SYMPOSIUM: BE.BOP 2012 - BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS

@ Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Berlin, Germany. Curated by Alanna Lockward, advised by Walter Mignolo and managed by Macu Moran with the financial support of Allianz Kultustiftung to VideoArtWorld, SL. This meeting was motivated and theoretically embedded to Decolonial Aesthetics/AestheSis in the spirit of the transformative and liberating qualities of performance art.

BE.BOP 2012 - BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS

It was the first international screening program and transdisciplinary roundtable centered on Black European citizenship in connection to recent moving image and performative practices. It took place at The Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, a translocal theatre space which serves as point of arrival for artists from (post) migrant communities and beyond, founded in 2008 by Shermin Langhof with the support of Fatih Akin.

The project aim to involve European audiences in intricate detail with the outrage generated by Black/African Diaspora peoples when confronting a racist world order structured along the lines of coloniality.

The framework of this meeting was circumscribed within decolonial theories which expose how the idea of citizenship is linked to current racializing configurations and hence with the limits of humanity. In that sense, the racial hierarchy of human existence, originating in the Renaissance and prescribed legally during the Enlightenment, established current (white-male-heteronormative-Christian-Western) European notions of who is Human and who is lower in that hierarchy, thereby designating citizenship, one of the most important legacies of modernity. The time-based positions discussed at this meeting were selected because they contest (racializing) fantasies on European citizenship.

By means of analyzing these narratives of re-existence, BE.BOP 2012 aimed at facilitating a long-term exchange between specialists in disciplines unrelated to visual arts and time-based art practitioners of different contexts of the Black European Diaspora. It successfully created multiple dialogues across the fields of history, legal studies, theatre, art and political activism.

OUNDTABLE SESSIONS

Friday, May 4th

10:00-11:00 Screening of works by Jeannete Ehlers, IngridMwangiRobertHutter, Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio, Emeka Udemba and Tracey Moffatt

11:00-11:30 Pause

11:30-13:30 BLACK EUROPE AND DECOLONIAL (DIASPORIC) AESTHETICS

Walter Mignolo, Duke University. Decolonial Aisthesis and Other Options Related to Aesthetics.

Alanna Lockward, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Decolonial Diasporic Aesthetics: Black German Body Politics.

IngridMwangirobertHutter, artist

Moderator: Rolando Vazquez, Roosevelt Academy

13:30-14:15 Lunch

14:15-16:30 BLACK EUROPE, CITIZENSHIP AND THE DECOLONIAL OPTION

Rolando Vazquez, Roosevelt Academy. Decolonial Thought and the Exteriority of Modernity.

Manuela Boatca, Freie Universität Berlin.The Mark of the Non-Modern: Citizenship as Ascribed Inequality in the Global Age.

Gabriele Dietze, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

Artwell Cain, Director Ninsee (National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy). Migration, Integration and Citizenship: Surinamese and Antilleans in The Netherlands.

Moderator: Walter Mignolo, Duke University

16:30-16:45 Pause

16:45-18:00 OPEN MIC

Moderator: Robbie Shilliam, Queen Mary University, London

Moderator: Alanna Lockward, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

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Saturday, May 5th

09:30-11:30 SCREENINGS OF WORKS BY JEAN-MARIE TENO, SUMUGAN SIVANESAN AND WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

11:30-11:45 Pause

11:45-13:45 COLONIAL AMNESIA I. CONNECTING ENSLAVEMENT LEGACIES BEFORE AND AFTER THE TRIANGULAR TRADE IN SCANDINAVIA

Simmi Dullay, independent scholar. Uprootings and Belongings. Mapping the Black Body in a Scandinavian Exile

Ylva Habel, Sodertorn University. Invulnerable but Touchy: White Governmentality, “Race” and the affective Economies of the Post-Political In Swedish Media Discourse on the Transatlantic Slavery.

Jeannette Ehlers, artist

Moderator: Alanna Lockward, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

13:45-14:30 Lunch

14:30-16:30 COLONIAL AMNESIA II. RES NULLIUS, THE BERLIN-CONGO CONFERENCE AND THE HERERO-NAMA GENOCIDE

David Olusoga, author. ‘Death through Exhaustion’

Jose Manuel Barreto, Goldsmiths College London. The Politics of Amnesia. The Herero-Nama Genocide in the context of European and German Strategies of Denial

Ulrike Hamann, Goethe University Frankfurt. Duala – Confrontations of “Res Nullius’’

Nico Horn, University of Namibia. Eddie Mabo in Namibia

Moderator: Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Director of Savvy Contemporary

16:30-18:00 OPEN MIC

Moderator: Michael Küppers-Adebisi, Director of AFROTAK TV cyberNomads

Moderator: Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio, artist

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Sunday, May 6th

10:30-11:00 SCREENING OF WORK BY AFROTAKT TV CYBERNOMADS

11:00- 13:00 BLACKNESS, SISTERHOOD AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE

Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio, artist. Ni ‘Mamita’ ni ‘Mulatita’. Caribean women's sterotypes and the Diaspora.

