On Monday, January 12th at 4 pm at Dokukino KIC, director Johan Grimonprez will hold a masterclass titled “All Memory is Theft / Every Day Words Disappear” in which he will present his guidelines for reclaiming storytelling and belonging.
Grimonprez is known for his films which mix fiction and documentary through a collage-like, archival approach and weave new narratives, pathways and stories, emphasizing a multiplicity of realities. His practice examines themes such as propaganda, the role of mass media, global power dynamics, and the nature of storytelling questioning the reliability of history and the ways narratives are constructed in the digital and television age. Overall, his work forms an acute and an indispensable criticism of contemporary media manipulation and mainstream’s consensus about History.
‘There is a mourning for a lost future,’ writes Max Haiven, ‘not for what was, but for what could be.’ History and memory don’t merely function as a means to recall the past, but rather as a tool to negotiate the present in order to reshape a shared future. Memory after all, is a form of collective storytelling; the contested site of ideological struggle, where we redeem our forgotten dreams. James Baldwin asserts that ‘history is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us; we are our history.’
Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once coined that we are not made of atoms as scientists say, but that we are actually made of stories. Stories are what holds us together, —or tear us apart, shaping our very idea of belonging. In the masterclass Grimonprez explores the following questions: Who owns our imagination in a world of existential vertigo where truth has become a shipwrecked refugee? Is it the storyteller who can contain contradictions, who can slip between the languages we have been given and who can become a time-traveller of the imagination?
The masterclass will be followed at 6 pm by a screening of Grimonprez’s epochal experimental documentary about the history of plane hijackings dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), which The Guardian has declared one of the most influential works in the history of video art. Two short video-works will be shown in the same slot – Two Travellers to the River (2018) is inspired by the poetry of Palestinian bard Mahmoud Darwish, while every day words disappear (2016) juxtaposes political philosopher Michael Hardt’s musings on the politics of love with footage from Godard’s dystopian classic Alphaville.
On Tuesday, January 13th at 7 pm, the audience will have the opportunity to watch Grimonprez’s latest masterpiece, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (2024) about a forgotten episode of the Cold War that intertwines jazz and decolonization and reconstructs the assassination of Congolese president Patrice Lumumba. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the author.
