Unearthing. In Conversation

In the video projection Unearthing. In Conversation (2017), Belinda Kazeem-
Kamiński performs on stage and in front of an empty auditorium. Sitting at a desk,
she takes some photographs out of cardboard boxes. These are portraits featuring
Austrian Czech ethnographer, missionary, author, and educator Paul Schebesta
posing with people from the former Belgian Congo (today, the Democratic Republic
of the Congo), taken at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, the pictures
are not in their original form: the artist has applied various visual strategies to
prevent the voyeuristic gaze. While manipulating the photographs, the artist speaks
to the people they depict, trying to find ways to communicate beyond the racist filter
of the colonial archive. She also addresses us, the absent and accomplice audience.
All at once, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński interrogates several layers of the colonial
legacy – in its making of dominant history and its constitution of the gaze. As the
artist states in the first line of the video: “This is in remembrance of those to come”.
Looking at the past is a way to search for another future and dream about another
present – one positively “haunted” by the failures of the past, and hence able to
negotiate for a future beyond the trauma of relentlessly being made Other. This work
is about finding artistic and discursive methods to transform and reconfigure
strategies of representation and structures of looking in order to rid them of their
inherent violence.


Credits:
Performance / Concept / Editing: Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński
Camera / Editing: Sunanda Mesquita
Sound / Light / Editing: Nick Prokesch
Sound Editing: Victoria Grohs and Flora Rajakowitsch
Production / Assistant Director: Liesa Kovacs
Collages: Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński Photos used with courtesy of the Austrian
National Library