A public program realized in the framework of the multi-part project Fragments of Repair

Screening and conversation from BAK, Utrecht, Berlin, and Berkeley, CA

Taking place on Thursday 15 July 2021, the sixth gathering of Fragments of Repair/Gatherings, Invisible Bridges, consists of a conversation between Kader Attia (artist, Berlin) and Stefania Pandolfo (medical anthropologist, Berkeley, CA) and includes selected screenings of “fragments” of Kader Attia’s video installation Reason’s Oxymorons, currently exhibited as part of Fragments of Repair/Kader Attia.

The repeated lockdowns and the isolation they produced, the experience of death unmourned, and the processes of dispossession, racialization, and control, have been associated during the pandemic with expanding forms of mental pain. In this conversation Kader Attia and Stefania Pandolfo will draw from their respective work as an anthropologist and an artist who in parallel ways have reflected on madness, culture, and repair in modernity and coloniality, and have explored the spaces and capacities of transversal forms of care: “invisible bridges” enabling passages, transferences, and translations, between medical, ritual, and artistic practices, towards a reactivation of desire, and the possibility of dreaming. In this perspective Pandolfo and Attia will explore the capacity of such “bridges” to produce a shift in the coordinates of the real, carrying us beyond the boundary of the visible and the invisible, the living and the dead, to produce uncanny and unexpected angles from which to feel, think, and see otherwise. Artistic, psychoanalytic, and mediumistic practices explore the gaps, silences, and voids of modernity and reason. May these traumatic cuts be also an “abyss” which may grant us an access to an otherwise?

The conversation includes screenings of selected “fragments” of Kader Attia’s 18-channel video installation Reason’s Oxymorons (2015), currently exhibited as part of Fragments of Repair/Kader Attia at BAK. Reason’s Oxymorons inquires into ways of dealing with trauma and injury by bringing together various cultural, medical, ritual, and artistic practices and perspectives regarding subjectivity, the psyche, and imagination from around the world. The interviewed protagonists hold a wealth of expertise and competence in fields ranging from psychiatry to ethnography, storytelling, shamanism, philosophy, history, music, etc. While enacted in the west as a strategy to correct or hide imperfections and “brokenness,” in non-western contexts “repair” often involves embracing the scar as a natural part of healing, honoring thus the traces of past wounds as a reservoir of resistance and learning.

This is the sixth gathering of Fragments of Repair/Gatherings, a hybrid off- and online series of lectures, conversations, screenings, and assembly forums around the theory and practice of “repair.”

Video registration of this program: