TODAY, I BROKE YOUR SOLAR SYSTEM. ON PARTITION AND PARTITURA LONG NIGHT OF IDEAS 06.06.2019 15:00–24:00 WITH Sara Abbas Ashish Avikunthak Madhuri Chattopadhyay & Ashraf Sharif Khan & Indranil Mallick Rosalyn D'Mello Ebow Chantal Edie Meenu Gaur Daud Haider Ahmed Isamaldin Sarathy Korwar Reem Shawkat Salma Siddique Ananya Jahanara Kabir Hanan Toukan Hervé Yamguen Sinthujan Varatharajah Arkadi Zaides and Mazhar Zaidi ARTISTIC DIRECTION Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung Antonia Alampi CURATOR Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock Anna Jäger Abhishek Nilamber PROJECT MANAGEMENT Jörg-Peter Schulze Lili Somogyi Lema Sikod COMMUNICATION Anna Jäger GRAPHIC DESIGN Fanny Sow Lili Somogyi Elsa Westreicher The event takes place in the context of the Long Night of Ideas in cooperation with Auswärtiges Amt. SAVVY Contemporary The Laboratory of Form-Ideas CONCEPT SCHEDULE It takes a lot of work to remember we are nothing. 15:00 WELCOME & INTRODUCTION What has history given us but a fickle home? A legacy 23:15 MUSIC PERFORMANCE of bloodied men. What´s a nation to the sky? Some other wood 15:15 FILM SCREENING Madhuri Chattopadhyay & Ashraf Sharif Khan & Indranil to call ours, some other snippet of cloud to pretend we own. Meenu Gaur: Manifesto for the Dead & The Ghost Will Mallick Fatima Asghar: If They Come for Us, 2018 Leave If You Ask Nicely We are all Godspeed, but no more or less 15:40 TALK so than any other aspect of the universe, Rosalyn D’Mello: A Case of Consideration Godspeed is all there is - all that Changes. Earthed is all that spreads 16:10 PRESENTATION Earth life to new earths. The universe is Mazhar Zaidi: Effects on the Sonic Godspeed. Only we are Earthseed. And the destiny of Earthseed is to take root among 16:30 TALK the stars. Chantal Edie: It Is On Us Octavia Butler: The Parable of the Sower, 1993 17:00 CONVERSATION This long night of pondering on Partition and Partitura imagine if we turned partitions on their heads. What Hanan Toukan & Antonia Alampi: The Palestinian takes as its starting point the partition between if partitions, these ongoing redistributions of parts, Museum Pakistan and India, which led to East and West just remained as the etymologies of other words, of Pakistan´s independence from colonial Britain, when partitas (from the Italian partitura) to just exist instead 17:30 FILM SCREENING & TALK approximately 14 million people were forced into as musical scores, spaces of sounds, transnational Salma Siddique: The Droll Queen of Partition migration, flying ethnic cleansing, rape, mass murder. sounds, sounds that have forgotten and overcome This historical event remains one of the largest forced nations, that unfurl in porous interstices? Can partitions 18:00 TALK migrations in human history. The making of partitions become conjunctions, and those become alignments? If Arkadi Zaides: Pre–Enacting Talos that lead or respond to migration, of dividing or being a partition becomes a partitura, can it also just exist as divided, of borders, walls, frontiers, fences, gates, a polyphony? For this Long Night, we invite poets, story– 18:30 BREAK barriers, whether physical or immaterial, crosses tellers, scholars, singers, musicians and filmmakers to cultures, times and geographies. From the old Greek respond to these reflections. 19:00 MUSIC PERFORMANCE & myth of Talos – as narrated by Apollonius of Rhodes LECTURE – an almost invulnerable bronze giant sent by Zeus Sarathy Korwar to Crete to protect Europa by walking throughout the coast of the island, we move on to the European 19:45 TALK Union´s project Talos – a suggested way to use The title is inspired by Fatima Asghar’s poem Pluto Shits Ananya Jahanara Kabir: ‘Once Again To Dream Of autonomous robotic vehicles to strengthen the security on the Universe (in: If They Come for Us, 2018). Return’: Between Partition and Partitura, Post–Amnesia of land borders. However, despite new technological as Polyphony systems of monitoring and control being put in place, new physical walls keep being constructed or enforced: 20:15 CONVERSATION from the border between Syria and Turkey – under Reem Shawkat, Sara Abbas & Ahmed Isamaldin: European pressure – to the reinforced rows of walls and Breaking Your Solar System With Our Bodies And Our fences along the border between the US and Mexico, to Barricades: Sudan, Revolution And Violence name a few. In many places of the world, brothers and sisters are 20:45 TALK killing each other because of perceived or constructed Sinthujan Varatharajah: A Possible Biography Of An differences, basic human rights are denied to the Ocean majority of the world population, leaving people to die in the sea, others are starving, imprisoned or homeless. 