Public Lecture: “Desert Scenes: Transformative Relationality in Genocidal Extractive Zones”; Speaker: Henriette Gunkel

Abstract:

During a site-specific workshop week in and around Lüderitz, Namibia in 2023, a group of artists, academics and activists from primarily Namibia and Germany followed the question of “How may something — in this case, the white settler colonial violence and the genocide, — be memorialized while its impact continues to unfold?”. Through collaborative, transdisciplinary practices, we aimed at exploring spaces, traces and practices of memorialisation that are widely unacknowledged in the current political and scholarly debates around reparation. I want to reflect on two scenes that were created during the workshop—one performance by nesindano namise (Khoes) and a moment of practices of attunement—that, as I will argue, enacted transformative relationality across time through sonic layering, ancestral invocation, and porous body-landscape relations. 

Henriette Gunkel is professor for the transformation of audiovisual media with a specific focus on gender and queer theory at the Institute for Media Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Her research interests are Visual Cultures and Aesthetics, Gender and Queer Theory, Post- and Decolonial Thought, Black Studies, Memory Studies and Mediated Landscapes, Infrastructure Studies, Extractivism, Speculative Fiction, Afrofuturism.

This lecture is open to the public.

For virtual participation via Zoom, please use the following link:

https://uni-freiburg.zoom-x.de/j/62755317882?pwd=VkfYvWhMASasyExaaaVAfEfB3FGZjC.1

Meeting-ID: 627 5531 7882
Code: R1MbYUNN4