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In Blog 2025

Between Bogotá and Munich: Godula Buchholz and South American art in Germany

claudia cendales paredes

Fig. 1: Godula Buchholz in Bogotá, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zentralarchiv, IV-NL Buchholz 24.

The German art historian and gallerist Godula Buchholz (*1935) lived and worked in Bogotá, Colombia from 1951 until 1963, before returning to Germany where she has resided ever since. Her work as an art historian and gallery owner between two regions (Colombia/South America and Germany/Europe) features connectivities and dis:connectivities. As a young German immigrant in Colombia, initially dis:connected from her new country, she was able to connect with artists, institutions and intellectual networks in South America and Europe, thus promoting cultural exchange between them. After returning to Germany in 1963 and founding her pioneering gallery in 1965, she was able to benefit from these experiences and connections. However, having to start over, given that she hadn’t been living there for long, and deciding to dedicate herself to promoting South American art, which was little known in the West German art scene, she found herself dis:connected again. Still, she was able to manage the tensions inherent in dis:connectivity and establish her work, playing a key role in the presentation and consolidation of South American art and artists in Germany. This article focuses on her work in Colombia and later in Germany, particularly from 1965, when she founded the Galerie Buchholz in Munich, until 1977.[1] It sheds light on her role in promoting cultural exchange between South America and Germany and as a pioneering art historian and female gallery owner in Munich.

Godula Buchholz’s work at the Librería Buchholz in Bogotá

In 1951, Godula Buchholz emigrated with her family to Bogotá, Colombia. Her father, the bookseller and art dealer Karl Buchholz (1901-1992), was tasked with disposing of the works confiscated during the Nazis’ degenerate-art campaign. After the war, Buchholz emigrated to Bogotá with his family and founded the Librería Buchholz, which existed until 1992.[2] The Librería Buchholz followed the model of a bookstore-gallery, as Karl had also opened in Berlin, Madrid and Lisbon, and became a hub for the intellectual and German-speaking community in the city (fig. 1).

Fig. 2: Cover of the catalogue of the exhibition Arte Actual Alemán in Caracas, Lima and Bogotá, 1960, SMB-ZA, IV-NL Buchholz 33.

Fig. 3: Cover of the exhibition catalogue Arte Actual Alemán in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago de Chile, 1962, SMB-ZA, IV-NL Buchholz 33.

Fig. 4: Godula Buchholz during the exhibition Arte Actual Alemán in Montevideo, SMB-ZA, IV-NL Buchholz 25.

Godula studied art history in Paris between 1955 and 1958. She then returned to Bogotá and worked at the bookstore, where she organised numerous art exhibitions from 1958.[3] The Librería’s exhibitions focused on Colombian artists, like Alejandro Obregón, as well as German artists living in Colombia, such as Guillermo Wiedemann and Kurt Levy. It also featured mostly graphic works of some European artists, like Pablo Picasso. Moreover, she presented some group exhibitions of modern German art, such as Arte Gráfico Alemán Contemporáneo (1958) and Arte Gráfico Abstracto Alemán (1959).[4] As the South American public’s first exposure to some German artists, the travelling exhibition Arte Actual Alemán, presented in 1960 in Caracas, Lima and Bogotá aroused great interest and was important for her career. It displayed 137 paintings and 44 sculptures assembled for Karl Buchholz by the Deutsche Künstlerbund in Berlin. In 1962 Arte Actual Alemán was also presented in Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Santiago de Chile, accompanied by Godula Buchholz (fig. 2-4). During the exhibition, she visited some of the artists based there. Thus, she put together a new exhibition, Pinturas suramericanas hoy, which she completed with more works from artists in Peru, Venezuela and Colombia and was presented in late 1962 in Bogotá and Caracas (fig. 5). This exhibition inspired a new travelling exhibition entitled Südamerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart, which marked her return to Germany in 1963.

Fig. 5: Cover of the exhibition catalogue Pinturas Suramericanas de Hoy, SMB-ZA, IV-NL Buchholz 33.

Galerie Buchholz München 1965-1977: exhibiting South American art in Germany

Südamerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart was presented between 1963 and 1964 in four German cities, Berlin, Bonn, Baden-Baden and Pforzheim, and surveyed contemporary trends in eight South American countries for the first time in Germany. Buchholz selected 28 young artists who had helped develop painting in South America from approximately 1958 to 1960, such as Fernando Botero and Rómulo Macció (fig. 6-7).[5] While the exhibition was running at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden, Buchholz met the director Dietrich Mahlow (1920-2013), who offered her a job as an assistant curator, and she worked there from 1963 to 1965.[6] After deciding to open her own gallery in Germany, but having long lived elsewhere and unsure of where to locate it, she followed Mahlow's recommendation and decided on Munich, despite being unfamiliar with the city or its art scene. She found a suitable space on a mezzanine floor at Maximilianstraße 29, and she opened the Galerie Buchholz in 1965 (fig. 8).[7] It was probably the best place for a gallery, as by the 1960s there were already several galleries located in Maximilianstraße, one of Munich's grand boulevards.[8]

Fig. 6: Cover of the exhibition catalogue Südamerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart, SMB-ZA, IV-NL Buchholz 33.

Fig. 7: Godula Buchholz at the opening of the exhibition Südamerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart in Bonn, SMB-ZA, IV-NL Buchholz 25.

Fig. 8: Galerie Buchholz in Munich, ca. 1972, Godula Buchholz archive, Munich.

