What happens to a revolution that fails? It does not disappear. It sediments. It embeds itself in gestures, in silences, in inherited positions of refusal. It lives on as latent potential in the present. This talk follows those forces—the nervous systems of resistance that survive in precarious attachments, interrupted rituals, the stubborn continuity of certain figures—which do not seek to represent but to transmit.
The present is haunted by futures that failed to arrive. Certain figures—women without names, bodies without faces, movements without leaders—embody those unfulfilled futures. They act as temporal bridges, reactivating moments of rupture to insist that their possibility is not closed. Rather than documenting history, they invent a mode of transmission from inside the interruption. They give shape to a memory that is affective and insurgent. What they carry is not a message, but a tension: between disappearance and insistence, the lost and the still possible.
The talk considers the exhaustion, fragmentation, and danger of holding onto what has been suppressed. Yet within failure or erasure lies a different kind of power: one that endures. The counter-archive is not a storage of facts, but a practice—refusing the erasure of lived experience, holding space for what could not be spoken, giving presence to what was meant to vanish.
In these aftermaths, resistance emerges through the dense, often invisible fabric of embodied experience—grief, love, mourning, and care. Experiences often relegated to the intimate, yet which remain, in many contexts, the only ground from which to articulate a political position.
From 2pm on: Daniela Zambrano Almidón and Åsa Sonjasdotter: Papitas Tarpuy-Cha - Earthing Potatoes. Part 1: The Harvest, Andean potato harvest in the Moritzburg courtyard
6:30 pm: Lecture by Chowra Makaremi with Q&A
Language of the lecture: English.
To follow the simultaneous translation, please bring your cell phone and your own headphones. On site, you can connect to the audio channel in German.
Chowra Makaremi is a French-Iranian anthropologist and a tenured researcher at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) in Paris. Her research focuses on experiences of state violence, exile, and political rupture, through the lens of intimate archives, memory, and embodied transmission. She is the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project OFF-SITE, which develops creative methodologies for investigating constrained research contexts, and for rethinking how stories of resistance, justice, and loss are told. Her work has been recognized with several distinctions, including the CNRS Bronze Medal and the Arte/France Culture Essay Prize.
Her publications include Aziz's Notebook: At the Heart of the Iranian Revolution (Gallimard, 2011), Enghelab Street: A Revolution Through Books 1979–83 (Le Bal/Spector, 2019), and Femme! Vie! Liberté! Echoes of a Revolutionary Uprising in Iran (La Découverte, 2023). She also directed the documentary film Hitch: An Iranian Story (2019).