Grada Kilomba, author. Diversity in Adversity

Rozena Maart, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Black Europe as Black Flesh

Minna Salami, Writer/Blogger. Fashioning Womanhood in Africa through the 20th Century – The Culture and Politics of Dress

Moderator: Robbie Shilliam, Queen Mary University, London

13:00-13:45 Brunch

14:00-15:30 BLACKNESS, BROTHERHOOD AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE

Michael Küppers-Adebisi, Director of AFROTAK TV cyberNomads. Multi-Media-Archives of Survival. Occupy!

Robbie Shilliam, Queen Mary University, London. Keskidee Aroha: Translation on the Colonial Stage.

Quinsy Gario, artist

Moderator: Ylva Habel, Sodertorn University

15:30-16:00 Open Mic

Moderator: Walter Mignolo, Duke University

Moderator: IngridMwangiRobertHutter, artist

17:00 SCREENING OF TOXI (1952) BY ROBERT A. STEMMLE †

IN COLLABORATION WITH AFRICAVENIR, HACKESCHE HÖFE KINO

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SCREENING SESSIONS

SESSION 1 / 04.05.2102

Jeannette Ehlers

Black Magic At The White House, 3:46, sound, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Art Labour Archives.

Synopsis: Ehlers performs a Vodoun dance in Marienborg, an old building which has a strong connection to the trans-Atlantic trade. It was built as a summer residence for the commander Olfert Fischer, in 1744. It is now the official summer residency of Denmark's Prime Minister.

http://vimeo.com/25062988

Three Steps of Story, 3:35, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Art Labour Archives.

Synopsis: We see Jeannette Ehlers waltzing in a big mirrored hall, where the colorful and rebellious governor Peter von Scholtenscandalized the white citizens by inviting then the then “free Negroes” to the ball. It was also von Scholten, who proclaimed emancipation of slaves on St. Croix in 1848.

http://vimeo.com/25309738

Jeannette Ehlers studied at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and The Funen Academy of Fine Arts. She has exhibited in several cities in Europe, USA, Asia and Africa; her works explores the Danish slave trade and colonialism worldwide through digitally manipulated photographs and video installations.

http://www.jeannetteehlers.dk/ 

IngridMwangiRobertHutter

Neger, 4:16, sound, 1999. Courtesy of the artist and Art Labour Archives.

http://ingridmwangiroberthutter.com/_/neger_1999.html

Wild Life, 01:33, sound, 1998. Courtesy of the artist and Art Labour Archives.

http://ingridmwangiroberthutter.com/_/wild_life_1999.html

Masked, 5:16, no sound, 2000. Courtesy of the artist and Art Labour Archives.

http://www.ingridmwangiroberthutter.com/_/masked_2000.html

Synopsis: In Wild Life, Niger and Masked, Mwangi transforms herself into beastly images that derive from the discriminatory imagination of the West. By becoming first a roaring caged animal in Wild Life, and a minimalistic self locked “haired” entity in Negerand Masked, Mwangi’s videos blend beautiful images with the edge of brutality embedded in racial stereotypes. (By: Laurie Ann Farrel)

Ingrid Mwangi and her husband Robert Hutter work together as video, photography and performance artists. They came to consider their practice as inseparable, “one artist two bodies”, and thus exhibit under their combined names. The issues that they have tackled have included race, sex and relationships.

Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio

Hommage à Sara Bartman, 4:00, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Art Labour Archives.

Synopsis: This performance is the result of an investigation on the Black performing body, and on how Blackness has become an act in itself. Sara Bartman's iconic status is a consequence of the well documented “legitimate” scientific and voyeuristic rape of her body.

http://vimeo.com/17094383

Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio is a Dominican visual and performance artist and researcher that lives and works in Amsterdam, she graduated as a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie 2007 and Master in Fine Arts from the Dutch Art Institute 2009. Her research challenges hegemonic constructions on “reality”. http://teresadiaznerio.wordpress.com/

Emeka Udemba

Dancing with the Star, 11:46, no sound, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Art Labour Archives.

Synopsis: This work explores the conceptual twists and turns of fluidity and impalpability of the body as a social and political context. Issues of tradition, religion and gender are chartered from image to body and body to image.

Emeka Udemba studied Art Education at the University of Lagos, Nigeria. His artistic practice focuses on the use of installations, video, photography, drawing and painting used as complementary to each other. His works focuses mainly on communication in the social and political sphere.

http://wikiart.net/index.php/Emeka_Udemba

Tracey Moffatt

Other, 7:00, sound, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and The Momentum Collection.

Synopsis: Moffatt explores the ways in which societies define so-called minorities as the Other, using film collage to elicit poignant and insightful understandings of stereotypes and cultural attitudes.

Tracey Moffatt is highly regarded for her formal and stylistic experimentation in film, photography and video, her work draws on history of cinema, art and photography as well as popular culture and her own childhood memories and fantasies. She studied visual communications at the Queensland college of Art.

http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/26/Tracey_Moffatt/

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SESSION 2 / 05.05.2012

Jean Marie Teno

Le Malentendu Colonial, 78:00:00, sound, 2004. Courtesy of Les Films du Raphia.

