Fragments of Repair/Gathering VI: Invisible Bridges

Screening and conversation from BAK, Utrecht, Berlin, and Berkeley, CA

Taking place on Thursday 15 July 2021, the sixth gathering of Fragments of Repair/Gatherings, Invisible Bridges, consists of a conversation between Kader Attia (artist, Berlin) and Stefania Pandolfo (medical anthropologist, Berkeley, CA) and includes selected screenings of “fragments” of Kader Attia’s video installation Reason’s Oxymorons, currently exhibited as part of Fragments of Repair/Kader Attia.

The repeated lockdowns and the isolation they produced, the experience of death unmourned, and the processes of dispossession, racialization, and control, have been associated during the pandemic with expanding forms of mental pain. In this conversation Kader Attia and Stefania Pandolfo will draw from their respective work as an anthropologist and an artist who in parallel ways have reflected on madness, culture, and repair in modernity and coloniality, and have explored the spaces and capacities of transversal forms of care: “invisible bridges” enabling passages, transferences, and translations, between medical, ritual, and artistic practices, towards a reactivation of desire, and the possibility of dreaming. In this perspective Pandolfo and Attia will explore the capacity of such “bridges” to produce a shift in the coordinates of the real, carrying us beyond the boundary of the visible and the invisible, the living and the dead, to produce uncanny and unexpected angles from which to feel, think, and see otherwise. Artistic, psychoanalytic, and mediumistic practices explore the gaps, silences, and voids of modernity and reason. May these traumatic cuts be also an “abyss” which may grant us an access to an otherwise?

The conversation includes screenings of selected “fragments” of Kader Attia’s 18-channel video installation Reason’s Oxymorons (2015), currently exhibited as part of Fragments of Repair/Kader Attia at BAK. Reason’s Oxymorons inquires into ways of dealing with trauma and injury by bringing together various cultural, medical, ritual, and artistic practices and perspectives regarding subjectivity, the psyche, and imagination from around the world. The interviewed protagonists hold a wealth of expertise and competence in fields ranging from psychiatry to ethnography, storytelling, shamanism, philosophy, history, music, etc. While enacted in the west as a strategy to correct or hide imperfections and “brokenness,” in non-western contexts “repair” often involves embracing the scar as a natural part of healing, honoring thus the traces of past wounds as a reservoir of resistance and learning.  

This is the sixth gathering of Fragments of Repair/Gatherings, a hybrid off- and online series of lectures, conversations, screenings, and assembly forums around the theory and practice of “repair.”

Video registration of this program:

PROGRAM
Thursday 15 July 2021,  18.30–20.00 hrs 
(All times are Central European Summer Time/CEST) 

18.30 hrs
OPENING WORDS OF WELCOME
Wietske Maas

18.45 hrs
CONVERSATION AND SCREENING
Invisible Bridges
Stefania Pandolfo and Kader Attia 

REGISTRATION
Registration Online
To join the program online, register tickets via the “Register (Online)” button above.
There are several ways to join us online. Please join free of charge by selecting the “solidarity ticket” option. If you are able and willing to support BAK’s program’s financially, please consider selecting a paid ticket option.
Options Online Registration:
Solidarity Ticket: Free / Regular Ticket: €4 / Student Ticket: €2

After registration, you are sent the link to the Zoom webinar.

Registration In-Person
Via the “Register (In Person)” button above. Please arrive 10 minutes early so we can safely guide you to your seat. We have some Covid-19 guidelines in place to make sure your visit is as safe and pleasant as possible.
Options In-Person Registration:
Regular Ticket: €6 / Student Ticket: €3 / Solidarity Ticket: Free
We Are Public: This program is free to attend for We Are Public members, but please make a reservation via wearepublic.nl

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