CMCArts is pleased to invite you for the film screening and artist talks “We Were Never Meant to Meet”, within the context of La Vaughn Belle’s solo exhibition “Being of Myth and Memory”. The event is organized in collaboration with the international network Reparative Encounters and the Virgin Islands Caribbean Cultural Center (VICCC).

Reparative Encounters is a project that brings together artists and researchers from the United States Virgin Islands, Ghana, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and Denmark to exchange knowledge and foster artistic collaboration across these locations differently impacted by coloniality. The participating artists and researchers are La Vaughn Belle (USVI), Julie Edel Hardenberg (GL), Dorothy Akpene Amenuke (GH), Bernard Akoi-Jackson (GH), Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld (DK) and Daniela Agostinho (PT/DK).

The title of the event, “We Were Never Meant to Meet”, is inspired by a quote from La Vaughn Belle’s video Between the Dusk and Dawn (how to navigate an unsettled empire), on view at the CMC. Filming the sunrise in Point Udall in St. Croix and the sunset in Point Udall in Guam, spaces that represent the eastern and westernmost point of the American empire, the film evokes the distance as well as the ties that bind disparate regions connected by coloniality.

The film programme and artist talks take the lead from Belle’s evocative sentence to speculate what happens when artists who have been separated by coloniality meet across different geographies. With the artists’ works as a point of departure, the event aims to create dialogue between different forms of engaging with colonial histories and repairing their ongoing legacies in the present.

Program:

6 - 7 pm: Film screening

La Vaughn Belle, Between the Dusk and Dawn (how to navigate an unsettled empire), 2023

La Vaughn Belle, In the Place of Shadows, 2021

Julie Edel Hardenberg, My First Coin, 2021

Bernard Akoi-Jackson, A_GOLDEN[R]AGE, 2021

Chalana Brown and Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Video Letter: A Dialogue on Liberty and Liberation, 2023

7 - 8 pm: Conversation with Dorothy Amenuke, La Vaughn Belle, Julie Edel Hardenberg, Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Chalana Brown and Daniela Agostinho, moderated by Hadiya Sewer (VICCC).

Entrance is free and everyone is welcome. A cash bar will be open.

Reparative Encounters is based at Aarhus University (Denmark) and supported by the Globus programme of the Nordic Culture Fund. For more information about the network visit https://projects.au.dk/reparative-encounters.