Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary

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Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary

ERC Grant Project on the Aesthetics Affects Archives of queer diasporic literature and art. Logo by Wassan Ali und Jasper J. Verlinden

The ERC Consolidator Grant project Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary: Aesthetics, Affect, Archives proposes that artistic practice can acknowledge negative affects and contribute to a reimagination of community that goes beyond national and heteronormative constraints. The project underlines, then, the relevance of Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary as archival sites that have the potential to challeng

e the workings of racist structures and foster new modes of belonging. https://blogs.hu-berlin.de/todo/

Funded by the European Union (ERC, TODO, ID: 101043907). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

29/01/2025

Join us for the session „War memories and the Environment“ of TODO team member Thao Ho‘s seminar „American War in Vietnam: Protest and Memory Culture“ with a guest lecture by Maithu Bùi:

Operation Remediation

Maithu Bùi’s work examines networks of violence at the intersection of collective history, science and technology. Operation Remediation interweaves storytelling with geohistory and science communication. Informed by their own history, their work examines never-ending wars and the diffusion of exploitative technologies. Their upcoming work Operation Remediation explores the exploitation of marginalized life forms in the disposal and detection of explosives and their impact on ecology.
The guest lecture will refer to the selected texts by Zani and Stoler.

Please register at [email protected].
Along with Maithu Bùi’s work, we will discuss „Bomb Ecologies“ by Leah Zani and „The Rot Remains“ by Ann Laura Stoler. PDF files will be sent upon registration.

Maithu Bùi (*1991) is an artist. They studied Philosophy of Language and Logic at LMU Munich, Fine Arts at UdK Berlin. Their work has been shown at the 12th Berlin Biennale, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn and Kunsthalle Bratislava. They are co-founder of the research collective “Curating through Conflict with Care (CCC)” and the working group “art+computation” at the Gesellschaft für Informatik. Maithu Bùi is a Human Machine fellow at Akademie der Künste. Their upcoming work Operation Remediation will be shown in autumn 2025 at E-WERK Luckenwalde and Contemporary Art Center Vilnius in cooperation with Akademie der Künste Berlin.

Images

Front: “Deadly legacy from the Vietnam War. Local villager holds an American BLU3 cluster bomb. Xiangkhouang, Province, Laos.” (c) goeffwiggins.com / Alamy Stock Photo
1) Mathuật – MMRBX, 2022 (c) Maithu Bùi
2) Operation Remediation (c) Maithu Bùi
3) Mathuật – MMRBX, 2022 (c) Maithu Bùi

08/10/2024

Save the Date!

How To Go Back: Art, Activism, and Archives of Return
Conversation and screening with kimura byol lemoine and Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen

November 16, 3-5 pm
Aquarium am Südblock, Skalitzer Str. 6, 10999 Berlin

What does it take to go back? For many diasporic subjects, return means visiting family. For most of the 200,000 Korean adoptees worldwide, including the 2,300 living in Germany, this is not possible. And yet, returning, or wanting to return, is as much part of their biography as having left the country as a child. Return is a highly emotional issue, charged with existential hopes for family reunification and dreams of belonging.
In this event, visual and performance artist, activist and archivist kimura byol lemoine will talk about zer history of return. byol, who grew up in Belgium, was one of the first adoptees to be invited back on a homecoming tour by the South Korean government as early as 1989. Ze was instrumental in building an infrastructure that would enable others to return as well – helping with the search for family members, educating the public and fighting for residency rights. Returning meant to confront bigger social issues, a struggle that would eventually change the country’s understanding of adoption and adoptees.
In the conversation, byol will talk about zer first experiences coming back, and the return work that followed. The event will include short films by and about byol.

The event will be held in English
No registration required

Organized by the ERC Consolidator Grant Project “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. Aesthetics, Affects, Archives”, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, in cooperation with korientation e.V. Netzwerk für Asiatisch-Deutsche Perspektiven e.V.

30/08/2024

In January 2024 after a semester of reading about and discussing theories of diaspora, we (the Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary research group) sat down to discuss the topic. This discussion gave us the space to reflect on and return to some questions and issues that came up during out reading sessions. As you will see, the conversation took us to many places, and we were often drawn to the anecdotal. We were also drawn into discussing the inflections and aesthetics of diasporic life in different countries as well as the possibilities for cross cultural affinities. Our contributions connect the personal and the structural, lived reality and theoretical observations. For us, diaspora is a difficult and liberally used term, it refers to many different and yet somehow related things.

https://blogs.hu-berlin.de/todo/research-2/research/a-conversation-on-diaspora/

12/06/2024

SAVE THE DATE

Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary hosts Dr. Christine Okoth (King’s College London),
June 27, 6-8PM
Unter den Linden 6, Room 3059.
No registration necessary.

Join us for an evening talk on:

‘Managed Mobility and the Documentary Tradition’

Against the backdrop of salt mining in Niger and at the meeting point between French colonialism and contemporary policies around ‘managed migration,’ this paper is interested in the work that documentation performs in perpetuating racial logics around right and proper movement. Building on recent work on early non-fiction film I read the work of poet and filmmaker Ladan Osman, whose travelogue Alien Citizen Field Notes and poetry collection Exiles of Eden both recover the history of anthropological depictions of nomadic communities and link that history to the contemporary policing of movement during the so-called ‘migrant crisis.’ The paper concludes on a reading of a scene in Idrissou Mora-Kpai’s documentary Arlit, deuxième Paris (2005), where the Nigerien town that was once the centre of the French uranium boom has been transformed into a last stop for persons who have been intercepted on their way to Europe.

