With Anita Di Bianco (Frankfurt am Main) and Nahed Samour (Berlin)
(in English)

In drawing connections between testimonials of seemingly singular incidents, bearing witness intervenes in the absence of accountability over structural violence. At EMAF in April 2024, Nahed Samour and Pary El-Qalqili took account of the repression and silencing of voices in Germany expressing solidarity with Palestine. One year later, Samour looks at where we are now: What to call the current societal condition? Has it already become permanent? In another chronicling, Anita Di Bianco’s ongoing project Corrections and Clarifications compiles daily retractions, re-wordings, distinctions and apologies to print news since September 1, 2001. Moving chronologically backwards from the present, Di Bianco suggests that the notion of historical ruptures is itself part of the misrepresentation and distortion and that the persistence of such revisions reveal a series of precedents. Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s essay What I Do Not Yet Recognize, Now at This Very Moment examines willful ignorance as part of structural racism and violence in Germany. How to unlearn the settings that shape and obfuscate one’s own perceptions – to allow for resonances with the knowledge and experience of migrant communities? In a collective reading of Corrections and Clarifications and a reading from Sadr Haghighian’s text, voices intervene in the silences and gaps. They offer testimony to continuities of denial, initiating a conversation on the challenges of speaking (up), and acts of refusal in a social landscape of anticipatory obedience.

• Programm Programme: Continuities