The Epidermal, the Ethical, the Epistemic, and the Episphere: Ethics, Permanence, and the Colonial Photograph
18:00–20:00
The event with Cameroonian researchers and artists Fogha Mc Cornilius Refem and Wan Shey is based on their critical examination of German ethnologist Günther Tessmann's colonial Cameroon photographs during a two-month fellowship at the Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde in Leipzig. This project interrogates the ethics of archival authority, the persistence of colonial violence in digital spaces, and the role of photography in racialized representation. Engaging with Black Studies, decolonial thought, and philosophies of impermanence, it challenges the static treatment of consent in archives, proposing instead an ethics of negotiation — fluid, relational, and ever-unfolding.
Through a combination of lecture, music, and spoken word, the project examines how colonial photography enacts epidermalization, turning Black bodies into racialized types rather than individuals. Shifting the focus from the colonial gaze to those depicted in the images, weFogha Mc Cornilius Refem and Wan Shey want to open new possibilities for seeing rather than surveilling. The project rethinks ethics beyond harm reduction, asking how archives materialize worlds and how our engagement with them might resist enclosure, offering new modes of presence and refusal.
Fogha Mc Cornilius Refem is a self-prescribed severe drapetomania patient and an academic nomad with backgrounds in Sociology, International Relations, and Social Work. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms program at Potsdam University and a Humanity in Action Senior Fellow. His research spans decolonial thought, subaltern studies, Black feminist theory, decolonial ecologies, and critical museum studies.
Wan Shey is a rapper, producer, and spoken word artist from the Nso grassfields in the northwest region of present-day Cameroon. Renowned for his powerful lyricism, he seamlessly blends storytelling across four languages—English, French, Pidgin English, and his mother tongue, Làmnso'—capturing the multilingual vibrancy of his homeland.
- Treff: Kassenfoyer
- Teilnahmegebühr: kostenfrei
