Spectres by Sven Augustijnen

In the context of the exhibition ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks, the curators what, how & for whom/whw are presenting the following screening program:

Spectres by Sven Augustijnen 2011, French with English subtitles, 104’

Fifty years after his assassination, Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the newly independent Congo, is back to haunt Belgium. Through commemorations, encounters, and a return visit, a top-ranking Belgian civil servant who was in Elisabethville on that tragic day of 17 January 1961 attempts to exorcise the ghosts of the past. To the sound of st john passion by J.S. Bach, spectres plunges us into one of the blackest days of the Belgian congo’s decolonization. An examination of the bio-political body, this feature-length film by Sven Augustijnen exposes the fine line separating legitimation and historiography and the traumatic question of responsibility and debt. The title of the film refers to the book by Jacques Derrida specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international (1993).