Screening - “The Act Of Breathing”, Kanal - Centre Pompidou, Brussels
Including: Hamedine Kane
September 16th, 2023
© Hamedine Kane
Selebe Yoon is pleased to announce the participation of Hamedine Kane in "The Act of Breathing: Notes on Fugitivity”: a series of performance, screening and musical performance that analyse the link between the struggle to breathe and the concept of Black fugitivity presented by Kanal-Centre Pompidou, on September 16th 2023 in Brussels.
The Act of Breathing: Talk, Music, Performance
With The Act of Breathing: Notes on Fugitivity, curators Sorana Munsya and Evelyn Simons create a space-time in which to analyse the links between the struggle to breathe and the concept of Black fugitivity. "The Act of Breathing" is the title of a poem by Sony Labou Tansi in which the author explores breath as both a repeated, instinctive force essential to life and a right that—when threatened—becomes a tool of political resistance. The notion of Fugitivity, mainly developed in Black American and Caribbean literature, refers to the history of slavery and the flight of maroons from plantations. Here, we will be exploring how to translate this concept into a contemporary Belgian postcolonial context.
Hamedine Kane will present two of his short films:
Habiter le monde, la Marche [Living in the World, the Walk]. The film follows the routes taken and occupied by refugees: ports, enclaves, deltas and borders, spaces transformed into places of desolation and detention. The work explores the mythology of walking, that of pilgrimages and diasporas as well as wanderings and drifting. Kane unfolds stories of hope, love, play, and despair to reclaim hostile territories and turn them back into fertile grounds for life and creativity.
À l’ombre de nos fantômes [In the Shadow of Our Ghosts] assembles notes on a film to be made or an essay still to be written. On 29 April 2006, a boat with eleven dead bodies on board was spotted off the south-east coast of Barbados in the Caribbean. The ghost ship drifted for four months on the Atlantic Ocean with migrants from Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and Gambia on board who had set off from the Cape Verde Islands to reach the Canary Islands. The film draws on the information currently available to try and make sense of the interplay between weather conditions, ocean currents, and state violence and their influence on the boat's course. A second series of shots brings together a walker and his shadow, which in turn confronts him and accompanies him through both desertscapes and urban spaces.
Text copyright: KANAL-Centre Pompidou