Dictionary of Now #5 | Françoise Vergès

Dictionary of Now #5 - Kader Attia, Françoise Vergès and others –
BODY November 3, 2016 8pm Lecture performance, dialogues, talk
Lecture by Françoise Vergès In his works, the artist Kader Attia
addresses the concept of “repair” as a constant in life. In the
oldest and largest anatomy lecture hall at Berlin’s Charité he
develops a narrative about the body in three fragments for the
Dictionary of Now. One hundred years ago, the bodies of disabled
World War veterans became the impetus for breaking ground in
aesthetic surgery. What changes are subject to aesthetic ideals and
our perceptions of the body? In what contexts does the body become
political? For the fifth edition of the Dictionary of Now, Kader
Attia and his guests will enter the historic Friedrich Kopsch
Lecture Hall at the Charité Anatomical Institute to approach the
concept of the body from different directions. In an opening
statement, Kader Attia introduces his reflections of loss, trauma
and phantom pain on the individual level and in society as a whole.
A second fragment is the German premiere of Kader Attia’s
award-winning film Réfléchir la Mémoire / Reflecting Memory (2016,
Video HD, 45 min, original version with English subtitles,
courtesy: Kader Attia and Galerie Nagel Draxler Berlin/ Köln). In
his film essay, Kader Attia assembles a series of interviews with
surgeons, historians, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and traumatized
people on the questions of the phantom limb trauma and its
psychosocial implications. In a third contribution, the political
scientist Françoise Vergès analyzes transformations of the human
body and points out the historical continuities of racial
narratives forced onto bodies. What can we learn from colonial
slavery about predatory economy and wars today? Starting from the
political and economic dimensions of the black body in the context
of the Transatlantic slave trade during colonialism, she analyzes
the structure of the self in the “post-colonial body” and politics
of reparation.