The Galerie Buchholz exhibited international contemporary art, with a focus on South American artists.The gallery also had a special interest in Spanish and Portuguese art l.[9] The gallery’s first exhibition was Malerei aus Südamerika in 1965, which featured the works of five painters from Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, including Fernando Botero, Fernando Szyszlo and the French artist Fernand Léger with graphic works (fig. 9).[10] In the exhibition catalogue, Godula alluded to the connection to the Librería in Bogotá, but despite profiting from its support and advice, she made her own decisions regarding her gallery in Munich.[11]

Fig. 9: Cover of the exhibition catalogue Malerei aus Südamerika at the Galerie Buchholz, Munich, Godula Buchholz archive, Munich.

In 1965 she also organised other exhibitions in the Galerie Buchholz, including Graphik aus Südamerika (14.9.-23.10.1965) and in subsequent years several individual and group exhibitions on South American artists (fig. 10-11).[12] When Godula founded the Galerie Buchholz in Munich in 1965, 20th-century  art from Latin America was neither very popular nor very present in Munich and greater West Germany.[13] Although some of the artists she presented had already exhibited in Germany before, such as Jesús Rafael Soto, Julio Le Parc and Sergio de Camargo, others were nearly unknown in Germany, such as Fernando Botero and Edgar Negret. In the introduction to Woman Art Dealers Creating Markets for Modern Art 1940–1990, Véronique Chagnon-Burke refers to female gallerists, especially those operating before the 1970s, as pioneers — serious entrepreneurs who carved out spaces for themselves in a male-dominated art world. They worked as small business owners when there were few women in positions of power, and they took risks, exploring both new tastes and territories.[14] Although this book does not cover Godula Buchholz, that description fit her well, as she decided to explore new tastes and new territories first in Colombia, presenting German art, but especially in Germany, presenting South American art in her own gallery.

Fig. 10: Exhibition catalogue Grafik aus Südamerika, Godula Buchholz archive, Munich

Fig. 11: Brochure of the Galerie Buchholz, Godula Buchholz archive, Munich

Like other female gallery owners interested in emerging and overlooked art and managing artists’ early careers, Buchholz contributed greatly to Fernando Botero’s renown in Germany and Europe, as she, Botero and other sources have acknowledged.[15] As she described in a recent interview, establishing her gallery and introducing artists like Botero required much practical work, such as importing the works from South America and elsewhere to Germany, and employing different strategies to popularise the unfamiliar artists, as evidenced by Botero’s promotion. In the early 1960s, Buchholz discovered Botero’s work at an exhibition during her stay in Bogotá. She included him in exhibitions in South America, like Pinturas suramericanas hoy, and in Germany, like Südamerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart, as mentioned above. After opening her gallery in Munich, she visited him in New York and represented him for a few years.[16] Prior to 1977, she organised, supported and participated in numerous exhibitions about him at her gallery and elsewhere in Germany,[17] such as two 1966 exhibitions, one at the Galerie Buchholz in Munich and Botero's first solo exhibition in a European museum at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, which she curated.[18] She also collaborated with other galleries and museums, contacting them and offering them works, as when she contacted the Galerie Brusberg in Hanover to promote Botero. When German and South American art magazines and newspapers reported on the exhibitions and the growing appreciation for the artists she featured, she collaborated with some of them, providing information and photographs. She also edited catalogues of the exhibitions presented at her gallery, featuring photographs, sometimes her own.[19] From 1970, she began editing art books, starting with a book related to a travelling exhibition of Botero (fig. 12).[20] She also participated in art fairs, such as International Kunstmesse Basel and the Kölner Kunstmarkt,[21] where in 1968 she was one of the few  female gallery owners to be present with her gallery.[22] In 1976, Godula Buchholz stated in an article that, of the South American artists the gallery had supported, Botero was the first to achieve international recognition.[23] While the interest his work generated in Germany was an important factor, Godula's work supporting and promoting paved the way.

Managing connectivities and dis:connectivities

Godula Buchholz is almost completely unknown in Colombia, despite having played an important role working with her father at the Librería Buchholz, whose relevance in the cultural sphere of 20th-century Colombia is widely acknowledged. After her return to Germany, Godula Buchholz did pioneering work as a woman gallery owner at the Galerie Buchholz in Munich, which has not yet been recognised. A few years ago, when researching South American art networks with West Germany in the post-war period, I came into contact with her work, initially through her father's archive in Berlin. Through further research and interviews with her, I discovered her important work in the promotion of modern art and cultural exchange between Germany and South America, topics that are part of my research focus. I found an affinity with her and wanted to learn more about her work. This paper gives a brief overview of some preliminary results of my research on her and her work, especially about the connectivities and dis:connectivities between two regions and interests.

Fig. 12: Fernando Botero in his studio, photograph by Godula Buchholz, Godula Buchholz archive, Munich.

