January 9. Audre Lorde — The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 (2012). With Dagmar Schultz and Ika Hügel-Marshall

Thursday, January 9, 19:00
Audre Lorde — The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 (2012)
With Dagmar Schultz (Director) and Ika Hügel-Marshall (Script co-writer)

Audre Lorde’s incisive, often-angry, but always brilliant writings and speeches defined and inspired the US-American feminist, lesbian, African-American, and Women-of-Color movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Audre Lorde – the Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 documents an untold chapter of Lorde’s life: her influence on the German political and cultural scene during a decade of profound social change. The film explores the importance of Lorde’s legacy, as she encouraged Afro-Germans—who, at that time, had no name or space for themselves—to make themselves visible within a culture that until then had kept them isolated and silent. It chronicles Lorde’s empowerment of Afro-German women to write and to publish, as she challenged white women to acknowledge the significance of their white privilege and to deal with difference in constructive ways. Previously unreleased archive material as well as present-day interviews explore the lasting influence of Lorde’s ideas on Germany and the impact of her work and personality. For the first time, Dagmar Schultz’s personal archival video- and audio-recordings reveal a significant part of the private Audre Lorde as well as her agenda—to rouse Afro-Germans to recognize each other. 2012 marked the 20-year anniversary of Audre Lorde’s passing.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director and screenwriter Dagmar Schultz, as well as co-author Ika Hügel-Marshall — friends and collaborators of Audre Lorde during her years in Berlin.

Dagmar Schultz is a German sociologist, filmmaker, publisher and professor. She has taught seminars on issues related to women’s studies, race, immigration, and class at Columbia College Chicago, Freie Universität Berlin, State University of New York, and Alice Solomon Hochschule. In 1974, she established together with a few fellow campaigners Orlanda Verlag, a book publishing house specialized on feminist literature, and a feminist women’s health center.

Ika Hügel-Marshall is a German artist and psychological consultant with an intercultural focus. Intense colored graphics and the imaginative processing of finds from wood are her specialty. In 1998, she published the autobiographical novel “Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany” about her life as a daughter of a Black officer from the United States army and a white German woman through Orlanda Verlag.

This screening is presented by Luiza Pado de O. Martins as part of her residency at TIER, In Weaving Shared Soil.

In Weaving Shared Soil
In this long-term project, TIER will become home to a small garden of plants traditionally used in Latin American and Northern European herbal medicine as aphrodisiacs and fertility enhancers. In promoting this encounter between distinct onto-epistemological traditions, the garden means to nurture discussions around matters of decolonisation, care and affect, the production of scarcity under capitalism, and the control of reproductive technologies.

Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist and researcher whose work engages with material and visual culture through the lenses of decolonial and queer theories. She is particularly interested in technologies and practices related to fertility and contraception, and their entanglements with colonial hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality. Her current artistic research project, titled “A Topography of Excesses,” examines the transmission of indigenous and folk knowledges about herbal reproductive medicine in Brazil as a decolonising practice of radical care.