Synopsis: This film looks at Christian evangelism as the forerunner of European colonialism in Africa, indeed, as the ideological model for the relationship between North and South even today.

Jean- Marie Teno studied audiovisual communication and worked as a film critic for Bwana Magazine and as chief editor at France 3. He produces his own films with the company Les Films du Raphia.

http://www.jmteno.us/

Sumugan Sivanesan

A Children's Book of War, A [Not So] Secret War. Terra Nullius and the Permanent State of Exception, 1:46, sound, 2010. Courtesy of the Artist and The Momentum Collection.

Synopsis: One interpretation of international law has it that people can prove their sovereignty by their ability to make and maintain laws, and their ability to declare war. Looked at that way, war is not only something civilizations do – it is something they must do in order for their right to self–rule to be respected.

http://childrensbookofwar.blogspot.com/

Sumugan Sivanesan is an anti-disciplinary artist. He is a member of the weather group_U, an experimental documentary collective focused on indigenous-non-indigenous exchange and collaboration. He lectures Experimental Film and Video at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.

http://www.sivanesan.net/

William Kentridge

Black Box/Chambre Noire, 22:00, sound, 2005. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Synopsis:The development of visual technologies and the history of colonialism intersect in Black Box/Chambre Noire through Kentridge's reflection on the history of the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in Southwest Africa (now Namibia) in 1904.

William Kentridge is a South-African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. Aspects of social injustice that have transpired over the years in South-Africa have often acted as fodder for his pieces.

http://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/william-kentridge/

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SESSION 3 / 06.05.2012

Michael Küppers Adebisi

Best Practice, culture and integration, sound, 2010. Courtesy of AFROTAK TV cyberNomads.

Synopsis: AFROTAK TV cyberNomads, the Black German Social Media, Culture and Education Network, was set up in 2001 to document the exchange of socio-cultural communities of the black German diaspora reaching out to global transatlantic networks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVvb7XaoFXs

Michael Küppers-Adebisi (a.k.a. Sun Leegba Love a.k.a. Black Hyperion) works for AFROTAK TV CyberNomads - The 1st Black German Media, Culture & Education Archives since 2001. In 1996, he was the 1st Afro-German lyrical ambassador for the Goethe-Institute New York. For the African Diaspora in Germany he modernized Social Media Activism.

Quinsy Gario

The Bearable Ordeal of the Collapse of Certainties, 2011, theater & poetry, photo by Brett Russel.

Quinsy Gario is a spoken word performer and is currently following the MA program Comparative Women’s Studies in Culture and Politics at the Gender Studies Department of the University of Utrecht. He makes art under the banner of NON EMPLOYEES.

http://www.nonemployees.com/

Final screening followed by reception in partnership with AfricAvenir

5:00 p.m. Hackesche Höfe Kino

Robert A. Stemmle

Toxi, 89:00:00, sound, 1952. Courtesy of Goethe Institut.

Synopsis: As one of the first and most successful films to directly tackle the problem of “race” in post-fascist Germany, Toxi arguably has been instrumental in the (re)construction of the German nation as exclusively white.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziZr3z10_B8&feature=related

Robert Adolf Stemmle (1903 – 1974) was a German screenwriter and film director. He wrote for 86 films between 1932 and 1967. He also directed 46 films between 1934 and 1970.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Stemmle

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BE.BOP INTERNATIONAL SCREENINGS:

+ ARCO. Imagery Affair. Matadero Madrid. 18.02.2012. 8:00 p.m.

http://www.mataderomadrid.org/ficha/1315/imagery-affair.html

http://www.videoartworld.com/data/bulletins/Imagery-Affairs-during-ARCO-Madrid.html

http://dutchartinstitute.eu/page/2047/preview-at-arco-imagery-affair-be-bop-2012-black-europe-body-politics-ter

+ Kwa-Zulu Natal Society of Arts. Durban. 20.04.2012. 9:00 p.m.

http://www.nsagallery.co.za/

+ The Bioscope. Independent Cinema. Johannesburg. 22.04.2012. 5:00 p.m.

http://www.thebioscope.co.za/2012/04/05/black-europe-body-politics-screening-and-presentation-at-the-bioscope/

+ National Art Gallery of Namibia, Windhoek. 24.04.2012. 8:00 p.m.

http://www.nagn.org.na/

+ Goldsmiths University of London. 22.05.2012. 5:00 p.m.

http://www.gold.ac.uk/

+ Oncena Bienal de La Habana. 15.05.2012.5:00 p.m.

http://www.bienalhabana.cult.cu/

Macu Morán, Manager

Alanna Lockward, Curator

Walter Mignolo, Advisor

Partners: Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University / DEFA Film Library / Digits Without Borders / Imagery Affairs / Goethe Institut / Goldsmiths University of London / Kwa-Zulu Natal Society of Arts / National Art Gallery of Namibia / Savvy Journal / Transational Decolonial Institute / The Bioscope Independent Cinema. Johannesburg / VideoArtWorld

Media Partners: AfricAvenir / AFROTAK TV cyberNomads / Exberliner / reboot.fm / Osvaldobudet.com