[1] The gallery existed until 2015 in Munich and elsewhere. 'Godula Buchholz: 1965-2015 Galerie Buchholz', 2021, accessed 15 May 2025, https://www.werkraum-buchholz.com/die-galerie.html. [2] Godula Buchholz, Karl Buchholz Buch- und Kunsthändler im 20. Jahrhundert - Sein Leben und seine Buchhandlungen und Galerien Berlin, New York, Bukarest, Lissabon, Madrid, Bogotá (Cologne: DuMont, 2005), 190. [3] Buchholz, Karl Buchholz, 195, 99. [4] Buchholz, Karl Buchholz, 202. [5] Südamerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart, ed. Städtische Kunstsammlungen Bonn (Bonn: Haus der Städtischen Kunstsammlungen, 1963). [6] Godula Buchholz, 'Questions about the life and work of Godula Buchholz and the Galerie Buchholz, Munich', interview by Claudia Cendales Paredes, 15 February & 11 May 2025. She participated in exhibitions like Illustrationen in 1964. See Illustrationen, ed. Godula Buchholz and Dietrich Mahlow (Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 1964). [7] Buchholz, interview. [8] These galleries collaborated to promote themselves in the Interessengemeinschaft Galerien Maximilianstraße and from the beginning of the 1970s they organised annual joint exhibitions. The Galerie Buchholz participated in Handzeichnungen in 1976. See Handzeichnungen: Gemeinsame Ausstellung der Galerien in der Maximilianstrasse München, ed. Jörg Schellmann, Jürgen Weihrauch, and Hartmut Stöcker (Munich, 1976). [9] Buchholz, interview. [10] Malerei aus Südamerika (Munich: Galerie Buchholz, 1965). [11] Buchholz, interview. [12] See the list of the exhibitions held there in 'Godula Buchholz'.. [13] See the brief description inMichael Nungesser, 'Moderne Kunst aus Lateinamerika: Rezeptionsbericht zur Lage in Deutschland', in De orbis Hispani linguis litteris historia moribus: Festschrift für Dietrich Briesemeister zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Axel Schönberger and Klaus Zimmermann, vol. 2,  (Domus: Frankfurt, 1994), 1804-05. [14] Véronique Chagnon-Burke, 'Introduction: women art dealers: creating markets for modern art, 1940-90', in Women Art Dealers Creating Markets for Modern Art, 1940-1990, ed. Véronique Chagnon-Burke and Caterina Toschi (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), 1. [15] Buchholz, interview; Gottfried Sello, 'Botero-Ausstellung in Baden-Baden Paradies der Dicken', Die Zeit, 3 April 1970; Heinrich Wigand Petzet, 'Botero Ausstellung in Baden-Baden — Feist und reglos: gequollener Kuchenteig', National-Zeitung Basel (Basel), 14 April 1970; Chagnon-Burke, 'Introduction', 1. [16] Buchholz, interview. [17] See the list of the exhibitions in 'Godula Buchholz'. [18] 'Godula Buchholz'; Fernando Botero,  (Munich: Galerie Buchholz, 1966). [19] Buchholz, interview. [20] Fernando Botero; 'Godula Buchholz'. [21] Bernhard Rohe, 'Der Kölner Kunstmarkt', Das Kunstwerk XXI, no. 11-12 (1968). [22] See the photograph of the participants in 'Kunstmarkt Köln ’68', Aachener Nachrichten (Aachen), 14 November 1968; Buchholz, interview. [23] Godula Buchholz, 'Galerie Buchholz', Das Kunstwerk XXI, no. 5-6 (1974).
bibliography
Buchholz, Godula. 'Galerie Buchholz'. Das Kunstwerk XXI, no. 5-6 (1974). ———. Karl Buchholz Buch- und Kunsthändler im 20. Jahrhundert - Sein Leben und seine Buchhandlungen und Galerien Berlin, New York, Bukarest, Lissabon, Madrid, Bogotá Cologne: DuMont, 2005. ———. 'Questions about the life and work of Godula Buchholz and the Galerie Buchholz, Munich'. By Claudia Cendales Paredes. 15 February & 11 May, 2025. Chagnon-Burke, Véronique. 'Introduction: women art dealers: creating markets for modern art, 1940-90'. In Women Art Dealers Creating Markets for Modern Art, 1940-1990, edited by Véronique Chagnon-Burke and Caterina Toschi,  London: Bloomsbury, 2024. Fernando Botero. Munich: Galerie Buchholz, 1966. 'Godula Buchholz: 1965-2015 Galerie Buchholz'. 2021, accessed 15 May 2025, https://www.werkraum-buchholz.com/die-galerie.html. Handzeichnungen: Gemeinsame Ausstellung der Galerien in der Maximilianstrasse München. Edited by Jörg Schellmann, Jürgen Weihrauch and Hartmut Stöcker. Munich, 1976. Illustrationen. Edited by Godula Buchholz and Dietrich Mahlow. Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 1964. 'Kunstmarkt Köln ’68'. Aachener Nachrichten (Aachen), 14 November 1968. Malerei aus Südamerika Munich: Galerie Buchholz, 1965. Nungesser, Michael. 'Moderne Kunst aus Lateinamerika: Rezeptionsbericht zur Lage in Deutschland'. In De orbis Hispani linguis litteris historia moribus: Festschrift für Dietrich Briesemeister zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Axel Schönberger and Klaus Zimmermann, Vol. 2. Domus: Frankfurt, 1994. Rohe, Bernhard. 'Der Kölner Kunstmarkt'. Das Kunstwerk XXI, no. 11-12 (1968). Sello, Gottfried. 'Botero-Ausstellung in Baden-Baden Paradies der Dicken'. Die Zeit, 3 April 1970. Südamerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart. Edited by Städtische Kunstsammlungen Bonn. Bonn: Haus der Städtischen Kunstsammlungen, 1963. Wigand Petzet, Heinrich. 'Botero Ausstellung in Baden-Baden — Feist und reglos: gequollener Kuchenteig'. National-Zeitung Basel (Basel), 14 April 1970.
citation information:
Cendales Paredes, Claudia, 'Between Bogotá and Munich: Godula Buchholz and South American art in Germany', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 16 December 2025, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/12/16/between-bogota-and-munich-godula-buchholz-and-south-american-art-in-germany/.
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16 December 2025
In Blog 2025

Atlantique:s — on global dis:connection in Mati Diop’s films

Fabienne Liptay

Fig. 1: Atlantiques, Mati Diop, 2009, 16 mins., film still, trigon-film.

