Contemporary Berlin fashions itself to be a “European metropolis”. In 1884, Berlin was host to the so called “Berlin Africa conference”. Colonialism is over? Coloniality is deeply engrained in Berlin. Informed by their experience as co-organizers of the “Decolonize the City!” conference in Berlin in September 2012 Noa Ha and Nika Zablotsky will discuss processes of Decolonization as a sustained political practice. Departing from the position that discussions of the city have so far only insufficiently addressed who is being displaced, controlled and marginalized, they foreground an queer anti-racist analysis which emphasizes the everyday struggles and resistance of postcolonial immigrants and people of color who are most affected by racist police violence, deportation, exploitation and discrimination in the education system, which they fight back since many years. This lecture will point to prospects of Decolonization of and in Berlin.
Category: news
Edited by Achille Mbembe
The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism is an experiment in global conversation based in the South. Located in Johannesburg, we seek to be a critical node in the re-territorializing of global intellectual production. We are a centre for theoretical work that takes seriously a position in the South while addressing international conversations and problématiques. We take the labour of theory and criticism to be significant political work that is crucial to the experimentation in social forms.
“The Movement of Ideas” is the first comprehensive screening of all films by Oliver Ressler. Since 2000, Ressler has created 15 films, which all will be presented at Cinema Dynamo, a cinema space initiated by Andrea Bellini, the new director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland.
The philosopher Alain Badiou writes: “We have to overturn the old verdict that would have us believe we are living in the age of the ‘end of ideologies’. We can now see quite clearly that the only reality behind their so-called ‘end’ is ‘Save the banks’. Nothing could be more important than rediscovering the passion for ideas, or than contrasting the world as it is with a general hypothesis, with the certainty that we can create a very different order of things. We will contrast the wicked spectacle of capitalism with the real of peoples, with the lives of peoples and the movement of ideas.” (The Communist Hypothesis, 2010)
Con “El problema está en el medio”, el proyecto de Pablo Marte para consonni HPC, propone repensar categorías como imitación, copia, remake, reproducción, repetición, plagio, fake o falsificación, interpretación o inspiración, simulacro, parodia, pastiche, burlesque, sátira… Palabras que refieren una determinada vinculación entre un producto cultural y otro precedente. Cita extensa en tanto sujetos en una relación histórica, o lo que es lo mismo, repensar la relación en sí. Muy apropiado empezar con este tema cuando precisamente el programa de consonni en el local, HPC, se inspira en un producto cultural previo (la novela de Virginia Woolf).
by Marina Gržinić, e-flux journal: http://www.e-flux.com/
Since November 2012, refugees have been protesting in Austria.1 At the center of this protest lies the formation of the Refugee Protest Camp in Vienna, which started with a ten-hour march of approximately a hundred refugees and their supporters. The march, which took place on November 24, 2012, started at the refugee reception center in Traiskirchen and ended at the Vienna city center—a distance of around twenty kilometers. The march resulted in the erection of the Refugee Protest Camp, which included tents, a kitchen, and activities in Sigmund Freud Park, in front of the Votive Church in the center of Vienna. This camp was cleared by police on December 28, 2012. After negotiating with personnel from the Votive Church, the refugees entered the church itself. They decided to “camp” in the freezing cold church building (while at the same time being monitored and controlled by Caritas, a Catholic Church charity relief organization). As nothing was offered to them by that point—no answer from the authorities regarding their demands—a group of refugees went on a hunger strike.