of Lumumba’s speech today and questions how to reconcile past and present, while the process of decolonization is still fully underway.
The images and chronologies in these displayed materials are coming from the catalogue/publication Words Precede Actions with the subtitle The Context of Language, Racism, Economy and Power by Marika Schmiedt published in 2018 that displays racist genealogies of discrimination and the ghettoization of the Roma people in the West and East of Europe.
One part of her analysis consists of the research of racism, linking them to histories of the relationship between race and physical anthropology. As “racist scientific results” are used in sorting and exposing bones and crania collections in the museum. This takes us via Schmiedt to the Natural History Museum (NHM) in Vienna that has one of the biggest crania collections, assembled by the Austrian anthropologist Augustin Weisbach (1837–1914) in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe. The anthropological collection at the Natural History Museum in Vienna includes 40,000 objects, human remains, including skulls, bones, hair, and body drains. The collection mostly contains relics from historical and prehistoric times, but also problematic chapters of human remains that mark colonial and National Socialist times.
The other part presents a gallery of “skeletons of important Austrian men” falling out of the closet of Austrian history. All these men are not solely vicious racists, having programmatic anti-Romaism agendas, but they are all anti-Semites:
Albert Geßmann (1852–1920)
Karl Lueger (1844–1910),
Josef Weinheber (1892–1945)
Taras Borodajkewycz (1902‒1984)
Josef Weinheber (1892 – 1945) a “respected” Austrian man, poet and essayist, who was largely under the literary influences of Rainer Maria Rilke, Anton Wildgans and Karl Kraus, was a member of the Nazi Party from 1931 until 1933 and from 1944 on. He committed at the time of the advance of the Red Army, leaving behind a clear-sighted parting letter. He was buried in the village of Kirchstetten, Austria, where he had lived since 1936. The municipality and the citizens of Kirchstetten, have honored for years the “great poet” Weinheber by transforming his house into a museum, dedicating a street, a square and a highway bridge in his name, decided to name a kindergarten in his honor. (From the text by Marina Grzinic in Words Precede Actions, 2018).
Lecture and introduction to Marika Schmiedt’s catalogue
by Marina Grzinic
[…] Words precede actions: language, words, and discourses have a powerful impact on concrete social issues, political decisions, media content, knowledge institutions, labor markets, the shaping of histories, memories, and subjectivities and defining of citizenship. Through mass media, public opinions, and widespread anti-Roma graffiti in public space, words have set in motion actions of constant dehumanization of the Roma, leading their conditions of poverty, segregation, and seclusion to become part of another rhetoric – the rhetoric of naturalization of these conditions. We can find at least three forms of displaying these processes of racialization in Schmiedt’s work. The second form that is as well central to the research Genealogies of amnesia displays mechanisms that I will label the gallery of “skeletons of important Austrian men” falling out of the closet of Austrian history. All these men, we are soon to learn, almost dumbstruck, are not solely vicious racists, having programmatic anti-Romaism agendas, but are all anti-Semites. Reviewing this frightening collection of men, which is by no means exclusively historical, but instead, reverberates persistently in present times, identified by generations of critical positions in Austria as the nation’s post-Nazi times. This past is preoccupying as hyper right wing neoliberal necrocapitalism is at its full power here and now.
The catalogue presentation at the VBKÖ was contextualized by an exhibition of Marika Schmiedt’s recent investigations on the Nazi-past of the Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs (VBKÖ).
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
May 27, 2019 Zagreb Workshop: Feminism Between Nation-states and Capitalism
Workshop with Marina Gržinić, Šefik Tatlić, and the participants of the module Feminism Between Nation-states and Capitalism at Centre for Women’s Studies, Zagreb, Croatia
Centre for Women’s Studies Zagreb is the first non-institutional educational center in Croatia. It was founded by a group of feminists, theorists, and scholars, peace activists, and artists in 1995. The Centre provides an interdisciplinary program and expert knowledge on women’s issues and is a meeting point for academic discourse, artistic practice, activist engagement. The Centre’s publishing program is focused on publishing the results of Croatian feminist research and theory, as well as translations of selected key feminist texts. Until today they have published more than 50 titles. The Centre’s feminist theoretical journal Treća – [The Third] was launched in 1998 and has been published annually ever since.