Mati Diop’s short film Atlantiques (2009) is a visual poem about the ‘oceanic time-lag’[1] experienced through migration. Relating to Senegal’s migrations piroguières in 2005 and 2006, when thousands of young Africans left their homes to embark on often-deadly voyages to Spain, the film tells the stories of these men, interweaving the lived experiences of the protagonists from Dakar with the ghostly recollections of the dead. Speaking about ‘the most burning desire to throw oneself into the sea’[2] — a quote drawn from the accounts of survivors of the 1816 shipwreck of the Medusa on the way to Senegal (which inspired Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa, 1819) — these ghost stories blur the lines between documentary and fiction to create an oneiric nocturnal imaginary of migration and exile. Mati Diop returns to these stories ten years later in her debut feature film Atlantique (2019), which looks to the ocean both as a mythological and political space from the perspective of the women who were left behind in Dakar. The almost eponymous titling of the films blurs the understanding of their relationship in terms of both identity and difference. In my commentary on the short film Atlantiques and the feature film Atlantique, I would like to share some thoughts and observations about how the disjunctive relations constructed within and between these films — their manifold doublings and splits — can be seen as a genuine contribution to a political aesthetics of global dis:connection. Atlantiques, the 15-minute short, shot by Diop herself on low-grain video (mini-DV), begins with the dark enigmatic image of turning cogs, rusty as if drawn from the sea. They resemble a reel-to-reel tape recorder playing the voice of a man who recounts his experience of encountering death on his passage over the ocean in a pirogue. The voice seems to be speaking from beyond, the man’s body absent from the image, leaving us uncertain whether he survived the ‘Siram’, the giant wave that hit the boat. The film ends with equally enigmatic images, now bright and glaring, giving an interior view of a system of rotating lenses in the lantern of a lighthouse, which flood the darkness with bright flashes of light before slowly fading at dawn. The rotation of the lenses echoes the turning movement of the tape recorder at the beginning of the film. This scene was likely filmed at the Mamelles Lighthouse in Dakar, sitting on a hill overlooking the Atlantic Ocean at the westernmost tip of Africa. While it was built under French colonial rule in 1864 as a landmark of imperial control of the region, the film lends the lighthouse a transformative visual presence. Like a nocturnal dream machine, it seems to return the fears and hopes that guide the journey on the pirogue, captured in the phrase ‘Barcelona or death’ (Barça ou Barsakh) that has become a common expression in Senegal, originally coined by the migrants.[3] Framed by the images and sounds of returns that open and close the film are scenes of three young Senegalese men, friends sitting on the beach around a fire, the sparks faintly illuminating the dark and grainy images, while they discuss the perils of migrating to Europe to escape the miseries of life in Africa. The scenes are staged but at the same time documentary, the scripted dialogues based on the recollections of the protagonists (one of which is Mati Diop’s cousin) who use their real names. One of the men, Serigne (Serigne Seck) has taken the risk of leaving on a pirogue, recounting his experience, his two friends inquiring about his reasons for leaving. Has Serigne returned from his journey alive, after having been deported or as a ghost after dying at sea? The dialogue gives evidence for both interpretations, just as the opening scenes with his recorded voice. The scenes around the campfire on the beach are interspersed with images of mourning women, a mother and a sister, as well as a close-up of the gravestones of men who died at sea, among them Serigne’s gravestone bearing the date of his death. Do these scenes of mourning and memorial precede or follow the friends’ meeting at the beach? The film’s temporal experience is one of haunting, of a time out-of-joint that Derrida described in Specters of Marx as ‘a disjointed now that always risks maintaining nothing together in the assured conjunction of some context whose border would still be determinable’[4] and that has since become a recurring concept in postcolonial thought, figuring in the many ghost stories that have emanated from it.

Fig. 2: Atlantique, Mati Diop, 2019, 104 mins., film still, MUBI.

Regarding the state of migration in contemporary films, among them Diop’s Atlantique, Ekow Eshun speaks of a ‘liquid Africa’, a political aesthetics of both renewal and remembrance that finds its expression, among other motifs, in images of the sea. ‘From its title onward, the sea is the gravitational force that shapes lives and events in the Dakar-set Atlantics. (…) As the camera lingers again over its surface, we contemplate the water as a repository of countless stories of desire and departure, loss and mourning’, allowing the ‘film’s transition from drama told in the tradition of European realism to a hauntological fable replete with ominous occurrences: mysterious fires and gesturings to the mythic and mystic, chiefly through the figure of the djinn, an Islamic spirit that is able to take the form of humans or animals’.[5] Atlantique, Mati Diop’s feature debut that followed her short film ten years later in 2019, spells out the haunting presence of ghosts, verging on the genre of zombie films infused with West African tales of spiritual possession. Here, the dead men return from the sea, inhabiting the bodies of the women at night to call for justice, for being paid the wages they had been denied after months of work on a construction site. Yet, an aesthetics of dis:connectivity expressing the state of migration is not simply achieved in terms of representation or narrative, however fragmented and ambiguous. Rather, it manifests itself in the multiple disjunctures, the frictions and folds, the absences and missing links that structure the films in both their internal relations as well as their relations to each other. In light of the feature film, Diop’s short film has frequently been discussed as a precursor, the experiment from which the later film could emerge. What escapes such conventional consideration is the spectral logic itself, the disjointed time of the present that renders the relation between both films more complicated than that of a simple succession or development. On the level of the plot, the film tells the story of young lovers, Ada (Mama Sané) and Suleiman (Ibrahima Traoré), who are separated from the first moment they appear on screen: a train cuts between them, raising dust, as they meet in the streets of Dakar, hindering them from coming together. Later at the beach, they are separated even in their embrace: she does not dare to tell him that her parents have arranged for her to soon marry a wealthy businessman; he does not dare tell her that he will be leaving in a pirogue later that night. ‘You’re just watching the ocean — you’re not even looking at me,’ she complains. He departs without saying goodbye. The film stays in Dakar with Ada and the other women; we don’t get to see anything of the men’s departure or their fatal journey across the sea, not even the stranded boat that is said to have been found by Spanish fishermen and might have been theirs. What is absent or disappears from the scene, what becomes unavailable for representation, returns in the film’s atmosphere — an atmosphere full of sandy heat, humidity and sea spray, of granite dust, smog and orange haze, polluted with the promises of cosmopolitan progress and haunted by the colonial past.[6] As Diop has stated in interviews, many of the film’s scenes were shot at the site of the 1944 Thiaroye massacre by French forces of West African soldiers who had fought for the French army, following their demand for equal pensions, which is echoed in the worker’s demand for payment in Atlantique. Here, spectrality is also heavily evoked by the films’ cinematography, the dark and grainy images, shot with a highly light sensitive 35mm camera (VariCam 35) that renders tangible the invisibilities of migration as a remnant of colonisation. ‘The men who died at sea,’ as the film’s cinematographer Claire Mathon states, ‘return via the (sweating) bodies of young girls’.[7]

