Tuesday 29 May – Sunday 3 June
Beeld voor Beeld 2012
Tuesday 29 May: Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden
Wednesday 30 May – Sunday 3 June: Tropentheater, Amsterdam
As I’m writing this piece, threehundred Somali and Iraqi refugees have put up a camp consisting of tents outside a centre for asylum seekers in the northern part of the Netherlands to protest against the inhumane refugee policy of the Dutch government. According to the Dutch government, the regions from where they fled are now safe and they have to return. According to the people themselves, their lives are in danger when they go back. There are, apparantly, different perspectives on when a region is still in conflict or when a region is in a post-conflict situation, and when it is dangerous or safe.
This years’ theme of Beeld voor Beeld addresses these issues of post-conflict societies. When is a situation transitting from conflict to post-conflict? When can people safely return? How do these societies deal with the traumatic past? Is there room for reconciliation? As we can see from Kasim Abid’s stunning film Life After the Fall, things are not necessarily better or less dangerous after an armed conflict. Iraq has not become the democratic example for the Arabic world everybody hoped it would be after the fall of one of the cruelest dictatorships in the Middle East. The safety situation in Irag is still critical, as Abid shows by the example of his own family. The same goes for Colombia or Palestine, from which countries the festival shows films and debates with the authors the role of cinema in the possible reconstruction of these societies. Nicolás Rincón Gille’s trilogy Campo Hablado, of which the first two parts will be shown in the festival (the third part is still in the making) is a visually stunning portrait of the Colombian countryside and its’ inhabitants, an area rich of traditions, myths and storytelling. Gille mastefully merges this tradition of storytelling in a mythical environment with the threatening and growing presence of paramilitaries bringing in death and destruction. Filmmaker Pary El-Qalqili was born in Germany from a German mother and a Palestinian father. The Turtle’s Rage is a sensitive and multi-layered portrait of her father who is exiled from his homeland and has lost his roots. But it’s not only a portrait of El-Qalqili’s father, but also of all these refugees who cannot return to their homelands, either because they are denied access or because the safety situation doesn’t allow them to return. Like the Somalis and the Iraqi’s in these tents in the windy northern part of the Netherlands.
Eddy Appels
Festival Director
http://www.beeldvoorbeeld.nl/
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31 May- 1 June 2012
CIM Conference(Creativity and Innovation in a World of Movement)
Funded by HERA
Venue: Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21, University of Utrecht,
Convenors: Birgit Meyer, Maruška Svašek and Rhoda Woets
This conference explores the dynamics of cultural production and creativity in an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity. Instead of assessing the relative novelty of end products, a viewpoint that betrays a limited, typically modernist view of creativity, participants are invited to explore practices of appropriation, consumption and (re)contextualisation in a broad selection of partly interrelated settings in the spheres of (popular) art, religion and museums in Europe, India, Africa, Australia and the Americas/Caribbean.
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14th of June 2012
Symposium Rethinking Theory and Practice through East – West Dialogue
This symposium brings together a distinguished Professor of comparative and ‘Asian’ philosophy, an anthropologist researching Falun Gong, and a number of performance artists. Together they engage in reflections on theory and practice, inspiration and presence, in relation to ‘EAST – WEST’ dialogue. The symposium is organized through ACCORD with Stichting Filosofie Oost-West, Stichting Performance, VISOR and Dialoog Academie.
Faculteiten: Faculteit der Godgeleerdheid and Faculteit Sociale Wetenschap
Afdelingen: Theologie en wijsbegeerte, and sociale and cultureel antropologie.
Date: June 14th 2012
Time: 1pm – 5:30pm.
Location: Kerkzaal, 16th floor. Main building, VU University Amsterdam.
Further Information and registration: see the symposium flyer. Registration at accordamsterdam@gmail.com before June 10th (please). Price of entry is 12 euro (to be paid on the day).
Link: http://www.dialoogacademie.nl/cultuur-podium/activiteiten/view/69-symposium-rethinking-theory-and-practice-through-east-west-dialogue
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