THE ARCHIVE AS ... FOUNDATION WITHOUT A CEILING
Conversation with சிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா (Sinthujan Varatharajah) & مشترى ھلال (Moshtari Hilal)
Wednesday, July 5
7pm


The archive as an institution and archiving as a methodology are currently experiencing an important cultural moment in Europe. While old archives are to be critically reappraised, reformed, or even abolished, new archives are to be created in order to fill the countless voids of the former. But can the new archive be the answer to the old archive? In this conversation, சிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா (Sinthujan Varatharajah) and مشترى ھلال (Moshtari Hilal) grapple with the current (desperate) search for a reorganization of documents.

Moshtari Hilal (مشترى ھلال) is an artist, writer, and curator living in Hamburg. She studied Islamic Studies in Hamburg, Berlin, and London with a focus on gender and decolonial studies and is co-founder of the collective AVAH (Afghan Visual Arts and History) and the research project CCC (Curating Through Conflict with Care). Her novel Hässlichkeit will be published by Hanser Verlag in the fall.

சிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா (Sinthujan Varatharajah) is an essayist and political geographer living in Berlin. Her*his work deals with the issues of statelessness and displacement from a spatial, logistical, and materialist perspective. In 2018, Varatharajah co-founded the event series dissolving territories - cultural geographies of a new eelam, which approaches the everyday consequences of statelessness aesthetically and politically. Varatharajah’s first book, an alle orte, die hinter uns liegen was published by Hanser Verlag in the fall of 2022.

Together they published the book, English in Berlin. Exclusions in a Cosmopolitan Society with Wirklichkeit Books in 2022 in Berlin.

The conversation will be held in German.