Fig. 3: Atlantique, Mati Diop, 2019, 104 mins., film still, MUBI.

Mati Diop, as a French-Senegalese director, has created such disjunctive dialogue between films before, with her short A Thousand Suns (Mille soleils, 2013), in which she relates to the Senegalese film classic Touki Bouki (1973), directed by her uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty.[8] A Thousand Suns was made for the 40th anniversary of Touki Bouki, staged around an open-air screening of the celebrated film in Dakar by night in the presence of its lead actor Magaye Niang, 40 years after having played Mory, the film’s young rebellious protagonist who, at the last minute, decides not to take the ship to Paris with his girlfriend, returning to cattle herding in a repetition of the film’s opening scene. A Thousand Suns is particularly interested in the coincidence that the actor, just as the character he played, never left Dakar. The opening sequence of the film shows this character, now an elderly man, still herding zebus like he did in the former film. Inscribing the lived time of the actor’s body into the fictional character, collapsing and multiplying fictional and documentary layers, the film creates a fractured temporality, in which the man seems to be endlessly returning, visibly aging, yet displaced from progression in time. What has happened in the 40 years since Touki Bouki, the actor is asked at the screening. Shrouded in the blue light of projection, he remains silent with his mouth agape. The plural of the film’s title A Thousand Suns reverberates this disjuncture of time, while the film lends an aesthetics to the philosophical concept of spectrality through the many shifts and splits between different visual and narrative registers, genres and materialities.

Fig. 4: Atlantique, Mati Diop, 2019, 104 mins., film still, MUBI.

