With Sanabel Abdel Rahman (Tunis) and Ashkan Sepahvand (London)
(in English)

As empires plundered, extracted, oppressed, and othered peoples, those who resisted the subjugation of their lands and lives developed various embodied forms of refusal and testimony. These practices and their representations were transmitted through storytelling, image-making, and gesture. While coloniality ignored and tried to erase testimonies of injustice, magical figures persisted in their haunting appearance, confronting the oppressive reality of empire with strangeness and alterity. Listening to the voices of the oppressed often requires us to enter unmastered territory characterised by defiant magical happenings and unexpected fantastical imaginaries. Ashkan Sepahvand together with Sanabel Abdel Rahman speak of witnesses who disrupt colonial reality through magic and storytelling. Abdel Rahman, who will join online from Tunis, shares aspects of her research on magical realism and haunting as part of Palestinian resistance, while Sepahvand focuses on figures of alterity emerging in modern Iran under geopolitical ruination.

• Programm Programme: Magic