Elizabeth A. Povinelli: Heritability and the Ancestral Present
hosted by: Francesca Raimondi
11.11.2021 6.00 p.m., Lecture
This talk by critical theorist and filmmaker Elizabeth A. Povinelli presents a series of parallel moments in the ancestral present of two clans in order to probe the relationship between Indigeneity and white nativism in the context of settler colonialism. The clans are, on the one hand, the Simonaz clan, patronym, Povinelli, and Bartolot clan, patronym, Ambrosi from Carisolo, Trentino; and, on the other hand, the totemic clans of the Karrabing that stretch along the coastal region of Anson Bay, Northern Territory, Australia. The talk approaches a turn in the politics of difference by tracking how two sets of clans have moved through historical forms of the ancestral present, namely, changing imaginaries of social form, time and heritability; and how these imaginaries emerge from and materially sediment into human bodies and the more-than-human world.
In context of the HTA-Lecture „(Un)settled. Performance, Protection, and Politics of Insecurity”.
Karrabing Film Collective: Day in the Life & The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland
11.11.2021 8.30 p.m., Film
Karrabing Film Collective, an Indigenous media group based in Australia’s Northern Territory, uses filmmaking and installation as a form of grassroots resistance and self-organisation. “Day in the Life” (2020) explores the obstacles Indigenous families face as they move through an ordinary day. Across five chapters – Breakfast, Playtime, Lunch Break, Cocktail Hour, and Dinner Time – and an audio-scape directed by its younger members, it is a visual and sonic landscape that dramatises and satirises the settler forms of governance and extractive capitalism that Karrabing members encounter.
“The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland” (2018): In the not-so-distant future, Europeans can no longer survive for long periods outdoors in a land- and seascape poisoned by capitalism, but Indigenous people seem able to. A young Indigenous man, Aiden, taken away when he was just a baby to be a part of a medical experiment to save the white race, is released into the world of his family. As he travels with his father and brother across the landscape, he confronts two possible futures and pasts.
