Event overview
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay on how to unlearn imperialism and transform violence into the practice of shared care for our common world.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay in a conversation with Ayesha Hameed and Astrid Schmetterling on how to recover the still present potentialities of the moment before imperial violence occurred and be with others, both living and dead, across time. The conversation will explore how to reorient our relations to history, citizenship, archives, museums and objects with regard to Azoulay’s recent book, Potential History (2019), as well as her current research focusing on the Maghreb.
This event is associated with our Culture, Memory and Futurity research cluster. In this cluster, we explore the ways in which the present is structured by a relation to the past and the future. We attend to memory as a collective as well as an individual faculty: something that, in a globalized environment, is produced across geographical, cultural and political borders. We also focus on the various ways in which memory might be blocked (by trauma, or by unconscious and/or political repression), an interest in how disavowed and blocked memories can function as ‘residual culture’ and ‘hauntological’ spectres and, indeed, how the past might itself be ‘re-fictioned’ within the present.
Some research approaches the future as another kind of spectre and fiction impinging upon the present. Where afro- and other new futurisms are concerned, a key preoccupation is the role that various projections and imaginations of the future can play to break us out of present delimitations.
Image: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Errata, 2019, exhibition view, Tapiès Foundation, Barcelona
Biographies
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature, Brown University. She is also a curator and documentary film maker. Her books include Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019); The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008); From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950, (Pluto Press, 2011); The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River (with Adi Ophir, Stanford University Press, 2012). Her films include Un-documented: Undoing Imperial Plunder (2019) and Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48 (2012) and her recent exhibition, Errata (2019) was shown at the Tapiès Foundation, Barcelona and HKW, Berlin.
Ayesha Hameed and Astrid Schmetterling are lecturers in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths
This event is part of our Visual Culture Public Programme 2021
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Mar 2021 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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