Olivier Hadouchi  is a critic, curator and film historian, based in Paris. He obtained a PhD at the  University Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3) on Cinema and Liberation struggles around Tricontinental's constellation (1966-1975). He has written for various publications such as CinémAction, Third Text, Mondes du Cinéma, La Furia Umana and has curated film programs for Le BAL, Bétonsalon. le Cinématographe de Nantes and la HEAD (Genève). 

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc is an artist, curator and researcher interested in exploring the history of the colonial encounter and its effects on memory and identity. Amongst others, he is very concerned to engage with film history and the decolonisation of African states in the 1960s. Abonnenc recently took part in the Paris Triennial in the Palais de Tokyo and in group exhibitions in the Fondation d‘entreprise Ricard (Paris) and the ICA – Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, USA).

Basia Lewandowska Cummings is a writer, editor and film curator, based in London. She has contributed to frieze, The Wire, Contemporary &, and The Quietus and has curated film programmes for Bold Tendencies, Film Africa, the New York African Film Festival, and Gasworks gallery. In January 2014 she became writer-in-residence at Jerwood Visual Arts, London.

At this stalled and disillusioned juncture in postcolonial history, at a time when many anticolonial utopias have withered into a morass of exhaustion, corruption, and authoritarianism, how can we rethink the past in order to reimagine a more usable future ? If the longing for revolution, the craving for the overcoming of the colonial past and the reclaiming of national identity that shaped the ‘cinemas of liberation’ of the 1960’s is not one that we can inhabit today, then it may be part of our task to set it aside and begin an effort of reimagining other futures for us to dream of. But how can we go beyond the nostalgia for past horizons that still (or once again) seems to occupy our contemporary scope of imagination ? Can an answer be found in the work of the contemporary artists and filmmakers who are attempting to reinvent and redirect the legacies of militant culture and ‘Third cinema’ ? How to position ourselves today in view of this large corpus of historical film works in a context that is radically different but at the same time dauntingly close ? A selection of formally and politically bold films from Latin-America will serve as the starting point for a discussion on the relation between our ‘dead-end’ present, and, on one hand, the old utopian futures that inspired it and, on the other, an imagined idiom of future futures that might reanimate this present and perhaps even engender in it unexpected horizons of transformative possibility.

RELATED SCREENING

SATURDAY 5 APRIL 17:30 PADDENHOEK

Elke Marhöfer, prendas - ngangas - enquisos – machines (2013)
Various films by Nicolás Guillén Landrián (1965-1966)
http://www.courtisane.be/en/event/selection-10

In het kader van het onderzoeksproject ‘Figures of Dissent’ (KASK/hoGent) en het EU project ‘The Uses of Art’ (confederatie l’internationale), in conjunctie met l’œil se noie, een tentoonstelling met werk van Eric baudelaire & Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc (KIOSK, 05/04 – 15/06/2014), i.s.m. KIOSK

Met de steun van de onderzoeksgroepen S:PAM & PEPPER (UGent), Kunstencentrum Vooruit, BAM instituut voor beeldende audiovisuele en mediakunst, Eye on Palestine, de ambassades van Mexico en Frankrijk.