Exhibition: We Threw Open the Doors - and Lecture: The Longue Durée of Genocide
Saturday, May 10, 2025 3:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1Floating Berlin (Lilienthalstraße 32, 10965 Berlin)
The Research Creation Class of 2025 is throwing open the doors for our annual exhibition event. Students have, during a semester of conducting individual research and creating artistic responses, engaged closely with archives – personal, grassroots, institutional, digital or state-held. They discovered traces of lives, events, and movements, and learnt that revisiting history is never the same as experiencing it – it is traced over and over until the lines are smudged, and stories, especially those of resistance, are lost, diluted, or erased. The geographies in their art works reach from Kaliningrad/Königsberg to India, from Nazi Berlin to Palestine, from the island of Vieques to France. The stories that they tell span the entire 20th Century.
Please register here.
At 3:30pm there will be an exhibition tour
At 5:00pm, we will listen to Eyal Weizman's lecture: “The longue durée of genocide”:
Weizman uses spatial methodologies and the archives of the landscape to show historical continuities and the protracted nature of genocide in and around Wadi Gaza - the fertile seasonal stream bed extending between Hebron and Gaza City. It was inhabited by Palestine’s southern most agricultural communities who were violently displaced in the Nakba 1948. After October 7 the Israeli army designated Wadi Gaza as the border between the northern and the southern parts of the Gaza Strip, north of it was a forbidden area where no Palestinians were allowed, and south of it a so-called "humanitarian zone”, which was also starved and bombed. In the eyes of Zionists’ predecessors, the 19c orientalist German, British, French and American travellers to Ottoman Palestine, south of Wadi Gaza started the desert, where settled life is seemingly impossible. Weizman relates the history of Wadi Gaza to Art. II c of the Genocide Convention, that defines “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction” as one mode that genocide can operate with.
Teresa Koloma Beck will respond to the lecture; the discussion will be moderated by Kerry Bystrom.
From 7:00pm, Omar Haidari and Jamal Momand will raise awareness for women in Afghanistan and serve their famous Afghan Burgers.
The event ends at 9pm.
Program:
3pm: Doors open
3.30pm: Welcome and Exhibition Tour
5pm: Lecture by Eyal Weizman; respondent: Teresa Koloma Beck; moderator: Kerry Bystrom
7pm: Afghan Burgers and Party
Email: [email protected]