The sight of zebus crossing the street returns in Atlantique, recalling once again the opening and closing scene in Touki Bouki that had already refigured in A Thousand Suns. This time they appear even more untimely, crossing the urban building site where a futuristic tower, the only digitally rendered object in the film, is being constructed in the real-estate development area of the city of Dakar, reminiscent of the unrealised project for a multi-million-dollar luxury tower hotel that Senegal’s former president Abdoulaye Wade wanted to build together with Gaddafi as a symbol of their shared vision of Africa. Against this vision of economic development and progress in global capitalism, the film sets an alternative future—a future that, in Derrida’s words, is rendered possible through ‘disjunction, interruption, the heterogenous’.[9] ‘One does not know if the expectation prepares the coming of the future-to-come or if it recalls the repetition of the same, of the same thing as ghost. […] It is a proper characteristic of the specter, if there is any, that no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a living future, for the revenant may already mark the promised return of the specter of living being’.[10] It is this ‘future-to-come’ (l’avenir) that is announced in the final scene of the film, in which Ada, after her reunion with the ghost of Suleiman, reflects on her memories as prophecies. Flipping the perspective, the camera now looks at Ada from beyond the refracted mirror in the beach bar, that site of spectral returns where the dead men’s images appeared, while she speaks the closing lines: ‘Ada, to whom the future belongs. I am Ada’. [1] Dora Budor, 'Oceanic Time-Lag: On Mati Diop’s Atlantics', MOUSSE Magazine, Mousse Publishing 2020, https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/mati-diop-dora-budor-2020/4 February 2025. On this point, see also Dennis Lim, 'Crossing Over', Film Comment, Film at Lincoln Center, 1 July 2019, https://www.filmcomment.com/article/crossing-over/5 February 2025; Olajide Salawu, 'The Method of Abjection in Mati Diop's "Atlantics"', Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Art and Culture online (8 June 2020), http://www.thirdtext.org/salawu-atlantics, http://www.thirdtext.org/salawu-atlantics; Gigi Adair, 'The Spirit of Migrancy: Mati Diop’s Atlantique', Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 46, no. 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.2208. [2] That is, 'le plus ardent désir de se jeter à la mer'. Alexandre Corréard and Henri Savigny, Naufrage de la frégate La Méduse, faisant partie de l'expédition du Sénégal, en 1816 (Paris: Corréard Libraire, 1821), 124. [3] See, for example, Stefano degli Uberti, 'Victims of their Fantasies or Heroes for a Day? Media Representations, Local History and Daily Narratives on Boat Migrations from Senegal', Cahiers d’études africaines 54, no. 213-214 (2014) https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesafricaines.17599. [4] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamut (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1. [5] Ekow Eshun, 'A Liquid Africa: Fluidity as Practice and Aesthetics in Diasporadical Trilogía', liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 5, no. 1 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1215/26923874-8932595. [6] See Lindsay Turner, 'In the Atmosphere: In Mati Diop’s Atlantics, every breath takes in the evaporated substance of history', The Yale Review Summer 2020 (1 June 2020). [7] Claire Mathon, 'Claire Mathon, AFC, discusses her work on Mati Diop’s film “Atlantics”', AFC, Association Française des directrices et directeurs de la photographie Cinématographique 2019, https://www.afcinema.com/Claire-Mathon-AFC-discusses-her-work-on-Mati-Diop-s-film-Atlantique.html?lang=fr. [8] On this film, see for example James S. Williams, 'A Thousand Suns: Traversing the Archive and Transforming Documentary in Mati Diop’s Mille Soleils', Film Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2016); Melissa Anderson, 'Family Ties', Artforum, 19 January 2015, https://www.artforum.com/columns/melissa-anderson-on-mati-diops-a-thousand-suns-222788/. [9] Derrida, Specters of Marx, 44-45. [10] Derrida, Specters of Marx, 123.
bibliography
Adair, Gigi. 'The Spirit of Migrancy: Mati Diop’s Atlantique'. Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 46, no. 1 (2022): 1-16. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.2208. Anderson, Melissa. 'Family Ties'. Artforum, 19 January, 2015. https://www.artforum.com/columns/melissa-anderson-on-mati-diops-a-thousand-suns-222788/. Budor, Dora, 'Oceanic Time-Lag: On Mati Diop’s Atlantics', MOUSSE Magazine. Mousse Publishing 2020, https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/mati-diop-dora-budor-2020/. Corréard, Alexandre and Henri Savigny. Naufrage de la frégate La Méduse, faisant partie de l'expédition du Sénégal, en 1816. Paris: Corréard Libraire, 1821. degli Uberti, Stefano. 'Victims of their Fantasies or Heroes for a Day? Media Representations, Local History and Daily Narratives on Boat Migrations from Senegal'. Cahiers d’études africaines 54, no. 213-214 (2014): 81-113. https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesafricaines.17599. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamut. New York: Routledge, 1994. Eshun, Ekow. 'A Liquid Africa: Fluidity as Practice and Aesthetics in Diasporadical Trilogía'. liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 5, no. 1 (2021): 75-88. https://doi.org/10.1215/26923874-8932595. Lim, Dennis, 'Crossing Over', Film Comment. Film at Lincoln Center, 1 July 2019, https://www.filmcomment.com/article/crossing-over/. Mathon, Claire, 'Claire Mathon, AFC, discusses her work on Mati Diop’s film “Atlantics”', AFC. Association Française des directrices et directeurs de la photographie Cinématographique 2019, https://www.afcinema.com/Claire-Mathon-AFC-discusses-her-work-on-Mati-Diop-s-film-Atlantique.html?lang=fr. Salawu, Olajide. 'The Method of Abjection in Mati Diop's "Atlantics"'. Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Art and Culture online (8 June 2020). http://www.thirdtext.org/salawu-atlantics. Turner, Lindsay. 'In the Atmosphere: In Mati Diop’s Atlantics, every breath takes in the evaporated substance of history'. The Yale Review Summer 2020 (1 June 2020). Williams, James S. 'A Thousand Suns: Traversing the Archive and Transforming Documentary in Mati Diop’s Mille Soleils'. Film Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2016): 85-95.
citation information:
Liptay, Fabienne, 'Atlantique:s — on global dis:connection in Mati Diop’s films', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 2 December 2025, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/12/02/atlantiques-on-global-disconnection-in-mati-diops-films/.
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2 December 2025
In Blog 2025, Voices Blog

Rethinking cultural infrastructures in post-Assad Syria: a forum 

[editor's note: the gd:c blog has been on hiatus for several months because life got in the way, but we're thrilled to be back with this post about one of our in-house events and written by one of our directors. Enjoy.]
christopher balme

The forum participants in the gd:c library, i.e. our in-house cultural infrastructure.

