What role do film and art have in contexts of political and societal change? Afghan director Sahraa Karimi will discuss this question during the Machteld De Metsenaere lecture. Sahraa Karimi has spent decades documenting the plight of Afghan women and turned the camera on herself when the Taliban returned and took over Kabul on August 15, 2021. In this lecture, she will discuss the experiences of artists in Afghanistan and the protection of their artistic freedom, incorporating her own life experiences, as she herself fled Afghanistan. 

During this evening, we will explore how human personhood has been constructed, and how it can be decentered and made to expand into different ways of seeing and being. The rational, universal individual has violently suppressed mutable persons existing at the intersection of multiple beings, as well as collective and interspecies ways of building knowledge that persist in the sciences, though often unrecognized. Underneath the steamroller of modernity, we will discover many possibilities for a more convivial future.

Do you sometimes wonder how you will ever be able to do anything about global warming? An important part of the solution is in your wallet. What does your bank do with your money? Did you know that the four major Belgian banks KBC, ING, Belfius and BNP-Paribas are still investing tens of billions in fossil fuels?