Nadia Yala
Kisukidi

In everyday language, a dream refers to an ideal projection, imagined in a waking state. Dreamers are not considered to be very productive or to be people of action. Within the political field, the whole semantics of the dream is spontaneously disqualified. Nevertheless, it is possible to aesthetically, philosophically, and politically re-signify the state of conscious dreamers. In this lecture Kisukidi’s aim is to reread and decipher some projects and thoughts of the Independence in Africa through the ideas of ‘utopia’ and ‘dream’. Kisukidi will try to show, through the political hopes of some anticolonial (political and religious) leaders in central Africa, how they tried to dismantle the reality of defeat and emphasize the long survival of traditions of political struggle, by reshaping our understanding of the very concept of History.

Nadia Yala Kisukidi is a French philosopher, writer and academic, who has re-examined the notion of Blackness with its colonial implications in France and the rest of Europe.

ICI Berlin

A model can be an object of admiration, a miniature or a prototype, an abstracted phenomenon or applied theory, a literary text — practically anything from a human body on a catwalk to a mathematical description of a system. It can elicit desire, provide understanding, guide action or thought. Despite the polysemy of the term, models across disciplines and fields share a fundamental characteristic: their effect depends on a specific relational quality. A model is always a model of or for something else, and the relation is reductive insofar as it is selective and considers only certain aspects of both object and model.

Critical discussions of models often revolve around their restrictive function. And yet models are less prescriptive and more ambiguous than codified rules or norms. What is the critical purchase of models and how does their generative potential relate to their constitutive reduction? What are the stakes in decreasing or increasing, altering or proliferating the reductiveness of models? How can one work with and on models in a creative, productive manner without disavowing power asymmetries and their exclusionary or limiting effects?