Antwerp University – February 18-19, 2016
A two-days bilingual international conference with keynote speakers Raoul Peck, Piet Defraeye and Johannes Fabian.
details: here
This interdisciplinary colloquium revolves around the work of filmmaker Raoul Peck and the iconography of Patrice Lumumba in Peck’s films as well as in all other forms of art.
‘The future has died with the prophet’, says Raoul Peck in Lumumba, la mort d’un prophète (1992). However, the figure of Lumumba, his unfinished project and the inability to bury his corpse, cast a spectral shadow on the present. Peck and many other artists with him deal with these Spectres by a responsiveness to memory and to the undigested suffering which inscribed itself on Lumumba’s body and Congo’s history.
The figure of Patrice Lumumba has been oscillating between demonization and beatification. The void between these two opposites has been appropriated by artists in painting, music, poetry, literature, photography, theatre, cinema, video, cartoons, public space and sculpture. The colloquium aims at bringing together scholars and artists working on these iconographies around Lumumba and/or the cinematographic oeuvre of Raoul Peck. The colloquium will also host an exhibition and film program on the theme.