Christine Okoth is Lecturer in Literatures and Cultures of the Black Atlantic in the Department of English at King’s College London. Prior to coming to King’s, Christine was Research Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick where she worked on Mike Niblett and Chris Campbell’s Leverhulme-funded project ‘World Literature and Commodity Frontiers.’ She is currently writing a book entitled Race and the Raw Material and her work has been published in Feminist Theory, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies, Cambridge Quarterly, and Textual Practice.

15/02/2024

Have a listen to Dr. Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Thao Ho and Fenja Akinde-Hummel, as they discuss the TODO project and their individual research with Yumin Li, with technical support from Lydia Romanowski.

Thanks for having us! Have a listen, link in our blog!

10/01/2024

Save the Date(s)

Institute Colloquium
TODO&Friends: Conversations on Queerness, Diaspora, and Archives
January 18-19, 2024

We decided to open our institute colloquium to the public, and are happy to invite you to our conversations and presentations on our work-in-process research projects of our TODO research members, and our colleagues at the Department of English and American Studies.

See the full program on our website (link in bio).

Please register at [email protected], stating on which days you want to participate, and if you would like to join us for dinner on January 18, 2024.

The artwork „The Lazy Drawing“ used for this poster is by Natthapong Samakkaew .

Natthapong Samakkaew is a visual artist. He was born in Krabi, Thailand and lives in Berlin, Germany. In 2018, he received his BA in Illustration at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, Germany with the dissertation ‘Move your body’ in which he drew people in darkrooms in Berlin. His dissertation received the best experiment award at the university’s annual prize. His drawing practice focuses on visual representations of observation and experience. He has been a member of .

21/12/2023

Save the date
Snare for Birds: Rereading the Colonial Archive
Artist talk by Lizza May David, HU Berlin, 8 January, 4 pm

Please register at [email protected]

Snare for Birds: Rereading the Colonial Archive is a collaborative research art project by Kiri Dalena, Lizza May David, and Jaclyn Reyes that inquires into the tangents of the Philippines’ colonial past, archiving, and its impacts on being Filipina. The project builds upon the imagery and knowledge of Dean Worcester, an ornithologist and Secretary of Interior of the Philippine Islands during the American colonial period, whose photos are part of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum’s archive in Cologne, Germany. Worcester’s views shaped US public opinion, foreign policy, and inevitably what we know to be Filipino history and identity. Snare for Birds: Rereading the Colonial Archive recipocrates Worcester’s endeavor: to engage with archival images like specimens and to claim truths a camera was “made to tell.” It encourages viewers to question the colonial gaze, the accessibility of these historical records, and the ways in which our responses to these images shape how we engage with our predecessors.

Lizza May David lives and works in Berlin and studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nuremberg, the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon and at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Currently, she is a lecturer at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. She is interested in gaps and silences in personal and collective archives and experiments with forms of activation or disturbance through abstract painting. She navigates through affects and moments that elude representability, leading to experimental approaches for the very same reason. She does not assume the existing binary simplifications of the world, but rather thinks relationally in crossroads, turning points, overlapping and branching out, finding further expression in collaborations, architectural interventions or installations.

20/12/2023

Safe the date

9 January, 6:30 pm, HU Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, room 2070A

W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture by Feng-Mei Heberer, NYU

“Documentation, Racialized State Surveillance, and the Undocument”

This talk examines visual documentation and the documentary form in their intimate connection with racialized state surveillance and border control in the United States. It discusses the ways that visual documents such as the photograph have been wielded on behalf of U.S. immigration policy to contain border crossings since the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), and highlights the underexamined linkage between official documentation and historical processes of Asian racialization. Against this backdrop, I turn to the ongoing work of Miko Revereza, a Philippine-born artist and self-ascribed “undocumented-documentary filmmaker.” I explore how Revereza advances an aesthetic of the undocument, or fugitive, errant, and ephemeral visual forms that both attune us to documentation’s violent history and mobilize self-documentary practices beyond the demand to capture and report.

Feng-Mei Heberer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, and the author of Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). Her research interests lie at the junctures of gendered racialization, labor, and transnational migration with a focus on q***r-feminist Asian diasporic media cultures. In addition, she researches and works in film curation and cultural organizing.

14/11/2023

Prof. Elahe Haschemi Yekani’s essay “Queer Invisibility, Archival Poetry and Utopian In-Betweenness” is included in the exhibition catalogue for the exhibition “Close[t] Demonstrations an exhibition on the multitudes of q***r in_visibility”, ()at the Semmelweisklinik: Centre for Arts and Culture,
3 - 24 November 2023! Take a look, via our blog!

13/10/2023

ANYONE ANYWHERE ALL THE TIME (pt 1)

Our hearts (and stomachs) are full! Across the workshop we enjoyed a series of insightful conversations, and even a group performance. Thank you to those who participated, and thanks to those who came and shared space, thoughts and ideas with us.

Adresse

Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin Institut Für Anglistik Und Amerikanistik Unter Den Linden 6
Berlin
10099BERLIN

Telefon

+4930209370945

Webseite

https://blogs.hu-berlin.de/todo/

Benachrichtigungen

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