Z-Files # 26 The Wasp and The Weather

About activism as poetry and poetry as activism

With M'Hamed El Ouali, Norah Karrouche, Zaïre Krieger, Robin Vanbesien, Zoe Cocchia, Ibrahim Alaoui, Carina Fernandes and Demy Koetsier we talk on the basis of poems by young people from the film The Wasp and The Weather about the current social and political climate of both Brussels and Rotterdam.

27 February, Z-Files # 26 is all about the movie De Wesp and Het Weer by Robin Vanbesien. After the film screening we talk about politics and the imagination of young people, based on the poems written in Rzoezie, a former youth center in Mechelen, Belgium.

Robin Vanbesien's film from 2019 is about the history of the Rzoezie youth center in Mechelen (Belgium). The center was founded by and for young people of Moroccan and Amazigh descent. The young people in the film focused on self-pedagogy and self-organization: bottom up and from within. Rzoezie acted from the concern of obtaining equal civil rights and was later reformed under political pressure in 2006. The film takes the poetry of the young people in Rzoezie as a starting point, and asks how the poems sound today: in the current social and political climate of Belgium, Flanders, but equally well in that of Rotterdam and the Netherlands?

Some of the original authors (M'Hamed El Ouali, Abdelhay Ben Abdellah) and contemporary poets (Samira Saleh, Mathieu Charles, Post Collective) guide us through the collection of poems in the film.

Vanbesien's starting point is that the poetry of the young authors in Rzoezie cannot be seen separately from the social struggle in which the young people engage. Just like Mechelen and Flanders, Rotterdam today still has to deal structurally with institutional and everyday racism (in neighborhoods and schools, ethnic profiling, police violence, unequal opportunities on the labor market, in housing policy). What is the role of poetry in the face of decolonizing resistance? We can create the social and political imagination of one grassroots learn to see self-organization as a poetic force?

This evening the film offers a stepping stone to an extensive conversation between various audience speakers. Based on the poems that are discussed in the film, the speakers take a position, to which the audience and respondents can respond.

🗣 Speakers: M'Hamed El Ouali, Norah Karrouche, Zaire Krieger, Robin Vanbesien.
EspRespondents: Zoe Cocchia, Ibrahim Alaoui, Carina Fernandes, Demy Koetsier

PRACTICAL INFORMATION
Onderdag Thursday 27/02/202
📍 Collective building 'Klooster
🕐 19:30 walk-in, 20:00 start
???? Free, just register

Z-Files is a series of talk shows, tours, workshops, debates and / or films from the two art and public space programs of CBK Rotterdam. Z-Files raises the role and dilemmas of art and artwork in the public space. The Z-Files op Zuid are part of the long-term program Maashaven Palace in and with the three districts Tarwewijk, Bloemhof, Afrikaanderwijk in Rotterdam South. Language and translation are the foundations of Paleis Maashaven.