From 16 to 17 September 2025, global dis:connect hosted our first forum. The forum is a new format for gd:c to explore how support for the arts can be rethought in countries and regions undergoing major transitions. The arts are subject to the same forces of globalisation as other areas of cultural and social life. They are highly diverse and at the same time often remarkably similar on an institutional level. Art fairs, theatre, film and music festivals, as well as iconic architecture for their presentation can be encountered around the globe. Yet their status and forms of delivery vary in the extreme, especially in countries and regions marked by ‘turbulence’.[1] Our forums address a set of recurrent questions. Who do these institutions serve? Do they justify their funding? Do they even receive public funding, or are they dependent on the vagaries of private philanthropy and sponsorship? Are they subject to direct political influence, or do they operate ‘at arms’ length’? Are arts institutions required to respond to touristic-heritage demands rather than artistic imperatives? How are local and national activities embedded in wider regional networks? We devoted the first forum to post-Assad Syria as a reaction to the events of December 2024, which saw the fall of the Assad regime and the takeover by a former jihadist group led by Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa. Once the most important cultural centre in the region, years of war and mass emigration have left the cultural landscape of Syria in disarray. The workshop gathered artists, directors of funding bodies and curators from Syria and neighbouring countries to rethink how cultural infrastructure might be reconceived going forward. The challenges facing cultural infrastructure globally pose themselves in Syria in extremis, as much material infrastructure has been destroyed and the former structures of a largely state-controlled arts scene no longer function. The conditions in Syria drove us to pose many questions in the discussion. What remains of existing cultural infrastructure — both material and immaterial — and what new forms can still be imagined and built? What possibilities and promises can emerge from these shifting landscapes? Which networks can be activated or reconfigured, and how might the region's cultural life position itself within broader regional and global artistic ecologies, particularly in relation to questions of alliances, dependencies and hierarchies in the arts? Christopher Balme; Sophie Eisenried, gd:c’s curator responsible for our cooperation with the arts; and Dr. Ziad Adwan, a Berlin-based Syrian dramatist, researcher and former lecturer at the Syria’s Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts, organised the event. With Adwan’s help, we assembled a group of largely Syrian participants, all of whom work outside the country: Abdallah Al-Kafri (Syria/Lebanon), Raed Assfour (Jordan),  Hala Khayat (Syria/Dubai), Hadeel Abdelhameed (Australia/Iraq), Helena Nassif (Lebanon), Junaid Sarieddeen (Lebanon) and Alma Salem (Syria/Canada). Anne Eberhard (Goethe Institute, Beirut) and the Syrian director and dramaturge, Rania Mleihi (Munich), joined us on the second day. Planning began in early 2025 with the circulation of a concept paper outlining the idea of the forum and how we understand the term cultural infrastructure. We distinguish between three different forms:
    • material: buildings, venues, spaces, heritage sites;
    • immaterial or intangible: the cultural capital of artists and creatives; their networks; sources of funding; and
    • institutional: mainly cultural organisations, which in post-socialist societies such as Baathist Syria are/were still largely state-funded. In liberal democracies they are augmented by different kinds of commercial and non-profit organisations.
There are many ways to study infrastructure, which has become an expanding area of  interdisciplinary research. It is important to remember that infrastructure is not just purely functional but also has a rhetorical use, what the anthropologist Brian Larkin terms the ‘poetics of infrastructure’[2] and Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, have called the ‘promise of infrastructure’.[3] A second stage of preparation involved mapping existing infrastructure in Syria using Google Maps. Such maps are commonplace, and many cities develop them as online resources. In the UK, the West Midlands Combined Authority, the Greater London Authority, and even local councils such as Milton Keynes provide them. Further afield, cultural infrastructure plans have also been developed in cities such as Sydney, Vancouver and Amsterdam. While such cities produce such maps for diverse reasons, ranging from self-promotion to a genuine need to inform their citizens, the situation in Syria meant it was a largely remedial and reparative exercise. After ten years of war, the question was: what still existed and in what state of repair? Our criteria indicated not just name and location but also functionality, genre and governance (figure 1)  

A section of the cultural infrastructure map, which can be accessed here.

