PANEL 'BLACK ACTIVISM'
After the screening of ‘Concering Violence we take a moment to unpack the film and think about the parallels to Black activism in the Netherlands today. What do we mean by violence, what are the types of structural violence that people of colour face here today and what are the liberative forces that can act as ways through? The panellists have been selected so there can be an intergenerational and gender balanced discussion that centres Blackness in NL with Ernestine Comvalius, Quincy Gario and
Simone Zeefuik.
Moderated by Sekai Makoni with panelists Ernestine Comvalius, Quincy Gario and Simone Zeefuik.
ABOUT THE PANEL
ernestine comvalius
Ernestine Comvalius (1954) is the first director and co-founder of the Bijlmer Parktheater. She retired in 2021. She directed this professional and inclusive theater, rooted in the diverse community of the South East of Amsterdam and created a stage for the hidden and sometimes oppressed stories.
In the seventies and eighties Ernestine Comvalius was involved in the anti-racial and anti-imperialist movement as an activist and organizer. Nowadays she publishes essays, columns and poetry.
Quincy Gario
Quinsy Gario is a performance poet and artist from Curaçao and St. Maarten. His work centers on decolonial remembering and unsettling institutional and interpersonal normalizations of colonial practices. Gario’s most well-known work is Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012).
As a member of the collective Family Connection established in 2005 by Glenda Martinus and Gala Martinus, respectively his mother and aunt, his current research is about attempting to institute otherwise.
simone zeefuik
Simone Zeefuik is an Afro-Dutch, Amsterdam-Bijlmer based writer, cultural programmer and organizer whose work centres around on representation, everydayness, inclusivity and social justice. She focuses on imagination as access, joy, the (de)spectaclizing of Blackness, digital archives and movements against the illegalizing of the so-called undocumented members of the Afro-Dutch communities. She’s a programmer for Amsterdam’s Bijlmer Parktheater, a teacher at Zawdie Sandvliet’s Afro-Dutch Studies and a ginger tea critic. Together with Richard Kofi (her fellow programmer at Amsterdam’s Bijlmer Parktheater) she set up and hosts the podcast Project Wiaspora.
From 2021-2023 Zeefuik will teach the temporary master Blacker Blackness at Amsterdam’s Sandberg Institute where she’s also a guest lecturer. Her course focuses on imagination as a method to decolonize, uncode and liberate representations of Blackness in art and design.
sekai makoni
TBC