The main quality of the Women’s Studies educational program is its interdisciplinarity and integrality. The program offers an insight into the diverse themes of feminism and gender studies, women’s culture and history, women’s rights and gender equality. During its 20 years of work, the Centre has seen more than 600 participants complete the educational program, and more than 1000 participants involved in various specialized programs.
Module: Feminism Between Nation-states and Capitalism
It is clear that what global capitalism brings in front of us is a necessity to revisit globally racist, homophobic, and discriminatory processes, not as simple identity differences but as processes that are entangled with capital, new media technology and with the change of the mode of life under capital’s brutal modes of racialization and exploitation.
Lectures:
Marina Gržinić
State nation, feminism, capitalism, memory, history
Feminist perspective: from former Yugoslavia turbo fascism to neoliberal postmodern fascist Europe
Šefik Tatlić
Nation-state, feminisms, capitalism
Political analysis of memory and history in the space of former Yugoslavia
Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism:Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, and Sophie Uitz (editors), 578 pp., Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, 2020
The volume is an outcome of the art- and theory-based research project Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality. It is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through its Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK). The research is developed at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, from 2018 to 2020. The volume focuses on collective amnesia in regards to traumatic events of the European past and the ways in which memory and history are presented for the future. It gathers together reflections on racism and nationalism, empowerment and futurity. As the subtitle indicates, ultimately this volume is about achieving a future conviviality. On this festive occasion, the editors of the book will present its content, structure and contributors.
Contributors: Jamika Ajalon, Ruth Beckermann, Elisabeth Brainin, Véronique Clette-Gakuba, CMCLD/Collectif Mémoire Coloniale et Lutte contre les Discriminations, Nejra Nuna Čengić, Matthias De Groof, Nicole Grégoire, Marina Gržinić, Adla Isanović,Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur, Geneviève Kaninda, Hikmet Karčić, Kasereka Kavwahirehi, Sophie Lillie, Michael Loebenstein, Nikita Mazurov, Berthold Molden, Pedro Monaville, Sir Geoffrey Nice, Jovita Pristovšek, Markus Rheindorf, Drehli Robnik, Tony Kokou Sampson, Birgit Sauer, Max Silverman, Kalvin Soiresse Njall, Shirley Anne Tate, Šefik Tatlić, Claudia Tazreiter, Nevenka Tromp, Hedvig Turai, Sophie Uitz, Tanya Ury, Gloria Wekker, Renée Winter, and Ruth Wodak.
Presentations by: Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.
Presentations by: Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, Sophie Uitz, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Presentations by: Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.
Presentations by: Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.
Images with violent content are always historical, as what is seen as violent is constructed and is violently managed; therefore nothing is natural in relation to violence. What will be defined as violent is always an outcome of violent hegemonic processes. Seeing images of killings can provoke our rebellion and our insurgencies, unless we are paralyzed by our normativized occidental lives. Europe and the global neoliberal capitalist system in general are well attuned to the hierarchization, control, and management processes of the present neoliberal capitalist states. Especially under attack are migrants and all those not considered to be “natural” parts of the neoliberal capitalist national body in the West: asylum-seekers and refugees escaping war-torn parts of the global world (the Middle East, Africa), from conflicts induced by capital and imperial management.
On the other side and at the same time, we can see, for example, the last election campaign in Austria, with posters by the Freedom Party (FPÖ) containing blatantly racist and fascist slogans and images. My interest is to connect racism with visual narratives, “trophy” artifacts, and culture. I will look at racism from a historical perspective, showing a horrifying trajectory of structural racism that reproduces itself almost always circularly from a pseudoscientific (biological) racism, “progressing” toward “cultural racism” to “return” again to “scientific racism,” though then coined “intellectual racism.”
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.
In the time of neoliberal global necrocapitalism we are increasingly confronted with a political and social amnesia that profits without the past, producing more and more processes of de-historicization and de-politicisation. Central to these processes is the logic of (neoliberal) repetition that produces at least two different procedures of (de)historicization. On one side we have the logic of the neoliberal Western world that works as a pure trans-historical machine, and on the other, in the East and in the South of Europe, we detect forced techniques of embracing historicization as totalization. In both cases the result is a suspension of history that works with a primary intention to dispose of any alternative within it! My idea is to provide some examples, and, more, to try to define these processes on a much wider scale in order to see their political, social and cultural consequences.
The presentation is based on the new insights provided by the research project I am in charge of at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, with the title “Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality” (funded through the Programme for Arts-based Research PEEK, by the FWF, Austrian Science Fund, in the period from 2018 to 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
