In the organizer's words:

CASTING for a long-term documentary

The long-term documentary will be realized over the next ten years by the artist Anna Jermolaewa.

Friday, 12.12.

7 pm Aurélia Kalisky (DE)
8 pm Alena Jabarine (DE)
Jury: Susanne Sachsse (Chairwoman), Alice Hasters and Heinrich Horwitz

Saturday, 13.12.

3 p.m. Farkhondeh Shahroudi (DE)
4 pm Aliaksei Bratachkin (EN/RU)
5 pm Lamin Leroy Gibba (DE)
7 pm Vaginal Davis (EN)
8 pm Shadi Habib Allah (EN)
9 pm Nina Katchadourian & Sina Najafi (EN)
Jury: Susanne Sachsse (Chairwoman), Alice Hasters, Heinrich Horwitz, Anselm Franke, Karin Harrasser, Jakob Racek

Market for useful knowledge (Foyer version)

Friday, 12.12.

Round A 21.30 - 22.00
Round B 22 - 22.30

With Aliaksei Bratachkin / Jakob Racek, Guillaume Cailleau, Shadi Habib Allah, Karin Harrasser, Aurelia Kalisky, Anton Kats / Sarah Lewis Cappellari, Mukenge / Schellhammer, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Farkhondeh Shahroudi

About the event

Memory problems? Let's try a different kind of memory theater. The Mobile Academy Berlin presents a performative proposal for a culture of remembrance in a migration society.

Three stages of remembering

The future was always there. It is waiting to be reanimated in the unrealized emancipatory projects of the past. In the performance "Memory, Speak!" , it emerges in polyphonic biographical narratives. Discourses and debates about the culture of remembrance do not make an appearance, but the act of remembering and the memories of the people themselves do - in all their detail, precariousness and brilliant incoherence. Installation and performance open up a resonance space in which visitors can listen to different techniques and ways of remembering over the course of two days.

The stage in "Memory, Speak!" functions as a "screen memory". Collective memory here is a game of addition, not a process of reduction. Everything is happening now, nothing has passed, we are right in the middle of it. On three stages of remembrance, far-flung places, times, events, other people's and our own experiences, the present and the absent intersect. Viewers and listeners can move freely around the space and connect to the individual stations on different channels via infrared headphones.

CASTING for a long-term documentary

The Mobile Academy Berlin has invited nine candidates to test their memory skills in a two-day casting in front of a three-person jury - live in front of an audience. Are the candidates suitable protagonists for a long-term film documentary that follows them over ten years to record how they will have experienced the coming decade? Are they good seismographs of future social changes? The jury of experienced interviewers and attentive listeners is particularly interested in the analytical or intuitive ability of the casting candidates to flash up possible futures in their memories and biographies.

The common thread of the interviews is a questionnaire based on oral history interview techniques, artist questionnaires, collaboration with the Colombian Truth Commission and the specific background knowledge of the jury members. The Berlin version is the first part of a planned series of castings, with the next stop being Vienna in April 2026. The subsequent long-term film documentary will be realized over the next ten years by Russian-born, Vienna-based artist Anna Jermolaewa.

RADIO REHEARSAL: The Black Caribbean, Memory Techniques for Approximating Ghosted Realities

We listen to the rehearsal of a radio broadcast. In loops and breaks, in words, music and sound, it returns to something that was never meant to be remembered. The program is about El Corte, the forgotten Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic in 1937, one of the most comprehensively silenced genocides of the 20th century. How do you talk about lives that have been cut out of history and yet continue to pulsate beneath it, persistently and stubbornly disrupting the plantation logics that define the present? The radio broadcast tunes into the frequencies of what simply won't disappear: sounds and dreams, scraps of memory and family stories, theoretical, literary and poetic traces conjure up the ghosts that have been expelled from the official archives.

The Sugar Woman drifts back from the sound. We first encounter her in a dream from Edwidge Danticat's novel The Farming of Bones. Bittersweet and sharp, teasing the edges of memory, she insists that what has been silenced still quivers to the beat of revolt. Ukrainian-born artist and musician Anton Kats accompanies Sarah Lewis-Cappellari's read and spoken texts, assembling, layering and recomposing them live via the G.O.S.P. Sound System to create a collage. You see, I know a sugar woman who dances in chains but laughs at locks, / who wears a muzzle but speaks in dreams, / who vanishes but never leaves, / She's got a story that'll make your teeth rot.

VIDEO PERFORMANCE: Kasala Continuum

Kasala means invocation, invocation or praise in Tshiluba. According to a definition by E. M. Mirembe, it is a poem of praise in free verse that is recited by professional reciters at funerals and other family celebrations. It presents people and biographies in a pictorial language that is not intended to share information, but above all to arouse emotions. A Kasala performance captures the attention of the community for several hours, bringing together those present and those absent, the dead and the living. It changes with the context in which it is performed and is never the same twice.

In the video installation by the Congolese-German duo Mukenge/Schellhammer, a Kasala takes place for the Congolese art scene in Kinshasa. How can the history of art be written in a place where discourses and debates take place primarily orally and are rarely archived? The video shows a performance by Kasala speaker Cécile Tuseku in the Plateforme Contemporaine art space. Her recitation brings together protagonists and ancestors of the art scene, tells of biographies and initiations, artistic movements and relationships. Instead of establishing a chronological history of art, it opens up a performative space of collective memory. The video is accompanied by live performances by the Austrian-Congolese poet and performer Fiston Mwanza Mujila, whose contemporary poetic form of Kasala enters into a dialog with Cécile Tuseku's performance.