  The workshop ran over two days and combined plenary sessions and breakout groups. The opening session took the map as a point of departure for an extended discussion of what cultural infrastructure entails in a postwar and post-socialist situation. The workshop was overshadowed by recent events, namely massacres of civilians: Alawites in Latarkia and Bedouin and Druse minorities in Sweida. These events, plus the continuing war in Gaza, influenced the atmosphere of discussions. The optimism of early 2025 had given way to uncertainty and even pessimism, not only about the political future of the country but also whether the arts, broadly understood, would have a place in a regime controlled by a government with roots in jihadism. An initial round of discussions opened a set of topics that would recur over the two days. For example, Helena Nassif asked what values can the arts defend, what meta-narratives do we want to construct? Alma Salem wondered how the arts can be embedded in the ongoing political discussions regarding the constitution, elections, and justice, especially when there is already evidence of individual freedoms being denied. Hadeel Abdelhameed pointed to the example of Iraq, which had undergone similar levels of destruction and internecine violence. Now, however, cultural venues and the their spatial memories have gained importance, as evidenced in the renovation of Iraqi buildings in last two years, such as the city of Ur. Abdallah Al-Kafri emphasised the importance of peer organisations in the region while acknowledging that philanthropy and donations had become more complicated with the welfare state in crisis. Currently, there are huge distractions and divisions amongst NGOs in the field of culture. For Junaid Sarieddeen, director, dramaturge and founding member of the Beirut-based Zoukak Theatre Company, a key aim must be to sustain the region’s cultural and religious diversity, which often figures as its weakness because of its potential for dissension. That can/should, however, be used as an advantage. Syria has, as he put it, a ‘super local economy’, created by over a decade of war. Co-convenor Ziad Adwan argued that this element of locality meant that, in the transition phase at least, one should think in terms of pop-up or recurrent festivals rather than extended seasons. The cultural-infrastructure map could be used to identify venues. Raed Assfour, director of the Jordan-based Al-Balad Theatre, a multi-purpose cultural centre, emphasised the need to support regional movements. In three breakout sessions, smaller groups focused on specific topics: alternative venues and training models, national vs. regional curating and models of support beyond state/public institutions. In the latter, for example, the role of NGOs, international funders and philanthropic foundations was discussed. While the traditional supporters, such as the European cultural institutes (British Council, Goethe Institute, Institut français etc.) certainly played a part in supporting local activities by, for example, creating safe spaces for performances and exhibitions outside state control, their financial contribution was relatively modest. Perhaps the most successful example of collaboration between locals and outsiders is in the field of archaeology, which can draw on exceptionally long-lasting partnerships going back decades. Participants emphasised the wide range of non-state and non-public funding. Apart from international philanthropy such as the Ford Foundation and the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), which have a long history of supporting the arts, one should also remember that support can come from numerous sources, corporate as well as private families and their foundations. Oil companies have funded art books, churches have supported choral singing, and amateur traditions such as ancient Syrian chants, a Christian singing tradition going back many centuries with claims to the status of a immaterial cultural heritage. The Beirut Museum of Art (BeMA), currently under construction, exemplifies the complex networks of support that extend beyond Lebanon and include UNESCO, the Washington-based Middle East Institute and the Getty Foundation. The Arab Theatre Training Centre (ATTC) based in Lebanon (executive director Raed Assfour) has received long-term support from SIDA, as well as other funding organisations such as the Swiss Agency for Development & Co-operation (SDC) in Jordan and the Anna Lindh Foundation. NGO funding is extremely complex, and there is too little research into the wider field of non-state funding. The second day opened with a plenary paper by Anne Eberhard, current director of the Goethe-Institut (GI) in Beirut and responsible for re-opening the GI in Damascus. The closure of the institute in 2012 due to the war had been countered to some extent by the Damascus in Exile programme, which involved many artists from the Syrian diaspora, especially those based in Berlin. Eberhard outlined current activities and the difficulties in restarting support for artists in Syria, such as a new cultural project fund. Its implementation is still hampered by bureaucratic barriers, such as the difficulties in transferring funds to Syria, which is still not possible. The challenge is to rebuild the networks in Syria. In March 2025, a delegation led by the German Federal Foreign Office that included members from the Goethe-Institut, the German Archaeological Institute, the German Academic Exchange Service and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation visited the country during a period of optimism. Though the desire to reopen remains, the Goethe Institut is beholden to directives of the Federal Foreign Office. The plenary sessions on second day were connected by the idea of ‘strengthening networks’ and looked at ‘community-based production’, ‘inter-city connections’, and ‘diasporic perspectives’. Community-based production belongs to the positively connoted terms, sometimes associated with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of ‘community-building’, that circulate in the NGO world.[4] In a wide-ranging discussion participants interrogated both the term itself (‘how to translate the NGO term community into Arabic or other languages’) and its application, as for example when the Syrian government began implementing ‘community projects’ under the patronage of the First Lady, Asma Fawaz al-Assad, in the early 2000s. A positive example was the Lebanon-based theatre group Zoukak, which initiated drama therapy workshops in refugee camps during the 2006 war with Israel. A recurrent critique targeted the equation of ‘community’ with ‘village’ or similar traditional forms of organisation. Helena Nassif proposed redefining the term to mean ‘working with groups in a context’, which also include artist collectives and various kinds of humanitarian actions. The topic of strengthening networks through intercity connections addressed a series of questions including whether artists in the region’s main cities form a shared community and how these ties might be strengthened. Another question revolved around competition vs. collaboration: when do inter-city cultural initiatives risk competing for the same limited funds instead of complementing each other? The importance of hub cities was also discussed, referring in this case Beirut and formerly Damascus. How can the latter regain that function? The current situation sees numerous smaller networks and a productive path might be to form coalitions to encourage them to come together. The importance of diasporic networks for rebuilding cultural infrastructure in new Syria is unquestioned, but discussion focussed on the extent to which diasporic voices can legitimately speak for a future Syrian context and whether the current conditions even permit a large-scale return of exiled artists. On the other hand, diasporic institutions (festivals, galleries, archives) could serve as ‘extended infrastructure’ for Syria. There was consensus that future planning must include diasporic artists because of the sheer numbers involved. As the participants all belong in one way or another to the diasporic network, although it is not formally organised as such, everyone was ready to contribute to strengthening immaterial infrastructure — such as knowledge transfer, networks and funding models. The final section of the workshop was an open mic and provided the opportunity for all participants to formulate plans and ideas for the future of the region, under the current or even a new government. Contributions ranged widely over deeply felt expressions of pain and loss over what has happened in the ‘cradle of civilisation’ formulated by Helena Nassif. It will be necessary to create for Syria, she argued, ‘a new sociality’ after the decades of oppression and war. Ziad Adwan asked: ‘what are my extensions today as a theatre maker towards Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians?’, thus positioning his artistic activity very much in a regional context. He wondered also how to evaluate the mapping project as well as how to record the deliberations of the forum itself (there is no audio or video recording). Perhaps one could think of a medium-term research project. Alma Salem stressed the need to reframe the region away from purely geopolitical arguments to geocultural ones to create more positive, constructive narratives. The regionalisation discussed in the workshop is not an objective to be achieved but is an already existing organic reality. The workshop was a short but intensive interaction bringing together theatre directors, curators, actors, cultural policy makers who were either Syrian or had strong ties to the country. Most described themselves either as expatriates or in exile. All were dedicated to re-establishing the once-vibrant arts scene in Syria, particularly Damascus, but also in other cities such as Aleppo. It was clear at the end of the two days that the forum format had initiated intensive discussions, renewed ties and laid the foundation for further initiatives. Much will depend on the stabilisation of an extremely fragile political situation and whether the current ‘transitional’ government can reconcile its Islamist orientation with the freedom of expression necessary for artistic culture to be re-established.   [1] Milena Dragićević Šešić and Sanjin Dragićević, Arts management in turbulent times: Adaptable Quality Management: navigating the arts through the winds of change, trans. Vladimir Ivir, ed. Esther Banev and Francis Garcia (Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation & Boekmanstudies, 2005). [2] Brian Larkin, 'The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure', Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013). [3] Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, 'Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure', in The Promise of Infrastructure, ed. Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). [4] Hossein Mousazadeh, 'Unraveling the Nexus between Community Development and Sustainable Development Goals: A Comprehensive Mapping', Community Development 56, no. 2 (2024) doi:10.1080/15575330.2024.2388097.
bibliography
Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel. 'Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure'. In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel,  Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Dragićević Šešić, Milena and Sanjin Dragićević. Arts management in turbulent times: Adaptable Quality Management: navigating the arts through the winds of change. Translated by Vladimir Ivir. Edited by Esther Banev and Francis Garcia. Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation & Boekmanstudies, 2005. Larkin, Brian. 'The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure'. [In English]. Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327-43. Mousazadeh, Hossein. 'Unraveling the Nexus between Community Development and Sustainable Development Goals: A Comprehensive Mapping'. Community Development 56, no. 2 (2024): 276-302. https://doi.org/doi:10.1080/15575330.2024.2388097. Continue Reading
25 November 2025