translating pasts into futures: Decolonial Perspectives on Things in Art, Design & Film
Symposium 13.10.–14.10.2017
With Colonial Neighbours et al.
At HFBK Hamburg
Concept and realization Eva Knopf, Sophie Lembcke, Mara Recklies
University of Hamburg and University of Fine Arts Hamburg
13.10.2017
13:00 Welcome, Introduction Round
14:00 Translation I – Materials
With knowbotique (Zurich): Psychotropic Gold (Lecture Performance), Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou & Sanne Sinnige (Brussels): Copper means Trouble (Screening and Lecture), Stephan Köhler & Georges Adéagbo (Hamburg, Cotonou): Assemblages as Laboratory of Encounters – The Daily Practice and Diversity of Locations (Presentation and Artist Talk)
Discussion
19:00 Translation II – Movements
With 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)
14.10.2017
10:00 Translation III – Objects
With 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), Jana Seehusen & Veronika Darian (Hamburg, Leipzig): Detournement of Things (Lecture Performance), Alyssa Grossman (Gothenburg): Unfixing Museologies: Seeing Through Objects in the Ethnographic Archive (Lecture)
14:00 Translation IV – Archives
With 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), Kitso Lynn Lelliott (Johannesburg): I was her and she was me and those we might become (Exhibition Screening)
Discussion
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?
