Common Ground: Tuli Mekondjo & Susana de Sousa Dias

25.05.2023 / 16:00 – 22:30
With Listening at Pungwe, Susana de Sousa Dias, Tuli Mekondjo

4:00 pm
Listening Session
with Robert Machiri (Listening At Pungwe, Fellow 2021)

7:00 pm
Screening and Talk
with Tuli Mekondjo and Memory Biwa

Tuli Mekondjo presents documentation of her recently realized performance without an audience at the military cemetery in Neukölln, the location of the so-called Africa Stone. This 1907 monument—which was placed in the cemetery in 1973 and shamefully commemorates not the victims of the genocide committed by the German colonial power in Namibia between 1904 and 1907 but the soldiers who died there—serves as the subject and setting for Mekondjo’s performance.
Accompanied by the voices of her ancestors, recordings of which are today part of the Humboldt Forum’s sound archive, Tuli Mekondjo seeks a moment of resistance and healing in a performative act of remembrance. The deeply moving images, scenes, and sounds are imbued with grief and power; these insist on a clear naming of the violence and crimes that occurred, while calling at the same time for a new beginning in history.

Following the screening, Tuli Mekondjo will join in conversation with Memory Biwa (Listening at Pungwe, Fellow 2021), a sound researcher also from Namibia.

9:00 pm
Fordlandia Malaise
Screening and Talk with Susana de Sousa Dias

Fordlandia Malaise is a film about the memory and the present of Fordlandia, the company town founded by Henry Ford for rubber production in the Amazon rain forest in 1928. Today, the remains of construction testify to the scale of the failure of this neocolonialist endeavor that lasted less than a decade. Fordlandia is a space suspended between times, between the 20th and 21st centuries, between utopia and dystopia, between visibility and invisibility: architectural buildings of steel, glass, and masonry still remain in use while traces of indigenous life left no marks on the ground. Giving voice to the inhabitants who claim the right to write their own story and reject the ghost town label, Fordlandia Malaise blends together archival imagery, drone footage, tales and narratives, myths and songs.

After the film, Susana de Sousa Dias will talk about the project and its creation, as well as show excerpts from a sequel currently in development entitled Fordlandia Panacea.

Fordlandia Malaise
2019, 40 min., Portugal

Free admission
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