Framing Human Rights – Details, episodes & analysis

In this episode, Ethiopian-American author Maaza Mengiste and Italian artist and photographer Laura Fiorio sit down with ECCHR General Secretary Wolfgang Kaleck.

The conversation centers on the colonial history of Italy in Ethiopia. Mengiste talks about the often overlooked role of women in Ethiopia's fight against Italian occupation during World War II, and Italian artist Fiorio talks about her work “My fascist Grandpa.”

Both bring their perspectives to contextualize photography and its manifold meaning and ability to hold and tell truths.

© Vittoria Trovato / Laura Fiorio

© Nina Subin / Maaza Mengiste

Human rights in times of crises #1

Welcome to ECCHR’s talk series on resistance and concrete utopias. With our conversations, we want to create the necessary platform for actors from all over the world to discuss and advance global human rights struggles. Human rights are a concrete utopia worth defending. But how to defend them needs to be constantly reinvented. As we find ourselves in a time of profound global transitions, human rights actors need to refer to prevailing inequalities and the underpinning social questions. ECCHR initiated an event series that is now available as a podcast to rethink the struggle for and around human rights.

Alejandra Ancheita (lawyer, founder of ProDESC, Mexico), Joshua Castellino (executive director, Minority Rights Group International), and Wolfgang Kaleck (ECCHR General Secretary) kick off our talk series Human rights in times of crises.

On the basis of Kaleck’s latest book The concrete utopia of human rights: A look back into the future (in German, S. Fischer publishers), our guests discuss how, when faced with a climate crisis, a pandemic, deeply unequal economic models, and authoritarianism, human rights activists can no longer go on with business-as-usual. These unprecedented global transitions are a chance to rethink new strategies and ways forward, and reclaim human rights and their potential for change.

For more information, go to: ecchr.eu/human-rights-in-times-of-crises

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#8

Eyal Weizman, founding director of research agency Forensic Architecture and ECCHR General Secretary Wolfgang Kaleck speak about the new joint initiative between Forensic Architecture and ECCHR: Investigative Commons. They discuss the advantages of presenting evidence in cultural fora, asking how Forensic Architecture’s approaches and ECCHR’s legal work can be useful to one another and synthesize different methodological approaches.

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#7 

Bénédicte Savoy, Kunsthistorikerin und Professorin an der TU Berlin und dem Collège de France spricht mit ECCHR-Generalsekretär Wolfgang Kaleck über Restitutionen von geraubter Kolonialkunst und ihre Kritik zur Debatte über das Humboldt Forum in Berlin.

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#1

Fred Ritchin, photographer and dean emeritus of the International Center of Photography, and ECCHR General Secretary Wolfgang Kaleck discuss the  role graphic images have in photojournalism to raise political awareness. Looking at iconic historic examples, Ritchin unpacks widely-held ideas about documentary truth, examining how photography can shine light on violence and repression, while also questioning the ways in which this transmission might be limited.

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#4

This episode is about the debut novel The Blood of the Dawn — La Sangre de la Aurora by Claudia Salazar Jiménez. Salazar Jiménez and Karina Theurer, director of ECCHR’s Institute for Legal Intervention, discuss the enduring consequences of gender discrimination, using fiction as a  tool for visibility and for sensitizing us to the suffering of others. Please be advised, this episode contains themes of sexual and gender-based violence that some listeners may find distressing.

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#2

Lebanese performance and video artist Rabih Mroué speaks with ECCHR General Secretary Wolfgang Kaleck about how he treats the impact of violent images in his work. Beginning with his piece PIXELATED REVOLUTION, which uses the moment of the civilian witness capturing violence on their cellphone camera, Mroué lays out a complicated web of connections between the witnessing acts of viewer, victim, and perpetrator.

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#5

In this episode, curator and cultural historian Mark Sealy and Wolfgang Kaleck, ECCHR general secretary, talk about the challenges of visual representation. They discuss the visuals of violence and the viewers’ responsibility and interrogate different ways of dealing with photography produced in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Sealy and Kaleck thereby try to answer the question: How do we deploy these images… and to what purpose? 

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#3 

In this episode, we will look at several of Forensic Architecture’s investigations and working methodologies in Gaza, Germany, and Cameroon  with architect and former deputy director of Forensic Architecture, Christina Varvia, and ECCHR General Secretary Wolfgang Kaleck. For the interactive experience visit: explore.ecchr.eu

#6

Guatemalan visual artist Ixmucané Aguilar joins Wolfgang Kaleck, ECCHR general secretary, to discuss her documentary photography practice  exploring the enduring effects of German colonialism in Namibia and the genocide against the Herero and Nama. The conversation addresses the  fragility of photography as a medium, the risk the photographer runs of imposing their values upon their subject, the importance of collective  evidence and recognizing the many nuances of truth. For the interactive experience visit: explore.ecchr.eu