PUBLIC HEARINGS: online festival addressing women’s rights issues opens 19 June
Goethe-Institut South Africa collaborates with the Women On Aeroplanes agency to share moments and thoughts on topics of legislation and law through an artistic lens
The festival will kick off on Friday, 19 June and run until Sunday, 28 June. Driven by a multitude of formats, such as film streamings, voice notes, conversations and mixtapes, it aims to explore the intersections of law and women’s rights issues on the African continent.
Annett Busch of Women On Aeroplanes: “Public Hearings, a series of readings in various places in Johannesburg, is what we had in mind – to address questions of law, legislation, legality and rights issues, but coming from outside the law machine – readings of texts, songs, fiction, essays, claims by women authors, writers, artists. It seems all the more important these days to look closely at periods of transition and transformation in terms of the implementation of separation, segmentation, segregation along new laws and the way these laws have shaped and shape our realities.”
Among the highlights are the film streaming of “Sisters in Law”, a case study of the Cameroonian justice system in transition (19 June) and the online exhibition “Prison Drawings”, with pictures by the South African apartheid activist Fatima Meer (25 June), that uncovers another underrepresented figure of South African history. “The Presence of Absent Books” is a series of short voice notes about the many ways books influence our lives, which challenges traditional concepts about literature and book readings. It is presented in collaboration with the vNAF, the virtual edition of the National Arts Festival. The real highlight of the festival, however, emerges through the assemblage of the many different elements that resonate with each other: protest songs, flitting sheets, political reflections, poetic interferences, paragraphs of law and much more.
Dr Asma Diakité, Regional Head of Programmes at the Goethe-Institut South Africa, stressed the importance of bringing the festival to life in times of a global pandemic: “We really believe that, with all complications, ‘Public Hearings’ needs to happen right now. Not only can we observe legislation change in real time due to Covid19, but also do we live in a society with massive systemic injustice towards womxn. Public Hearings touches on these issues in many ways, so we are glad that Women On Aeroplanes and all contributors were able to transform it into the digital space.”
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