CASTING for a long-term documentary
Mobile Academy Berlin has invited ten prominent candidates to test their powers of recollection in a two-day casting in front of a three-member jury – live on stage. Are they suitable protagonists for a long-term documentary that will accompany them over ten years, capturing how they will have experienced the decade to come? Can they become seismographs of future social change? The jury, composed of experienced interviewers and attentive listeners, is particularly interested in the candidates’ analytical or intuitive ability to make possible futures flash up in their memories and biographies. Guiding the conversations is a questionnaire based on oral history interviewing techniques, artists’ questionnaires, our work with the Colombian Truth Commission, and the specific expertise of the jury members. The Berlin casting is the first part of a series, next stop is Vienna in April 2026. The subsequent long-term documentary film will be realized over the coming ten years by Russia-born Vienna based artist Anna Jermolaeva.
RADIO REHEARSAL: The Black Caribbean — Memory Techniques for Approximating Ghosted Realities
We listen in on the rehearsal of a radio broadcast. In loops and breaks, in words, music, and sound, it returns to what was never meant to be remembered. The program recalls El Corte, the forgotten Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic in 1937, one of the twentieth century’s most silenced genocides, where Black life was violently severed from land, history, and collective memory. How can one speak of lives seemingly cut from history, yet still pulsing beneath it, insisting on disrupting the plantation logics that structure the present? The transmission tunes into the frequencies of what refuses to cease: sounds and dreams, fragments of memory and family stories, theoretical, literary, and poetic traces conjuring ghosts driven from official archives. Among them, the Sugar Woman drifts back through sound, first appearing in Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones, bittersweet and sharp, teasing the edges of memory, insisting that what was silenced still trembles with the beating of revolt. Texts written and read by Sarah Lewis-Cappellari are spliced, layered, and amplified into a live sound collage through the G.O.S.P. Sound System by Ukrainian artist and musician Anton Kats. You see, I know a sugar woman who dances in chains but laughs at locks, / who wears a muzzle but speaks in dreams, / who vanishes but never leaves. / She’s got a story that’ll make your teeth rot.
VIDEO PERFORMANCE: Kasala Kontinuum
Kasala in Tshiluba means invocation, conjuration, or praise. According to a definition by E. M. Mirembe, it is a free-verse praise poem, performed by trained specialists at funerals and other family gatherings. It introduces people and their biographies in an evocative language that does not aim to convey information so much as to evoke emotion. A Kasala performance can hold the attention of the addressed community for hours, bringing together the present and the absent, the living and the dead. It shifts with the context in which it is performed, is never the same twice. In the video installation by the Congolese-German artist duo Mukenge/Schellhammer, a Kasala unfolds for the Congolese art scene in Kinshasa. How can art history be written in a place where discourse and debate live mainly through spoken word and are rarely archived? The video shows a performance by the Kasala reciter Cécile Tuseku in the art space Plateforme Contemporaine. Her recitation gathers actors and ancestors of the art scene, recounting biographies and initiations, artistic movements and relationships. Rather than fixing a chronological art history, it opens a performative space of collective remembering. The video is accompanied by live performances from the Austrian-Congolese poet and performer Fiston Mwanza Mujila, whose contemporary poetic form of Kasala enters into dialog with Cécile Tuseku’s performance.