Pippa Skotnes: Books, Bones, Billiards: Real Presence in the Place of the Past
@ Buffett Institute at Northwestern
633 Clark St, Evanston, IL 60208
Opening Monday, May 8th, from 4PM - 6PM
South African artist and academic Pippa Skotnes is this year’s Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies. Skotnes is the founding director of the Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town. Her work explores themes in South African history, and many of her projects have centered the |xam peoples’ story as it faced cultural extinction and the death of their language.
At the time of the great bison hunts in the American West, a similar drama was playing out in the thirstlands of southern Africa as Dutch farmers (the Boers) drove their sheep herds into the arid lands of the |xam.
This lecture draws on a remarkable archival collection of thousands of pages of stories, which preserves a language now no longer spoken. Recalling an account once told in the dolerite hills of the Northern Cape, she will address the wider resonance of this archive, the nature of the book, and the conjuring of real presence in the place of the past.
“In her visual and written work, [Skotnes] deeply engages South Africa’s complex racial history and colonial experience and considers the varied memorial practices through which a society brings its past into the present,” says Buffett Institute Director Bruce G. Carruthers.
Scott Hall, Guild Lounge
Lecture: 4 p.m.
Reception to follow: 5:30 p.m.
Official Website
More events on this date
Tags: Buffett Institute at Northwestern Books Bones Billiards: Real Presence in the Place of the Past, Evanston, Pippa Skotnes
« previous event
next event »