The film follows four very different characters and shifts locations without creating overt narrative connections between them: In Upper Egypt Safwat Samaan, a Coptic political activist and the photo collector Francis Amin try to reconstruct the story of their hometown Luxor that was destroyed during the rule of Mubarak due to state corruption and neo-liberal economy; in Cairo socialist writer Alaa El-Dib compares the 1952 and the January 2011 revolution and reflects on his own political disillusionment and marginalization. His depression is anti-thetically juxtaposed to the enthusiasm of a young female Islamist, cyber-designer Awatef Mahmoud who is asked to create an avatar for a secluded friend who is not allowed to join the political protest on the streets.
Viola Shafik is a filmmaker, curator and film scholar. She is the author of Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (AUC Press, 1998/2016), Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class and Nation (AUC Press, 2007), Resistance, Dissidence, Revolution: Documentary Film Aes-thetics in the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge, 2023) and the editor of Documentary Filmmaking in the Middle East and North Africa (AUC Press, 2022). She lectured at the American University in Cairo, Zürich University, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München where she held the position of a researcher in 2016-2020. She served as the Head of Studies of the Documentary Campus MENA Program 2011-2013, has worked as curator, consultant and selection committee member for numerous international festivals and film funds, among others La Biennale di Venezia, the Berlinale, Dubai Film Market, Rawi Screen Writers Lab, Torino Film Lab and the World Cinema Fund. She directed several documentaries, such as The Lemon Tree/Shajarat al-laymun (1993), Jannat ʻAli-Ali im Paradies/My Name is not Ali (2011) and Arij – Scent of Revolution (2014).
Banu Karaca works at the intersection of political anthropology and critical theory, art, aesthetics, and cultural policy, museum and feminist memory studies.She is the author of The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany (Fordham University Press, 2021), and co-editor of Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press, 2019). She has published on freedom of expression in the arts, the visualization of gendered memories of war and political violence, visual literacy, and restitution. At the Forum Transregionale Studien, she directs the research group “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge” (BEYONDREST) supported by a Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council.
Çiçek İlengiz works at the intersection of memory studies, politics of emotions and critical heritage studies. In 2019, she completed her PhD at the Research Center for History of Emotions, hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. Before joining the research project BEYONDREST, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Empires of Memory Research Group, hosted by the Max Planck Research Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen. Her recent publications have engaged with the conceptual discussions on inheritance, temporality and mourning in the fields of memory and heritage. She is currently revising her book manuscript for publication, tentatively titled The Healing-Injury: Revolutionary Mourning in Post Genocidal Turkey. Combining ethnographic research with oral histories and archival documentation the book offers a critical assessment of the logics of rational politics, the framework of which has been drawn by military, racial, and secular regimes of power.
The event is part of the conversation series Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm of the BEYONDREST Research Group. “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge” (BEYONDREST) is an ERC-funded, five-year research project at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Project No. 101045661). More information on the project and the conversation series can he found here.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the speaker(s) and author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union, nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.
