School of Resistance The Congo Tribunal

Watch the recording of the discussion here

In their film The Congo Tribunal (2017), IIPM/Milo Rau shed light on the background to the war in the Great Lakes region, which has been going on for 20 years and has already claimed over 6 million lives. Even more inscrutable than the question of the number of rebel armies involved are the entanglement of arms dealers operating in the supply lines, the role of foreign diplomats and humanitarian organizations, and the involvement of multinational mining companies. As it directly or indirectly involves all the major powerful players of our time, the Congo war can be considered a Third World War, and constitutes one of the decisive economic distribution battles in the age of globalization.

The Congo Tribunal paints a harrowing and yet analytically profound tableau of a neocolonial world. In the discussion following the screening, Celine Tshizena, one of the lead investigators of the Congo Tribunals, curator and journalist Dorothee Wenner, choreographer Nora Chipaumire and sociologist Harald Welzer discussed the conditions of global art production and the significance of artistic strategies of resistance. In particular, they shed light on the necessity of symbolic institutions: How effective are artistic interventions? Whose struggle is at stake? Who is ultimately put at risk?

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