WIR SIND ALLE BERLINER: 1884 - 2014
A Commemoration of the Berlin Congo Conference
An Exhibition curated by Simon Njami
15th November 2014 – 26th February 2015
SAVVY Contemporary
Participating artists: Kader Attia, Sammy Baloji, Bili
Bidjocka, Filipa César, Mansour Ciss, Theo Eshetu, Satch Hoyt, Cyrill
Lachauer, Nadia Kaabi Linke, Henrike Nauman, Thabiso Sekgala, Katarina
Zdjelar
This exhibition is dedicated to Thabiso Sekgala (1981-2014).
Concept (short):
November 2014 marks the 130th anniversary of the Berlin Congo
Conference and the official partitioning of Africa by Western (European,
North American and Ottoman) colonial forces – in absence of African
representatives. It is against this backdrop that the exhibition
WIR SIND ALLE BERLINER: 1884-2014
reminisces this determining moment in world and its severe and ongoing
repercussions and history and reflects upon Berlin’s historical and
contemporary bond to Africa.
The exhibition proposes a space for deliberation on the repercussions
of this conference on past and current socio-political and economic
phenomena in a Europe of flourishing nationalism and racism, as it deals
with issues like migration flow or border and identity politics.
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More:
Savvy
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WE ARE TOMMORROW
Visions and Retrospection on the Occassion of 1884 Berlin Conference
Ballhaus Naunynstrasse (Post-migrant Theatre)
STILL / LIFE
Dance performance by Qudus Onikeku
The contradictions and tragedies of our collective histories do not
allow us to represent the “other” with certainty. There is nothing we
could be more certain about than our self, our mortality and our ego –
an ego that is able to draw clear demarcation lines between good and
bad, until it gets wound up deep inside of us, not knowing distinction.
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More: Ballhaus Naunynstrasse
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POST-COLONIAL CITY TOUR
Host: Joshua Kwesi Aikins
Afrikanisches Viertel (African Quarter) and Schlossplatz,
“Mohrenstraße,” Wilhelmstraße and May-Ayim-Ufer: all of these very
different places have one thing in common – they were the sites of
German policies of enslavement and colonialism. This is where crimes
against humanity were planned, committed or celebrated by honouring the
aggressors. Goods, art treasures and also human beings stolen in the
colonies came into this city. Up to the present day the colonial
propaganda from the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich continues to
have an effect in Berlin’s cityscape. And until this day people in
Berlin, Germany and Europe benefit – unconsciously and self-evidently –
from colonial continuities shaping everyday life – from the morning
coffee to the smart phone. The bus tour provides insights into a history
and present which are at the same time suppressed and existent,
starting out from local vestiges while also addressing the resistance of
Black people which quickly emerged.
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DAS ÜBERSEHENE SEHEN / ARTISTS' TALKS
Theatrical Lecture by Prof. Wendy Sutherland
In her theatrical lecture,
Das Übersehene sehen (Looking at the Overlooked), literary scholar Wendy Sutherland illustrates how 18
th century global trade, colonialism and enslavement are reflected on theatre stages of that era.
Sutherland’s research demonstrates how Black presences were and
continue to be marginalised in theatre and literary studies – and how
this has the effect of their disappearance from the German culture of
remembrance.
In the subsequent Artists’ Talk held in English, including Mmakgosi
Kgabi, Branwen Okpako and Wendy Sutherland, the performer, the filmmaker
and the academic, all of them retrieving the overlooked from archives,
from the body, provide insights into their respective work.
Featuring: Mmakgosi Kgabi, Branwen Okpako and Wendy Sutherland
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POLYPHONIC - SPONTANEOUS TOWN MEETINGS
Curated by Jean-Paul Bourelly
The
Spontaneous Town Meetings is an interdisciplinary jam session in the format of a talk show taking place every month in the context of the series
WE ARE TOMORROW – Visions and Retrospection on Occasion of the 1884 Berlin Conference.
Jazz musician Jean-Paul Bourelly invites musicians and writers, DJs,
historians and actors to an afro-futuristic meeting in order to open up
the gates of a Black collective knowledge archive. In an interaction
between language and music, guests and audience, emotion and didactics,
current and historic discourses are negotiated so as to emphasise new
aspects and develop perspectives which so far seemed limited by the
framework of their negotiation. As a consequence, discussions on the
situation of refugees living in Berlin, the destruction of family
relationships owing to the continuity of colonial conditions, the power
dynamics between Old Europe and New Africa obtain an unknown variety of
fresh perspectives and possible interpretations.
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Erste Indaba Schwarzer Kulturschaffender
Open Presentation
Indaba [in‘daba] – isiZulu term for:
(1) Gathering, assembly, conference;
(2) Issue, matter affair.
On occasion of We are Tomorrow, Ballhaus Naunynstraße will host a two-day conference of Black German cultural producers.
