On Thursday 11 August to Friday 12 August 2022 the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ) will host a Russia-South Africa Dialogue on Violent Histories focusing on the aesthetics of cruelty in the Soviet Gulag and apartheid.
The collaboration is interdisciplinary, led by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (the Chair of AVReQ), Katya Tolstoj (Chair of Theology and Religion in Post-Trauma Societies and Founding Director of the Institute for the Academic Study of Eastern Christianity at the Vrije University, Amsterdam) and Anastasia Mitrofanova (Chair of Political Science, Church-State Relations and the Sociology of Religion at the Russian Orthodox University as well as Professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities). It is a continuation of a conversation that started in 2020 with a two-day roundtable event exploring scholarly research and public scholarship on the representation of crimes in the traumatic pasts of the Soviet Gulag and South African apartheid through film, visual arts, photography, performing arts, and narrative representation of stories of suffering.
In the upcoming colloquium the issue of violent histories and memory will once again be placed at the centre of our reflection on the question of the aesthetics of systemic violence and its legacy in the context of the Soviet Gulag and apartheid.
The two-day colloquium will take place in person at STIAS and will consist of roundtable conversations, workshops and individual talks featuring internationally renowned scholars from across the world (including Tamar Garb, Nanci Adler, and Jennifer Fish, among others), as well as celebrated local artists and thinkers (like Greer Valley, Stephané Conradie, and Siona O'Connell). It will close with a poetry offering by Tim Seibles, the American poet and former Poet Laureate of Virginia.
The programme can be accessed here. And speaker bios can be accessed here.
The colloquium will only be in-person and the following sessions will be open for attendance:
Thursday, 11 August (09:30-09:55): Welcome and Opening Remarks (Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Katya Tolstoj). No registration required for attendance.
Thursday, 11 August (10:00-11:25): Roundtable Discussion – Thinking with/through Art: Analogy, Juxtaposition and the Power of 'sympathy' in the Encounter between the Gulag and Apartheid, featuring Tamar Garb, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Nanci Adler, and Andrea Gullotta. To attend, register here.
Thursday, 11 August (11:30 – 12:55), The Aesthetics of Memory versus the Aesthetics of Terror and the Gulag, featuring Irina Flige and Dmitry Pritykin, chaired by Andrea Gullotta. To attend, register here.
