De Imagerie / Projecten / Visite Aug’19 / 07.08.2019
WED 07.08.2019
Het Bos, Ankerrui 5-7, Antwerpen
Food 18h - Films 20h30
MEGAN-LEIGH HEILIG - Multiple works
+ Penny Siopis - ‘Obscure White Messenger’ (2010, 15’)
Still from 'The Politics of Choice and The Possibility of Leavind’
PROGRAM
‘The Politics of Choice and the Possibility of Leaving’ (2018, 15’)
‘Falling’ (2017-2019, 11’)
‘Absurd Claims to Hide Straightforward Feelings’ (2018, 8’)
‘The Day the Sun Did Not Rise’ (2017, 4’)
“This series of films were made in-between 2017 and 2019, they were made in-between South Africa and Belgium, in-between love and loneliness. Each film plays with the formal structures of the travel essay by unpacking the politics of new, different or well-known environments, of dislocation and shifting redefinitions of home. Drifting from interior to exterior, from mass media and online forums to the apartment in Woodstock that I once lived in.” - Megan-Leigh Heilig
+ Film of choice: ‘Obscure White Messenger’ (2010, 15’) by Penny Siopis
Obscure White Messenger uses anonymous home move footage to tell the story of Dimitrios Tsafendas, who assassinated the South African prime minister and ‘architect of apartheid’, HF Verwoerd, in 1966; it takes its title from a reference to Tsafendas from Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. What drove Tsafendas, a man of mixed race, a migrant working as a parliamentary messenger at the time, to commit this act? Siopis explores the intermingling of madness and political motive evident in transcripts of interviews with Tsafendas. Throughout the film there is the question of who the ‘illegitimate’ Tsafendas is, and where he belongs; of what it means to be stateless in a world in which citizenship all too often establishes and legitimates what it means to be fully human.