Transkontinentale
7. - 10. November 2024
| No language skills required |
| Foyer, Ground Floor, Hall 2, Ground Floor, Hall 3, Hall 1, Ground Floor |
The Transkontinentale is a new platform that presents international dance, theatre, performance art and poetry at the Humboldt Forum. 140 years after the opening of the Berlin Africa-Conference, this first festival edition focuses on productions from the African continent that deal with colonialism and ongoing coloniality in an entertaining and critical way. The audience is invited to meet the artists through introductions, Q&As and a poetry session.
The Transkontinentale 2024 marks the start of an autumn season dealing with artistic, scientific and community voices from former territories colonized by Germany. The festival encourages people to remember the Berlin Conference and its aftermath, and to re-encounter the collections in the partially reconstructed Berlin Palace. Held from November 15, 1884, to February 26, 1885, in the Chancellor’s Palace on Wilhelmstrasse, the meeting was organized by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and included representatives from twelve European powers, the Ottoman Empire, and the USA. The conference aimed to regulate freedom of trade on the Congo and Niger Rivers. Instead, the final document, the “Congo Act,” formed the basis for the division of Africa in the subsequent so called “Scramble for Africa”. Although the Berlin Conference is now regularly taught in schools across the African Continent, it has largely faded from public memory in Europe. Today, two memorial plaques initiated by civil society activists commemorate the conference in front of Wilhelmstraße 92.
Opening: 07 November, 18:30, Mechanical Arena
Greetings from Hartmut Dorgerloh, General Director, and Maguèye Kassé, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Senegal
Maguèye Kassé teaches at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar as Full Professor of German Studies. His areas of research are intercultural studies, art criticism, jazz in the négritude and African origins of jazz. He is a literary critic specialised in the reception of African literature in Germany and the literary and cinematic work of Ousmane Sembene, Africa’s first filmmaker.
In 2008 he was curator of the Biennale des Arts africains contemporains (Dak’Art 2008). In 2012 he was Fulbright Fellow at the Howard University, Washington DC, topic: « Présence des Africains et Africains-Américains en Allemagne (18ème siècle, National-socialisme et période contemporaine) »
He is president of the “Association Sembene Ousmane”, of the “Association Festival de Jazz: Mémoire et résilience”, of the “Rencontres Cinématographiques Internationales de Dakar (RECIDAK)” and member of the scientific advisory board of the “Musée Panafricain de l’Héritage Culturel du Ghana”.