Curator: Nick Aikens (curator Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven)

On 11/6, 18/6 and 1/7 at 19:30

A screening program about subjective ways of writing history. Through the exploration of personal memories and alternative sources, filmmakers offer different ways of understanding the past. All of the screenings will be followed by a conversation with the artists.

Cultural practice has time and again set itself the task of forming, negotiating and re-assembling history in order to better understand the present. Today this task seems more prescient than ever when particular histories might help shed new light on a contemporary moment that feels uncertain and in flux. Beyond the use of the archive or documentary formats, however, what methodologies allow for a more emotive, fluid and tangible sense of history - and subsequently the present - to emerge? Speaking to History looks at a group of filmmakers working today who explore the conceptual and narrative potential of oral histories, the tangled relationship between spoken word and image and the use of cinematography to both make sense of and complicate our understanding of the past. Through the medium of film they thus examine the construction of narratives, whether they are personal, collective or historical.

The use of story telling and the subsequent play between word and image treats the past as an emotive force, understood through personal narratives or different subjectivities, contingent as they are on lived experience. Similarly, told from the present, these stories and images are framed by a sense of how they might be relevant for today. In this sense they echo what Walter Benjamin’s approach to engaging with history: “To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.” The films look at a range of histories that appear to have implications for our understanding of the present – from an analysis of collective struggles of resistance, an examination of colonial histories, the passing of different ideological systems to more personal, subjective recollections. Told through the voices of those implicated in these histories, however, the protagonists become co-authors, both in the films themselves and the narratives they construct. As such, they reveal a porous relationship between individual subjectivity and collective history; memory and narrative.

Thursday 18/6, 19:30:

- Bouchra Khalili, Foreign Office, 2015

With ‘Foreign Office’, Bouchra Khalili revisits the period spanning from 1962 to 1972 when Algiers became the “capital of the revolutionaries” after Algeria’s independence. The film portrays two young Algerians of today who recount this history, questioning its traces and the reasons why it has been forgotten by their generation. Questions surrounding oral tradition, language and their relationship to the story and to history are at the film’s core, revealing an alternative historiography.

- Clara Ianni in collaboration with Debora Maria da Silva, Plea / Apelo, 2014

Though the hegemonic narratives about Brazil might coincide with a festive imagery of progress, there is an urgent untold story of systematic and administrated violence perpetrated by the State. ’Plea / Apollo’ reflects on this hidden history, from the colonial slaughtering of indigenous people and slavery, through the tortures and disappearances in the military dictatorship, to the current democracy of massacres, and the desire of erasure of these very same events.

- Sven Augustijnen, Spectres, 2011

Fifty years after his assassination, Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the newly independent Congo, is back to haunt Belgium. Through commemorations, encounters and a return visit, a top-ranking Belgian civil servant who was in Elisabethville on that tragic day of 17 January 1961 attempts to exorcise the ghosts of the past. An examination of the biopolitical body, ‘Spectres’ exposes the fine line separating legitimation and historiography and the traumatic question of responsibility and debt.

Following the screenings Bouchra Khalili and Sven Augustijnen will be in conversation with Nick Aikens

Other screenings:

Thursday 11/06, 19:30: Manon de Boer - Wendelien van Oldenborgh

Wednesday 1/7, 19:30: Petra Bauer – Phil Collins

Language English