4 December, Paranational Archives and Restitution

In the last few years, restitution has become an urgent topic for museums, politics, and academia. In disciplines like ethnography, art history, and history, the legacy of looting and, more generally, colonial injustice violence, has finally led to a sensitivity for the inequalities between nations and the necessities of repair. While the debate is mostly concerned with material artefacts like statues, paintings, historical sources and documents, the specificities of audiovisual media have not been at the center of attention.

In a workshop with Nikolaus Perneczky (London), we hope to open up an interdisciplinary discussion about the contexts, stakes, and perspectives of the restitution debate when it is approached from the particular requirements of audiovisual media. Responding to the premise that «rethinking restitution through the medium-specific affordances and operations of the moving image compels a reconceptualization of that paradigm» (Perneczky and Valenti), current fellows of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Global dis:connect are invited to share their experiences, questions and propositions.

Reading: Film/Restitution: Rethinking Displacement, Enclosure, and Relations of Care in Global Audiovisual Archiving (Nikolaus Perneczky and Cecilia Valenti)
Inputs, Responses, and Contributions: Nikolaus Perneczky, Hadeel Abdelhameed, Sarah Smith, Toby Yuen-Gen Liang, Katy Deepwell, Fabienne Liptay, Burcu Dogramaci

The event starts at 9:30am, registration takes place at 9:15am at Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect (gdc), Maria-Theresia-Strasse 21, 81675 Munich.

You can find the programme here.

 

Free admission, please register  here until November 30, 2025.

Organized by Volker Pantenburg, Philip Widmann, and Nikola Radic in cooperation with global dis:connect as part of the research project Paranational Cinema — Legacies and Practices at the University of Zurich, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

The project ‘Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices’ aims to develop a framework to examine film practices beyond, transversal or opposed to notions of ‘nation,’ ‘nation-state’ and ‘national cinema(s).’ By intervening critically into the ‘national’ as one of the cornerstones of discussing and marketing cinema, the project intends to offer a novel perspective on theoretical debates surrounding national, international, transnational, and global cinema.