Past Events

Photo-Writing | Adriaan Gerbrands Lecture

Thursday, 28 November, 16-19.30
Museum Volkenkunde | Grote Zaal, Steenstraat 1, 2312 BS Leiden

The 9th Adriaan Gerbrands Lecture will be delivered by Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck.

Starting from our own practice, a collaborative ‘photo-writing’ between a visual artist and an anthropologist, this presentation will reflect on the possibilities of combining various artistic and anthropological approaches and inroads into the city (in our own case this means the urban contexts of the Global South, in particular Central Africa). To what extent do ethnography and photography (or film and video) reveal a shared methodological possibility to move beyond the urban surface and to reach into the more intimate folds where urban life is generated?

Program

16.30

Welcome & Announcement of the RCMC-FEL Junior Fellows

Wayne Modest
Head of the Research Center for Material Culture

16.45

Welcome & Introduction

Mark Westmoreland
Associate Professor in the Visual Anthropology, Leiden University

17.00

“Photo-writing”

Sammy Baloji
Visual Artist
Filip De Boeck
Professor Anthropology of at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa, University of Leuven

18.00

Q & A

18.15

Reception

19.00

End program

Sammy Baloji
and
Filip De Boeck

Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck

In addition to the upcoming Gerbrandslezing, we will host Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck for two additional events

27 November
17.00—19.00 Screening followed by Q&A with filmmakers
Location: Filmzaal (0A28), Pieter de la Court building, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333 AK Leiden

28 November
13.00—15.00 Masterclass
with Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck
Location: Room 1A25, Pieter de la Court building, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333 AK Leiden

Registration required
Email: SecrCaos@FSW.leidenuniv.nl
Subject: Masterclass
Max 20 participants

Details will be shared after registration.

The Tower: A Concrete Utopia (70m)

by Filip De Boeck and Sammy Baloji

Conceived as a visual essay on the legacy of colonial architecture in the Congo, this film focuses on an unfinished and makeshift 12-story structure both inspired by the modernist promises of skyscrapers and reflects the way inhabitants of Kinshasa must “suture” together the “holes” that permeate the urban landscape. The Tower, a vision of one man known locally as the ‘Docteur’, provides a concrete response to earlier colonial propositions, while also highlighting the way aging and dilapidated colonial infrastructures have become “fragments and figments of a modernity that has become part of an irretrievable past.” In this way, Docteur’s Tower serves as “a giant question mark,” as if to ask: “What kinds of social (after)lives does [a colonialist modernity] still enable, and what dreams and visions of possible futures, if any, does that colonial legacy still trigger for the residents of Kinshasa today?”