AMT research projects presented in Canada and Brazil

In March, Dr. Mihaela Brebenel led a workshop at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada titled “Historiographies of the Present: Whither Our Imaginations of Futurity and Solidarity? Moving Image Artworks as Documents and the Role of Practice-led Research.” This event was part of the Global Emergent Media Lab series of Work-in-Progress workshops. It invited staff and postgraduate students to think through the role of practice-led research, as different from practice-based and with the possibilities contained in collective curatorial practice, as it can feed into academic research.

Following that, Dr. Brebenel was invited by former WSA visiting scholar Marcio Telles to give a talk at the Centre of Semiotics, Culture and Communication at The Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil. The talk was titled “Historiographies of the Present: Futures Imagined in Non-Alignment and Decolonial Movements” and tackled the intersections between the legacy of Gilberto Freyre’s influences in the Angolan context and the support that the independence movements in Africa (Angola, Mozambique) have had from Eastern European states like the former Yugoslavia and Romania, through the Non Alignment Movement.

The workshop and talk are part of Brebenel’s ongoing research project, which critically investigates the notion of solidarity, as it was historically projected during anti-colonial independence struggles, from Eastern European socialist states onto so-called “Red Africa” and its influence in the contemporary.

Earlier in March, Dr. Brebenel also presented a paper at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) co-written with AMT affiliated PhD researcher Yiğit Soncul, titled “Documenting After-Maths: Futures Waged and Lost.” This is part of a collaborative research project where Brebenel and Soncul seek to investigate the conceptual potential of the term “after-math” in calculative futurity.