Participants

A project of the Mobile Academy Berlin in collaboration with:

Aliaksei Bratachkin Historian and former head of the Public History Department at the European College of Liberal Arts in Belarus, researches, among other things Guillaume Cailleau French filmmaker, artist and producer, co-director of "Direct Action", awarded Best Film Berlinale Encounters - Vaginal Davis Musician, author, artist, zine producer, filmmaker, icon of black, queer counterculture, on the twentieth anniversary of her move from L.A. to Berlin. to Berlin, the Gropius Bau recently showed her solo exhibition "Fabulous Product" - Anselm Franke curator, author and professor of Curatorial Studies at the Zurich University of the Arts, the symposium he co-curated "The Great Canton: The Rise & Fall of the FRG" - Christian Fritzenwanker, Austrian hair and make-up artist from Berlin - Lamin Leroy Gibba actor, screenwriter, director and film producer, creator, lead actor and head writer of the series "Black Fruits" - Shadi Habib Allah Palestinian artist and filmmaker, his works examine informal economies and marginalized infrastructures and document networks of survival - Karin Harrasser Director of the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Art and Design Linz, Donna Haraway translator and member of the MAB - Alice Haruko Hasters German journalist, audio book narrator, podcaster and author, including "Identitätskrise" (Identity Crisis) Heinrich Horwitz director, choreographer and actor, activist for queer visibility in art and culture - Hannah Hurtzig has been running the Mobile Akademie Berlin for 25 years, the topic of memory keeps coming up - Alena Jabarine German-Palestinian journalist and author of "Der letzte Himmel. My Search for Palestine" - Anna Jermolaewa Russian-born, Vienna-based conceptual artist, professor of experimental art in Linz, represented the Austrian pavilion at the last Biennale di Venezia - Marian Kaiser media theorist, author and project maker, Aurélia Kalisky French literary scholar, expert on forms of testimony, comparative genocide and memory research - Nina Katchadourian American interdisciplinary artist and teacher with an Armenian-Finnish background, lives and works in Berlin - Anton Kats Ukrainian-born artist, musician and professor of Sonic and Listening Practices at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts - Sarah Lewis-Cappellari author, curator and teacher in the intersection of performance, art, Black and Caribbean Studies - Melinda Matern art sociologist and founder of the feminist collective "Between Institution and Utopia" - Fiston Mwanza Mujila Congolese-Austrian writer, writes poetry, prose and plays, teaches, and publishes African literature - Mukenge/Schellhammer two-headed Congolese-German artist duo, producing between Berlin and Kinshasa since 2016 - Sina Najafi founder and editor-in-chief of Cabinet, a quarterly magazine for art and culture - Jakob Racek Head of the Information Department of the Goethe-Institut in Munich, director of the Goethe-Institut in Minsk, Belarus from 2018 to 2022 - Susanne Sachsse artist, actress, theater director and co-founder of the artist collective CHEAP - Eran Schaerf artist, author, radio play and film maker, lives in Berlin - Farkhondeh Shahroudi poet and visual artist born in Tehran and living in Berlin - Florian Stirnemann visual architect, designs spaces and stages for the MAB, member of raumlabor berlin - Elena Tilli video designer, scenographer, technologist and researcher - Cécile Tuseku professional Kasala performer, born in Mbuji-Mayi in the Kasaï region of the Democratic Republic of Congo - Boris Wilsdorf German producer, sound engineer and co-founder of the sound studio andereBaustelle in Berlin

About "Memory, Speak!"

Memory is the opposite of storage and retrieval. It is the accomplice of forgetting and comes to us rather than us to it. It accepts no hard boundaries between yesterday and today, happens right now and is directed towards the future. It does not exist outside itself, it changes and shifts. It cannot tell what was, but what is or would be told - it cannot be used to make a state. "Memory Speak" opens up a space for listening in which this special form of memory can emerge.

With "Memory, Speak!", the MAB is continuing a series of remembrance and memory projects that began 25 years ago with the "Filiale für Erinnerung auf Zeit", inspired by Aleida Assmann, in Hamburg. This was followed by "The Milieu of the Dead" in Vienna and Berlin 2013-2018, the "Conversations from the Darkroom" in Novosibirsk 2016 and a series of projects that were created between 2018 and 2021 together with the Colombian Truth Commission (Comisión de la Verdad) in Bogotá and Barrancabermeja. The next stop for "Memory, Speak!" after Berlin is Vienna in April 2026.

Is it us who will be forgotten?
Or are we the ones being forgotten?

A project by the Mobile Academy Berlin, in cooperation with the Academy of Arts. Supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin. Accompanied by a research project of the Co.Lab Erinnerungsarbeit - ästhetisch-politische Praktiken / Kunstuniversität Linz.

Supported by the Capital Cultural Fund Berlin

Price information:

Friday, 12.12. 19-23 € 15/9 Saturday, 13.12. 15-22 € 15/9 (each 15-18; 19-22) € 20/10 (day ticket) Admission throughout