The Identity Document and the Documentary Gesture: Notes from South Africa | Workshop an der Northwestern University
Workshop mit Rosalind Morris und Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Am 29. April 2021 veranstaltet unsere Kooperationspartnerin, die Northwestern University (Chicago), einen Workshop zum Thema The Identity Document and the Documentary Gesture: Notes from South Africa mit Rosalind Morris und Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky. Der Workshop findet von 19 bis 21 Uhr via Zoom statt.
Mitglieder des Graduiertenkollegs bereiten den Workshop im Austausch mit Promovierenden verschiedener amerikanischer Universitäten (Northwestern & Columbia University) vor. Beteiligt sind Marion Biet, Jana Hecktor, Philipp Hohmann, Vera Mader, Anna Polze und unsere PostDoc Cynthia Browne.
Grundlage der Diskussion werden zwei Kapitel aus dem in Kürze erscheinenden Buch Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa von Rosalind Morris sein sowie der dazugehörige Film A Film is Being Made (2020). Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky reagiert auf Morris’ Film mit ihrem Konzept der Dokumentarischen Geste – im Workshop treten die beiden Wissenschaftlerinnen miteinander in Dialog.
Das Material kann über eine Mail an rlbince@u.northwestern.edu angefordert werden.
Workshop-Material
Morris’s forthcoming project, Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa is based on nearly twenty years of field research in South Africa’s gold-mining regions. Drawing on deep ethnography and collaborative filmmaking with undocumented migrants and itinerant miners, Morris analyzes transformations in the social worlds of mining since 1994, when South Africa held its first democratic elections. In looking at local histories of South Africa in light of global developments, Morris extends insights elaborated in her earlier essays, during documentary filmmaking, and in collaborations with South African artists William Kentridge, Clive van den Berg, Songizile Madikida, and Ebrahim Hajee. Chapter five of Unstable Ground (recommended as prior workshop reading, along with book’s introduction) engages transformation in protest over identity documentation and “pass” protests by women.
Deuber-Mankowsky’s A Space of Appearance in Deep Underground: A Film is Being Made and the Documentary Gesture discusses A Film is Being Made (2020). This 17-minute documentary film realized in conjunction with the Unstable Ground project, was made possible through a collaboration between Morris and miners who themselves operated cameras underground. The documentary gesture draws its power from the tension Walter Benjamin noted in the encounter between technical forms, living bodies, and historical time. It is a gesture of resistance against the use of digital technology in the age of ubiquitous documenting for total surveillance and state control and allows a rethinking of Hannah Arendt’s concept of the political space of appearance.
29.04.2021, 19-21 Uhr via Zoom
Material: rlbince@u.northwestern.edu