Program
Thursday, September 14
9:30 am Introduction
10 am Keynote Elyan Hill (Dallas, TX)
Dancing Altars: Embodied Visualities and Domestic Enslavement in Togolese Sacred Arts
11 am Coffee break
Panel 1: Performing Matters
Moderated by Birgit Meyer (Utrecht)
11:20 am Meera Venkatachalam (Mumbai)
Dealing with Textual Unboundedness: Gorovodu Objects, Images, Ritual, and Performance in Southeastern Ghana and Togo
12:00 pm Angelantonio Grossi (Moraga, CA)
“It Is Humans Who Make the Gods”: On Autonomy, Causation and Relations
12:40 pm Lunch break
Panel 2: Towards Different Representations. Art, Film, Experimental Ethnography, Autoethnography
Moderated by David Frohnapfel (Berlin)
2 pm Zainabu Jallo (Bern/Basel)
The Ethnographic Interface: How Not to Study Haitian Vodou
2:40 pm Alissa Jordan (Philadelphia)
Jè Kle [In a Vision]: The Productivity of Visions, and Visionary Critiques of Production in Haitian Petwo Vodou
3:20 pm
Dora Imhof/U5 (Zurich)
Heavy Homework: On Engaging with Leonore Mau’s Haitian Photographs
3:50 pm Coffee break
4:20 pm Conversation Michaela Schäuble (Bern) and Sela Kodjo Adjei (Accra) Imag(in)ing Vodun/Vodou: Filmic Approaches to a Spiritual Practice
5 pm Sum up discussion: Framing and Positioning Research, moderated by Bärbel Küster
Friday, September 15
9:30 am Conversation Gina Athena Ulysse (Santa Cruz) and Sasha Huber (Helsinki)
Sonic and Visual Activism from Haiti and Beyond: A Rasanblaj of Reparative Interventions
Panel 3: The Camera and the Archive
Moderated by Bärbel Küster (Zurich)
10:30 am Christopher Nixon (Wiesbaden)
Visual Justice and the Haunting of Colonialism
11:10 am Dialogue of two Photographic Positions
Moderated by Niklas Wolf (Zurich)
Laeïla Adjovi (Dakar): Bridging with Light. Photographing Orisha-Vodun Culture Across the Waters (Benin-Nigeria-Cuba)
Nicola Lo Calzo (Paris): The Right to Opacity: Photographing Vodun Tchamba in the Postcolonial Age/Time
12:00 pm Rita Mawuena Benissan (Accra) and Sela Kodjo Adjei (Accra)
Chieftaincy, Spirituality and Heritage Preservation: Visual Evidence of Vodu in Photographic Archives
12:45 pm Lunch break
Panel 4: Spaces of Negotiation
Moderated by Zainabu Jallo (Bern/Basel)
2 pm Keynote Timothy R. Landry (Hartford, CT)
Willful Things: Sorcery and Encountering the Ontologically Alive in West Africa
3 pm Niklas Wolf (Zurich)
Vodun’s Visuals. The Imagery of Vodun in Shrines, Museums, and Photobooks
3:40 pm Coffee break
4 pm Kwame Akoto Bamfo (Nuhalenya)
Through the Eyes and Hands of the Mounted
4:40 pm Keynote Kyrah Malika Daniels (Atlanta, virtual)
Spirits of the Jewel Case: An Ethics of Care for Vodou Sacred Arts in the Museum World
Q&A moderated by Gina Athena Ulysse
5:30 pm Final discussion and closing remarks