The PROGRAMME for our working group works along several strands:

A series of public lectures “Converse 3.0: Radical Conversation” will bring together different perspectives on our topics of interest in a conversation between young researchers and artists with established scholars at Iwalewahaus.

The „Cinema Africa“–Festival 2015 will be a key moment of the working group as well, with film conversations and screening s around the topic of “Revolution and/as Film”.

At the time of our working group, the collective exhibition of the Bayreuth Academy “Future Africa - Visions in Time“ will be on show, in which a curatorial board teamed up artists and academics to work on the key issues of the project. These results and processes are on show at Iwalewahaus from November 7th, 2015 till February 2016. Please save the date of the vernissage: 7th of November, 19h.

Our guests and contributors are invited to work with our “tank” of images of revolution and utopia. As guest curators, they will work with a set of images we present as an exhibition in flux: Change it, arrange it in different ways, comment on it. We will have a set of changing image arrangements – both at Iwalewahaus and in virtual space.

Iwalewahaus, as the research and exhibition centre for contemporary art from Africa and the diaspora, is the playground for all subprojects of the Academy in this term. We invited our colleagues to use the space. All these projects — exhibitions, screenings etc — are planned and developed together.

By means of our Icon Lab we are able to visualize these relations. „Icon Lab“ is the name for a method of establishing affiliations of images via qualitative research we developed in the academy -- an innovative tool which focuses on the relations of images with each other; constituting an affective image tank of floating meaning which is interlinked to a glossary based on visuals.

Our research firstly focused on Mozambique, particularly because of the foundation of „Instituto Nacional de Cinema“ right after independence in 1975; established in order to produce and promote ‚own‘ images for Mozambicans. It was conceptualized as a contrast to colonial imageries. Furthermore, Mozambique as part of the „socialist international“ formed integral part of political dynamics (eg in Algeria, Angola, Namibia, Burkina Faso, Guinea Bissau), which found its expression in the iconographies of the time. This internationalism, both ideological and factual, resulted in references and relations which reach beyond Africa as a continent which is also reflected in post-socialist iconography. Contemporary visions of futures indeed meander between political-economic pragmatism and nostalgic utopias, and are negotiated in the investigated triangle of fine arts, film and virtual imageries in digital media such as the internet.