documenta 14 is hosting the program Documents from the South as part of the Kassel Dokfest. On November 18 and 19, Angela Melitopoulos and Manthia Diawara will each present two program sessions, including screenings of their own films as well as works by other filmmakers. In the films and in conversations following the screenings, the artists discuss what documents from the South could look like and which stories they tell.

Documents from the South takes its cue from the title of the magazine South as a State of Mind, which is published during the years of work preceding the exhibition of documenta 14 and helps define and frame its concerns and aims. “South” is no longer understood as a geographical orientation, but refers to a culturally and historically produced location charged with psychological and political meaning.

Two documenta 14 artists discuss these concerns in relation to their own work with the Dokfest audience: Angela Melitopoulos, in whose films and video installations different phases, ruptures, and mobilities between Germany and Greece play an important role; and filmmaker and writer Manthia Diawara whose films and books have shaped and expressed the critical self-assertion of the African diaspora since the early 1990s.

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November 18
In and Out of Africa
1:30 pm, Kleines Bali, Kassel

In and Out of Africa (1993) is a documentary film by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash. The film looks at the global trade with African art objects, in particular with artifacts like masks and fetishes, sourced from a presumably religious context to be transformed into high-priced art objects.

Several languages with English subtitles.

The screening is followed by a talk with Manthia Diawara, moderated by Tobias Hering.

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November 18
Negritude: A Dialogue Between Wole Soyinka and Léopold Senghor
5:30 pm, Bali, Kassel

Manthia Diawara’s new film Negritude (2015) is not an attempt to neatly summarize Négritude, arguably one of the most important intellectual movements of the 20th century, but an effort to face and understand the contradictions of History. His interlocutors are poet and freedom fighter Léopold Senghor who together with Aimé Césaire is considered a founder of Négritude thinking and who became the first president of independent Senegal in 1960; and Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka who in 1986 was the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

English and French with German subtitles.

The screening is followed by a talk with Manthia Diawara, moderated by Tobias Hering.

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November 19
Megara
1.30 pm, Kleines Bali, Kassel

Megara (1974) by Yorgos Tsemberopoulos and Sakis Maniatis represents a turning point in the last phase of the military dictatorship in Greece (1967–74), both as a cinematic achievement and with respect to the events it deals with. The year is 1973. Megara is about the fight of a village by the same name against the confiscation of farm land by the state and its clearing by a private investor. The trigger for the villagers’ outrage was the destruction of an ancient olive orchard, and their revolt soon developed into the first mass protests against the military junta.

Greek with English subtitles.

With an introduction by Angela Melitopoulos.

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November 19
Passing Drama
5:30 pm, Bali, Kassel

“In Passing Drama, ‘escape’ turns from a subject of narration into a cinematic theme about narration and memory itself. History is presented as a machine which devours minorities in order to feed the majority. Drama becomes a stage for oblivion, oblivion however which hasn’t ceased to stir movements. Drama is also the name of the town around which many refugees from Asia Minor, among them my grandparents, settled after 1923, i.e. after having survived the trauma of deportations and the ‘catastrophe of Asia Minor.’ For many of them, Drama wasn’t the final refuge: in the next generation, thousands of these refugees ended up in forced labor camps in Austria, or became ‘guest workers’ in Germany yet another generation later. […] The tales which these ‘guest workers’ could tell were not only about poverty and civil war, but also about their persistent resistance and the guerilla war, about camps and forced labor, and about a genocide officially termed ‘expulsion’, because evidence of this organized crime is still wanting today.” (Angela Melitopoulos about Passing Drama)

German and Greek with English subtitles.

The performative screening with additional live soundtrack is followed by a talk with Angela Melitopoulos, moderated by Tobias Hering.

For more information on the program, please consult the website of Kasseler Dokfest.