12.02.25, (cancelled) Lennart Soberon, Universal Soldier (1992) en de maakbare man

Debates about migration often get stuck in the same dichotomy: either you are in favour of open borders, or you want to turn Europe into a fortress. But what if we refuse to be locked into that straitjacket? In this lecture, Albina Fetahaj breaks open the current frameworks of thinking. This starts with the simple, but never asked, question: ‘What is a border?’. Anyone who takes this question seriously is in for quite a journey of discovery. Because it soon becomes clear that borders are more than just dry lines on a dead map. They are mechanisms of power. By intermingling with race, class and gender, among other things, borders determine who is welcome and who is not, who is allowed to feel at home somewhere and who is excluded or expelled.

Fetahaj challenges us to break open that order and make the unthinkable, a world without borders, conceivable. Her plea goes beyond simply thinking away borders: it is an invitation to reimagine the world order itself and to search together for a more just future – for everyone.

After the lecture, Albina will talk to postdoctoral researcher Natan De Coster. Getting the Voice Out, a collective that collects stories from people in Belgium's closed centres, will share testimonies.

• Albina Fetahaj studied Conflict and Development Studies and Gender and Diversity at Ghent University. In 2024, her debut ‘Grenskolonialisme’ was published by EPO Uitgeverij. In her work, she studies borders and migration from a decolonial perspective, with a particular focus on anti-colonial resistance. She is of Kosovar-Albanian descent.
• Natan De Coster is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, where he conducts research on race and class dynamics in South Africa. He obtained his doctorate in political science with a historical-ethnographic work on a “white” working-class neighbourhood in Cape Town where, despite apartheid politics, people lived across colour lines. He is interested in how large structures such as colonialism and apartheid are experienced by ordinary people. He is currently working on a book based on his doctoral research. Natan obtained a master's degree in philosophy from KU Leuven and an additional master's degree in Conflict and Development Studies from Ghent University.
• Getting the Voice Out is a collective based in Brussels that collects testimonies from people in Belgium's closed centres. Belgium currently has six such centres, where people are detained for administrative reasons while awaiting deportation. There is virtually no access to information about the detention centres and what exactly happens inside them. The website gettingthevoiceout.org was set up in collaboration with the No Border network to publicise the voices of the detainees and the conditions in which they are held and deported. The collective also supports all forms of individual and collective struggle by detainees. By “struggle”, they mean any form of resistance to detention and threats of deportation. They are not advocates of non-violence on principle and support all forms of resistance against these prisons. They also believe that surviving in a closed centre is an act in itself that requires a form of resistance. Getting the Voice Out demands an end to detention centres, prisons and all other forms of incarceration.

This lecture will take place in MIRY Concert Hall. The hall is wheelchair accessible via a lift to the first floor. A sign language interpreter will be provided for this lecture. If you have any further questions about accessibility facilities, please contact the organisation: anais.vanertvelde@hogent.be. Questions can be asked on site to the student assistant at the desk.

Young Constance (Ingrid Bergman), a somewhat perfectionist psychiatrist from Vermont, suddenly falls in love with a mysterious patient with amnesia (Gregory Peck). Her new love turns out to be not entirely without complications when he is accused of murder. To protect him, Constance tries to unravel his repressed traumas in therapy sessions, hoping to uncover the truth in her practice. Because what is love without a thorough psychoanalysis of your partner? All the clues emerge in a delirium where eyes become liquid and the architecture is at least as unreliable as the patient's memory.

Alfred Hitchcock, master of suspense (and notorious control freak himself), brings his familiar ingredients together again in Spellbound. Cutting tension, cameos, plot twists and tight editing. He gave carte blanche to the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí for the set design of the dream sequence. This iconic scene has become permanently embedded in the collective film memory as a textbook example of how cinema can make you dream.

This screening will be introduced by Film-Plateau coordinator and filmmaker Julie Daems.

In this eccentric musical film, Berlin is a stage and getting lost is an art of living. For his eccentric document of the times, Rosa von Praunheim invited a handful of glorious misfits to his home, the Stardust guesthouse, where he had them sing, seduce and stumble. This colourful community of trans performers, singers, dancers and outsiders play all kinds of roles, but above all themselves. Anything goes, nothing needs to be smoothed over.

The film feels like a night that goes on just a little too long. A revue without wings, a glitter show that undermines any idea of “role”. Cinema with a healthy disregard for good taste. Kitsch flirts with sincerity, camp with melancholy.

