Common Ground: History as Material

31.10.2019 / 19:00
With Alan Pauls, Don Mee Choi, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Runo Lagomarsino

In the third iteration of the interdisciplinary talk series Common Ground, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Don Mee Choi, Runo Lagomarsino, and Alan Pauls will explore how historic material affects artists who reflect on forms of protest and political struggle linked to violence.
Visual artist Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc is currently researching the protests led by the African Students Association and the SDS against the screening of the movie Africa Addio in West Berlin in 1966. The strategies they developed in their struggle against colonial and racist framings would eventually be echoed nationally and internationally.
Novelist Alan Pauls has written a fictional trilogy on Argentina’s left-wing armed movements in the 1970s, reflecting on historical experience through the gaze of a teenager too young to take action.
Poet Don Mee Choi’s research centers on the Gwangju civilian uprising in 1980 and its brutal crackdown by the military government in South Korea – an event that found its way into media both in East and West Germany.
Visual artist Runo Lagomarsino’s installations, actions, and films focus on the way in which history is reused and reread over and over again: whether depicting how Pontecorvo’s anticolonial cult film Battle of Algiers was used by the Pentagon as a teaching tool, or recontextualizing found materials to tell the histories of exile or colonialism.
Through a shared reading of images and materials, Abonnenc, Choi, Lagomarsino, and Pauls will explore the challenges of approaching historic experiences when such events are either overwritten, idealized, or suppressed. What critical potential can emerge from the counter-narratives they develop in their practice?

Around twenty international fellowship holders are brought together under the auspices of the Artists’ program each year – from a wide variety of artistic fields and with very different political, social, and geographical backgrounds. In spite of this diversity and the historic division between the four categories of visual arts, film, literature, and music, the lines of interconnection are more than obvious.

The interdisciplinary series »Common Ground« focuses on these interfaces and brings the commonalities, points of friction, and translation challenges associated with different perspectives and artistic positions into a constructive dialogue.

A mix of workshop talks and discussions is designed to provide fellowship holders a platform for exchanging views on topics of shared interest. Above all, Berlin audiences are invited to engage in conversation with the artists – and not only when they present themselves to the public with a finished work.

in English