22-23 February, archival f(r)ictions

On 22 and 23 Feb. 2024, the Center will hold an international workshop focusing on the topic of "archival f(r)ictions" in curatorial and artistic film practice.

The workshop invites in a transdisciplinary dialogue on the colonial legacies of film archives. By making use of invention, imagination and speculation, artists and curators have explored the possibilities of engaging critically with the historical narratives contained in the archive, appropriating and transforming them. In this context, fiction has frequently served as a means to interrogate official histories and the legacies of the colonial past. In works by John Akomfrah, Filipa César, Tamika Galanis, Payal Kapadia, Zineb Sedira, Fiona Tan, Ala Younis, Akram Zaatari – to name just a few – the archive has become a site of subversive fiction and artistic resistance. In the framework of “global dis:connect”, the workshop addresses the potential of dis:connections, of the counterhegemonic f(r)ictions produced by imagining other (hi)stories from which alternative memories and futures may emerge. The focus lies on artistic and curatorial practices that produce dissonances and allochronisms through fictional narratives that investigate and rework the histories contained and preserved in archives.

Place & date: Munich, 22-23 February 2024

Organisers: Fabienne Liptay (University of Zurich), Laura McMahon (University of Cambridge), Sujit Sivasundaram (University of Cambridge)

Venue: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Maria-Theresia-Straße 21, 81675 Munich

11-13 October, gd:c annual conference

'All stories at least are not the same': dis:connectivities in global knowledge production

The creation, provision and application of knowledge depends on subjects, geographies, events and wider contexts. ‘All stories at least are not the same’, noted the writer Bernadette Meyer in 1968 in her volume Story, in which various novellas intertwine. Taking stories as diverse and non-hierarchical forms of producing and transferring knowledge, Meyer’s statement could be adapted as follows: knowledge as the totality of one’s abilities moves and is moved — between continents, regions, countries and societal contexts. Educational institutions, publishing houses, companies and state institutions, as well as social groups and individuals, organise and archive knowledge stocks, and they translate, convey and re-contextualise them in (global) transfers. These processes cannot be reduced to a linear narrative of boundless, irrevocable epistemic globalisation of permanently increased interconnectedness and universal availability. Rather, transnational and transcultural knowledge production is articulated precisely in dissonant registers as, for example, through interruption, absence and digression.

Not least due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the realignment of geopolitical blocs, political think tanks, editorials and other opinion leaders have recently postulated increasing ‘deglobalisation’. However, instances of dis:connectivity that emerge through various forms of interruption, absence and detours can also be understood as foundational dynamics of historical and contemporary globalisation. Dis:connectivity means the coexistence of non-connection and connection as, for example, in constellations of local and global knowledge and of traditional/indigenous and futuristic/technological knowledge production. Our perspective on dis:connectivity thus necessarily includes hierarchies, power relations and inherent norms of global knowledge circulation.

The dis:connective conditions of global knowledge production are the starting point of our centre’s second annual conference, which is divided into three sessions — unlocking knowledge, bodies of knowledge and challeging knowledge — with visits to Munich museums and cinema.

Organisers:

Nikolai Brandes and Burcu Dogramaci