On Friday, January 31st at 6 p.m. in Dokukino KIC, director, curator and researcher Kumjana Novakova will hold a masterclass under the title Along the Archives, Against the Archives: Assembling Absences.
Work with archives is an exercise in intuition. As is meaning making itself. Intuition can also be translated as being attuned to the internal and the outward. Most of the time – at least in and with archives – it is about being attuned to absences. Listening, seeing, and capturing the silences, the omissions, the erasures, the removals. Watch, rather than look at – as in the proposal of Ariella Azoulay. To recompose, assemble, or stitch the traces. To refuse what the archive proposes. To reject “the sum total of the known and knowable”. And to re-archive desire.
After the masterclass at 7:30 p.m., the forensic video essay “Silence of Reason” will be screened, which explores the collective memory of the rape camps in Foča and finds a way to talk about the unspeakable. The film won a number of important awards – including the award for best director at the world’s largest documentary film festival IDFA, the Heart of Sarajevo for Human Rights and the Award for the best film in the Brave Balkans program (Author’s Film Festival in Belgrade).
Kumjana Novakova is the co-founder of the Pravo Ljudski Film Festival in Sarajevo, and acts as its chief curator and director. She was also leading the Film Department of the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Skopje from 2018 to 2021. As an author, her research lays between cinema and contemporary video art, often exploring how moving images address identities, memories and the collective self. Currently she is an associate professor at Master of Film of the Netherlands Film Academy, while pursuing her PhD in Contemporary Arts and Media in Belgrade. Kumjana currently lives between Sarajevo and Skopje, North Macedonia.
Entrance to the masterclass is free, while the ticket price for the screening is €3.