The conference engages with the question of what the challenges,
obligations, and the responsibility of Black cultural producers in
Germany in the 21st century are. This includes the discussion around
issues such as if it is possibly part of the “duties” of Black cultural
producers to negotiate racism and colonial continuities; if and to what
extent "reactive antagonising“ against existing injustices influences
the development of artistic potential; in which areas of the cultural
scene Black decision makers are present or underrepresented; to what
extent stereotyping has an effect on casting for stage roles and what
proactive solutions can be found for this.
Participants of
this conference are exclusively Black cultural producers: writers,
actors/actresses, performers, musicians etc. In its format the
conference roughly corresponds with academic conferences, including
roundtable talks, an accompanying programme and workshops. These are
initially exclusive events for the accredited conference participants.
At 4 pm the outcomes will be presented to the public in an open
discussion forum.
The outcomes will be presented and
subsequently published, including all the diverse and potentially
contradictory views, but also the consensus that was developed. The
conference aims for a strong voice power of heterogeneity as opposed to
the conformity of opinions. The publication of the outcomes and
discussion reports serves the purpose of documenting the status quo and
setting up guidelines, suggestions and demands which can in turn be used
during cultural policy negotiations to be presented to the respective
“gatekeepers”.
CURATED BY Philipp Khabo Koepsell
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A FREAKSHOW FOR S.
A performance by Annabel Guérédrat
A Freak Show for S. is a solo performance. It is a tribute to Sarah Baartman, the “Black Venus,” a woman of Khoisan heritage who in the 19
th
century was exhibited naked and against her will as an exotic curiosity
for the amusement of a European audience. Annabel Guérédrat enters the
process of exploring the scope of action of a sexualised Black woman.
Guérédrat experiments with eroticism and surrender, with control and
resistance, and the question, if these things cannot actually be the
same thing after all. She breaks the mould of self-perception and
external perception of the sexualised body, of the exoticised. And in
doing so, she simultaneously criticises the shocking normality of sexist
and inherently racist viewing habits.
A Freak Show for S. is the attempt of a performative
transformation for both the audience and the performer; from the
dehumanized object of sexual desire to a resistant and self-determined
Black woman right up to a state of pure dancing energy.
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DARK MATTER
A Spoken-word performance
''Before love there was gender / And before sex there was pleasure.'' DARK MATTER in a performance in Berlin.
Watch their videos HERE
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BLACK DIASPORA + BERLIN
Decolonial Narratives
Curated by Alanna Lockward & Julia Roth
November 20, 2014, 13-22.30 hrs at Grüner Salon, Volksbühne, Berlin
Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz
In the course of the so-called “Scramble for Africa”, the Berlin
Conference of 1884-1885 was held. At that moment, the colonial powers
already on the African continent officially divided it among themselves.
Under the Nazi Regime, German Jews, Sinti, Roma, Black Germans and
People of Color were stigmatized and systematically exterminated.
The heroic refugees in the protest camp at Oranienplatz are only one
recent sad example of how German internal and external policies are
actively involved in funding and expanding the racist delimitation of
the EU’s external borders with institutions such as Frontex. “BLACK
DIASPORA + BERLIN. DECOLONIAL NARRATIVES” is dedicated to exposing and
critically discussing the continuities of this state of affairs,
decentering hegemonic accounts on this matter. Until today, predominant
self-representations of Germanness and especially the cosmopolitanism of
Berlin are still presented as white. Black German and African
Diasporas’ narratives are considered as belonging to a constructed
“Other”. However, for a very long time, Black and African Diasporas have
played a relevant role in this city.
This one-day symposium will introduce counter narratives of Black
German legacies as well as art and activism interventions in Berlin and
other European metropolis. A film screening, live performances and
contributions on art education from a Black Diaspora perspective are
also part of the program. The symposium aims at decolonizing established
notions of knowledge, sensing and being and at enabling a dialogue on
the current articulation of white supremacist discourses in Berlin and
elsewhere, offering strategies and practices to dismantle it.
The series “bpb metro”, initiated and conceptualized by Julia Roth
for the German Agency for Civic Education, takes the Berlin
urban/metropolitan “space of struggle and negotiation” as a starting
point. This sixth edition is a co-operation with Berlin-based Caribbean
author, curator and activist Alanna Lockward, who has initiated and
successfully presented
BE.BOP. BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS (2012-2014) at Ballhaus Naunynstraße.
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BE.BOP 2014
Spiritual Revolutions and the ''Scramble for Africa''
Curated by Alanna Lockward (Art Labor Archives)
Ballhaus Naunystrasse, Berlin
BE.BOP
previous editions (2012-2013) have engaged 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. BE.BOP 2014 now
brings re-existence into the hallowed grounds of healing by means of
drawing the spiritual map of Pan-Africanism before and after the
so-called “Scramble for Africa”. The event will include for the first
time an exhibition and a simultaneous presentation in Copenhagen in
connection to “Say it Loud!”, so far the largest overall presentation of
Jeannette Ehlers’ videoworks at Nikolaj Kunsthal (15.03–25.05.2014).
