Ørecomm Festival: Selections from Day 2

The Black Box at Malmö University is crammed with people when Thomas Hylland Eriksen starts his talk on Saturday morning. The low buzzing sound and light from the many computers sitting in the laps of the audience, together with the cameras set up for live streaming, adds to the feeling of connectedness with an even broader public.

Anthropologist Hylland Eriksen sets out with the proposition that we have lost the narrative of where we are coming from in postmodern society; delivering an up-to-date talk on how we can understand the time we live in.

“What I want to call attention to is the more general loss of the notion of progress. There is a case to be made for the idea that the notion of progress somehow disappeared, maybe somewhere around the 1990s.”

His talk contrasted to the afternoon speaker Trinh T. Minh-ha who was merging academic and artistic expressions in a meditative talk on the relation of word and image to memory.

Matthew Houdeck, graduate student at Syracuse University, USA, and one of the presenters at the festival, was only one of several that caught interest in Trinh T. Minh-ha.

“She had a way of taking you to her ideas; a different state. It was mind blowing.”

The late afternoon continued with the emotional screening of The Act of Killing, followed by a Q&A with producer Signe Byrge Sørensen, which could well have lasted for hours.

Questions around the interplay between artistic expression and reality were debated with intensity. The span of how the audience experienced the film; from being a piece of art to mere propaganda, pointed to the complexity of the film, but also to the complexity of reality and the importance of providing space for discussion. How can we challenge dominating narratives?