Campus Westend, Hörsaalzentrum, HZ 5. The event is open to the public and does not require prior registration.
“What if history is haunted by cyclical violence, precisely because it has not been told properly? What if the ghosts of the past, inhabit the present, as monsters and birds? And what are heroines for?” These questions are at the very center of Grada Kilomba’s opening lecture-performance. Kilomba guides us into her unique artistic practice of performing knowledge, in which she gives body, voice, form, movement and image to her own writings. In her ouevre knowledge is translated into visual and sculptural language and becomes performative storytelling. “What stories are told? How are they told? Where are they told? And told by whom?” Kilomba asks. In this first part, titled Heroines, Birds and Monsters, Kilomba explores the concepts of post-coloniality, violence and erasure, memory and forgetting, ritual and knowledge production as well as the concepts of amnesia and repetition.