21:15 CONCERT The devastating future Octavia Butler had imagined in Ebow The Parable of the Sower, where small privileged, walled communities protect themselves from a world in which 22:00 BREAK poverty has brought only violence and destruction doesn't seem to be a product of the imagination but 22:15 PRESENTATION finds numerous equivalents in our present and past. Ashish Avikunthak: Untitled – Single Shot Film Part II While we want to take a moment to focus on what it is that drives the political impulse to divide and rule, we 22:45 POETRY READING also want to think about what other present we could Daud Haider: I Do Not Celebrate Eternity SAVVYContemporary: The Laboratory of Form Ideas TODAY, I BROKE YOUR SOLAR SYSTEM. ON PARTITION AND PARTITURA 06.06.2019 2 / 10 SVVYContemporary: The Laboratory of Form Ideas TODAY, I BROKE YOUR SOLAR SYSTEM. ON PARTITION AND PARTITURA 06.06.2019 3/ 10 dismantling it while simultaneously building my own and immigrant media. Her work has appeared in feminist table and the ecosystem around it. the journals Feminist Media Histories, Third Text and CONTRIBUTIONS Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies. Trained as a film ROSALYN D’MELLO is a writer, art critic practitioner in New Delhi, she has edited a number of and feminist columnist based in New Delhi. She is the documentaries, including her first independent film MEENU GAUR Manifesto for the Dead & nuance to Gertrude Stein's seemingly nonsensical author of A Handbook for My Lover, published in India Road Less Travelled (India, 2009), an intimate portrait of The Ghost Will Leave If You Ask Nicely FILM elaboration on Roast Beef (“please beef, please be a by HarperCollins India, and a forthcoming artist book, an Australian migrant’s bitter–sweet relationship with SCREENING case of consideration”), I seek to institute into public The Domestic Nomad published by Eau&Gaz, an artist Delhi. Since 2015, she has been the associate editor discourse an alternative, more empowering feminist residency based in Sudtirol, Italy. She is currently of Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies. She is also a We open this Long Night with ghostly apparitions on whisper network, that is not exclusively premised on working on the sequel to her debut memoir and a book teaching associate at Gender and Media Studies for the the screen: Meenu Gaur’s Manifesto for the Dead follows the protective gesture of listing serial oppressors or for Oxford University Press, India, based on her visits to South Asian Region, Humboldt–Universität zu Berlin. Charlie the Clown protesting the destitute state of the predators but is instead more consciously a system South Asian artists' studios. She is currently writing her first book on cinema and performers of the erstwhile Pakistani film industry. of sustaining hope through an investment in the partition, An Evacuee Cinema: Travels of film cultures Standing outside the funeral of the film star Chakori, written word as a form of proliferating palimpsest. For MAZHAR ZAIDI Effects on the between Bombay and Lahore (1940-60)”, to be published Charlie carries a manifesto representing the All Pakistan instance, in the dystopian authoritarian, patriarchal Sonic PRESENTATION AND in early 2020 with Cambridge University Press. Protection of Senior Performers which calls for the world of Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, women CONVERSATION financial support for sick and ailing film personnel. He are no longer allowed to read or write, lest they feel HANAN TOUKAN AND ANTONIA walks around Hall Road, Abbot Road, and Laxmi Chowk, empowered enough to organize collective resistance. The story of partitions of the subcontinent first in 1947 ALAMPI The Palestinian Museum the once busy spaces inhabited by the film industry, that Her protagonist, Offred, who must fulfil her role as a and then 1971 is also a tale of disruptions in the long CONVERSATION are now decaying. The ghostly clown bears witness to a surrogate for the commander and his wife, discovers cherished musical tradition of the region. How has history of loss and neglect. The Ghost Will Leave If You one day in the bottom of her cupboard in her room music both suffered and survived these catastrophic How are we to think about a museum that represents a Ask Nicely is about a haunting at a now decrepit film an inscription in Latin that she tries to decode, which changes in the history of South Asia? As these divisions people who not only do not exist on conventional maps studio. The video uses the “out of work” body double she eventually learns is an old Latin joke, “Don't let resulted in violent displacements and tried to reshape but who are also in the process of resisting obliteration of the famed Pakistani film star Sultan Rahi, who was the bastards get you down”. It was left for her by her national identities, how did musicians and music cope by one of the most brutal military complexes in the mysteriously killed on a highway and his assailants were foresightful surrogate predecessor as an anticipatory and what are the possibilities of healing these ruptures world? What is, and what can be, the role of a museum never found.