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This article offers a survey of theatre festivals in Germany (and Austria) in 2007. It pays particular attention to new work and to innovative directors, and concludes with an overview of the Romanian season at the Heidelberger Stuckemarkt. more...

Sven Augustijnen is a Belgian film maker and visual artist. In 2012 he contributed a piece called AWB 082-3317 7922 to the Track exhibition in the city of Gent (Belgium). Track invited artists to provide art installations that were site-specific, and engaged with local narratives, history, and situations. Augustijnen had an old bike chain-locked against a park tree, with a bunch of charcoal on its baggage rack; it stood in the vicinity of the so-called “Moorken” monument, a memorial for the heroic adventures of the brothers Van de Velde in Congo Free State, erected in Gent’s prominent Citadelpark at the end of the 19th century. The idea of AWB 082-3317 7922 came about during the shooting of his film Spectres (2011), in which Augustijnen goes in search for the location of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination in Katanga, Congo, in January 1961. While the theme of the bike installation is the (only partially resolved) murder of Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the newly independent Congo, the piece spawns a spatial and historical cartography of events and developments within the park landscape as well as the greater urban, and global scope. It is the kind of street art that needs its environment for any chance of meaning, which derive from the contiguities it allows and creates. more...

Susan Sontag reminds us that film and photography have an extremely democratic heuristic poetics, and are quasi-universally accessible for signification, though at the same time, it almost always implies a prime target audience. The many films that have come out on the Rwandan genocide (1994) are no exception. Film has been a prime access source to this bloody event and dominates, particularly in the West, our remembrance and understanding of one of the most intense and grueling political conflicts in African history. All these films struggle with a compulsive need for structured narration, whether it is in their fable, or in the visual representation itself, while the historical events were certainly not experienced as part of a linear structure. At the same time, the films aim for historical credibility, or truthfulness, which is rendered through a variety of filmic approaches. The article discusses the fictionalization of genocide through film, and problematizes the quasi-unavoidable documentary effect of filmic iteration. Robert Favreau’s Un Dimanche a Kigali is analyzed in greater detail, as it offers specific strategies to the problem of filmic representation of genocidal violence. more...