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Echoing Silences - Zimbabwe as Metaphor is an interdisciplinary art and exhibition project on the history of violence using the example of the Zimbabwean War of Liberation and its traumatic aftermath in a postcolonial African society. The project investigates and considers this history of violence using images and texts from natural sciences as botany, geology and palaeontology, and an archaeology of private everyday objects. The exhibition includes photographs and texts; film and video screenings; a library; a film program; and an introductory artist talk with Cliford Zulu, curator of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, who was a guest at Ebenböckhaus in Munich for one month.
The exhibition is based on a long term research in various places in Zimbabwe, particularly in Chimanimani, Mutare, Harare and Bulawayo. The research included places in nature as well as local archives, museums, libraries and other institutions.
The title Echoing Silences - Zimbabwe as Metaphor refers to the huge number of unspoken individual memories that form a collective trauma and don’t find a place in history books. Since history can be written, but memory is based on images that need to be expressed individually and very often fail to find an adequate form, the history of violence in Zimbabwe (the liberation war 1964-79, including the ethnic cleansing in Matabeleland 1982-88) still is afflicting unconsciously each individual. A traumatized war generation passes on its trauma to the post-war generation. Speaking about such a trauma, finding words for it, is difficult in Zimbabwe – and elsewhere. The topic is sensitive and the generation-spanning silence seems to be both psychologically and politically motivated. Therefore Echoing Silences - Zimbabwe as Metaphor approaches the topic carefully in an uncommon way by using documents of history of secondary order, such as natural history (Invisible Landscape) or an archaeology of private everyday objects (My Object Tells).
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Echoing Silences includes the photo projects My Object Tells and Invisible Landscape. Related to both are the film and slide projections Hortus Harare, Under The Stones, Rashid Jogee - 144 Fort Street - Bulawayo, Lancaster House and Turn Your Scars Into Stars. |
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