Elizabeth A. Povinelli (Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University; Karrabing Film Collective) presents her film The Inheritance and speaks with Nina Tabassomi (Director TAXISPALAIS). A cooperation of the TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol with the Cinematograph in the context of our exhibition GODDESSES. Film and event in English.<\/p>\n
In her video essay, The Inheritance, Elizabeth A. Povinelli tackles the question of how the heritage of a community and its commons can be told from a white perspective without falling into the trap of negating differences between fundamentally divergent types of dispossession, brutalization, and dislocation. Investigating the fractured histories of ancestral presence in her own life, she points to the deprivation the Povinelli clan was confronted with at the beginning of the nineteenth century in a village in the now Italian region called Trentino-Alto Adige. This was a dispossession intended to lead to proletarianization rather than extermination, as in indigenous communities of the sort that members of the Karrabing family (see their two videos in the exhibition GODDESSES), of which she is also part, belong to. How can sensitive storytelling on ethnicity, kinship, and belonging open up connections between different traumatized communities while retaining an awareness of the differences in power dynamics and legacies of violence that each were and are confronted with? In her proposed solution, Povinelli fashions a type of storytelling resistant to white supremacy and nationalism, as well as fatuous forms of identification with indigenous communities victimized by settler colonial violence.<\/p>\n