Ehlers’ video “Whip it Good”, which premiered as a performance during BE.BOP 2013, will be projected in the Foyer of Ballhaus Naunynstrasse. The
self-explanatory whipping action in Ehlers’ work brings up unsolved
issues regarding enslavement in the Caribbean plantation system and the
challenges of coloniality. These are concerns that have been discussed thoroughly at BE.BOP
since its pioneering introduction of the theoretical perspective
modernity/coloniality/decoloniality conceptualized by a group of
thinkers and activists from the Americas, the Caribbean and the US
Latino Diaspora in the 90’s.
In his keynote entitled “Spirituality, Subjectivity And (Im) Migrant Consciousness: The Tasks Ahead”, Walter Mignolo, one of the founders of this group and advisor of BE.BOP,
will address how the combination of these entanglements has created the
conditions for reversing migration movements: from the colonies and
ex-colonies to Europe and the US.
Another extraordinary public lecture will be given by Dennis Dickerson with the title “Religious Insurgency and the Long Civil Rights Movement in the United States.” in the framekwork of the Du Bois Lectures organized by the English and American Studies Department, Humboldt University Berlin.
For
the first time in Berlin, Héctor Aristizábal, an internationally known
theater of the oppressed practitioner, will create a space for
collective meditation after his 30 minutes performance “Nightwind”.
Also premiering in Berlin, the moving-image work of Anika Gibbons,
Sasha Huber, Joy Elias Rilwan and Jane Thorburn will be presented along
the photo series “Platos para los Muertos” (Meals for the Dead) by Yoel Díaz Vázquez dedicated to the Orishas. The exhibition will open with “Poison”,
a performance by Charo Oquet , who will involve the audience with her
characteristic usage of colour and video projections as healing devices,
opening the way to an unprecedented meeting which in the liberating
tradition of performance art is free and open to the public.
In
the compilation of moving image from previous editions with
groundbreaking works by Adler Guerrier,Teresa María Díaz Nerio, Raúl
Moarquech Ferrera Balanquet, Mwangi Hutter, Tracey Moffatt, Pascale
Obolo and Caecilia Tripp, among others, the public will be able to
appreciate how BE.BOP. BLACK
EUROPE BODY POLITICS continues its contribution to the radical
imagination of European futures in which immigrants are becoming
fundamental players.
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Return to Sender
Artistic positions from Egypt, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Morocco, Mozambique and South Africa
HAU Theatre, Berlin
There is still a long way to go before Europe is able to look at the
non-Western World without its colonial glasses. Perhaps the answer lies
in repositioning Europe's role in the world, as voiced by one of
Africa’s leading intellectuals, Achille Mbembe: “Europe is no longer the gravitational centre of the world.”
As a counter move to the Berlin Conference of 1884, which paved the way
for the political and economic devastation of the African continent by
the European powers, HAU Hebbel am Ufer has invited six artists to
examine the foreign-dominated history of their home countries and the
resulting consequences. Over 9 days artists such as Bouchra Ouizguen, Faustin Lynyekula, Boyzie Cekwana, Adham Hafez, Panaibra Canda and Adissu Demissie
will present their work and, as co-curators of the festival, invite an
artist from their home country to take part in the festival.
With
Marie Al Fajr, Panaibra Canda & Maria Tembe, Boyzie Cekwana &
Nina Støttrup Larsen, Adissu Demissie & Junaid Jemal Sendi / Destino
Dance Company, Dinozord, Ntone Edjabe, N’Goné Fall, Mona Gamil, Adham
Hafez, Kapwani Kiwanga, Mehdi-George Lahlou, Faustin Linyekula, Sifiso
Majola, Bouchra Ouizguen, andcompany&Co. and others.
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Faustin Linyekula
Statue of Loss
What remains 100 years after the deaths of the Congolese soldiers who
fought and died in Europe and Africa? In his latest dance performance Faustin Linkeyula will explore one man’s attempt to build a monument to the Congolese soldiers who fought and fell during World War One.
On 13 October 1923, Firmin Leclercq, president of the Congolese
Volunteers, wrote to Paul Panda Farnana, a veteran and the first ever
Congolese graduate from Belgian and French universities, to acknowledge
Farnana’s wish to build a monument at the river Congo’s mouth to the
unknown Congolese soldiers who died during World War One. Seven years
later Farnana died under mysterious circumstances, never realising his
ambitious project.
Through his distinctive choreography Faustin Linkeyula will question
what remains of the memory of these Congolese and African men who fought
thousand miles away from their native land. What acknowledgment has
been made of their sacrifice and what’s left apart from the ghost of a
monument that was never built?
What remains 100 years after the deaths of the Congolese soldiers who
fought and died in Europe and Africa? In his latest dance performance Faustin Linkeyula will explore one man’s attempt to build a monument to the Congolese soldiers who fought and fell during World War One.
Artist's reflections (audio):
HERE
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GRADA KILOMBA / Writer, Theorist and Interdisciplinary Artist
