Complexifying Restitution

Rijksakademie Schip
Free entrance, RSVP here

In 'Complexifying restitution: Notes to self' (2022), Jihan El-Tahri approaches archival material in intimate dialogue. The author engages with moving images, questioning the gaze in which the colonised identity has been constructed, and proposing a critical translation of the meaning and potentialities of what an archive can be.

"Restitution is now a buzz word that is threatened – like the word decolonisation – to be emptied of its true significance for everyone involved. Preservation and restoration of archive is the flagship for institutional funders, but the critical issue remains: how do we reappropriate our past as a tool for an alternative future? The role of the artist’s memory to complexify restitution, in all its forms, by making or re-making the archive is fundamental, for who else is better placed to relink the chain of social and political memory through the translation of yesteryear’s legacy into today’s vocabulary."

The film will be followed by a talk and conversation with the artist, who will share her latest engagements with filmmaking and/as critical archival practice.

Jihan El-Tahri is a filmmaker and visual artist. Her practice deals with materiality and the moving image. Working primarily with installation art, she often engages with the interstices between official history and memory in an attempt to reinterpret the moments of our history of which no traces have been left behind and to propose a new reading and alternative voice from a Global South perspective.