Von Praunheim, who passed away last December, was a key voice in German gay cinema. With a loving yet brutal gaze, he films people who live without excuses and without a safety net. ‘I am interested in the fragile, the spontaneous, the warm-hearted in them,’ says the filmmaker himself. Stadt der Verlorenen Seelen is now a cult classic and reads today as a legacy for a community that is reinventing itself on the margins, and shining there.

With titles such as The Quiet Girl (2022) and Small Things Like These (2024), it is clear that Irish cinema is flourishing. However, amid the arthouse capital of hit films, the undercurrent of smaller genre films is often forgotten. Fréwaka shows that Irish horror cinema is also alive and kicking. After enduring a personal tragedy, caregiver Shoo decides to leave her pregnant partner alone to take care of an old woman in the countryside. However, as folk horror conventions dictate, there is something not quite right with the local community. On top of her paranoia about her neighbours, the old woman is consumed by superstition about the mythical na sídhe, a supernatural people who are said to have once abducted her.

Delving into Irish history and culture, Fréwaka is a surreal atmospheric piece with both feet firmly on the ground. Slowly, Shoo slips into her patient's delusions and the wounds of the past. Elegant scares are interspersed with a tactful approach to the post-colonial traumas that continue to plague the country. The attention to the Irish language further underlines a commitment to ground the film in a political project that seeks to heal the many horrors of reality through magical stories.

This screening will be preceded by the short film Cold Bathroom (2025) by Eleni Aerts.

Delve into the mind of Federico Fellini. With seven feature films to his name, including La Strada (1954) and La Dolce Vita (1960), and a handful of short films, the Italian filmmaker embarked on what would aptly be called 8½. Otto e mezzo follows the seemingly chaotic stream of consciousness of film director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), whose creative reservoir has run dry. His wife and mistress each pull at one of his arms, while an impatient producer, cunning critics and desperate actresses cheerfully nibble away at his already scarce time. But remember: when reality becomes too stifling, even a crack in a car window can suddenly feel like salvation.

Anselmi (read: Fellini himself) decides to simply make his lack of inspiration his subject matter and thus conjures up an irresistible “film about film” out of thin air. In this wild, typically Fellinian introspection, dream and reality are constantly intertwined, a gamble that was rewarded with two Oscars in 1964 and is considered one of the maestro's best works. Bravo, Federico!

The Weird Wednesday family continues to expand. This time, we welcome the strange friends from Cinema Obscura: a cult film collective that sees high art in bad taste. With a range of screenings that honour the craftsmanship of low-budget filmmaking, they help us search for gold nuggets in the rubbish heap. The manic Miami Connection is our first collaboration and serves as living proof of the B-movie quip “so bad it's good”.

In the neon-drenched Miami of the 1980s, we follow the band Dragon Sound. These five musicians and taekwondo fighters firmly believe that friendship conquers all, even rival bands, drug dealers and ninjas on motorbikes. When a cocaine deal goes wrong, everything derails into a battle full of clumsily choreographed fight moves, awkward silences and intimate synth-rock anthems about brotherhood. Miami Connection may be a terrible film, but the sincerity behind its making is disarming. Nothing about the film is meant to be ironic, as director and lead actor Y.K. Kim clearly thought he had an unrivalled action epic on his hands.

Unfortunately, those dreams were shattered and the film (understandably) slipped by unnoticed upon its release. Now the world is finally ready for this fiery ode to action cinema and friendship.

Everyone's favourite animation festival (Anima!) is back again, this time with a programme bursting with new talent. This selection of short films provides a platform for the next generation of European filmmakers whose imagination knows no bounds. In this programme, they effortlessly combine stories about snowed-in houses, unbreakable eggs, shoes that move to music on their own, and cups of tea that get lost in a magical universe. Using various innovative techniques within the medium of animation, they explore unknown worlds that will inspire dreams for a long time to come. Discover the films of these young pioneers, whom you will undoubtedly hear more about in the future.

Floating freely through the clouds, a bird has much to realize.

Cinema for the youngest cinema-goers! Parents and children aged 4 and above are welcome to this screening, where we present a varied and original series of short films.

A newlywed couple, a deckhand, a seasoned sailor and his cats in heat. Together they cram into the stuffy cabins of a riverboat that glides lazily through the French waterways. As tensions rise and eroticism gently simmers, the outside world beckons seductively from the shore.

But the ship of fools stubbornly sails on through fog and drizzle, past deserted warehouses and banks that whisper rather than speak.

L'Atalante feels like a daydream that you can't quite place and ‘smells like dirty feet,’ according to François Truffaut. In Jean Vigo's only feature film, social criticism, sensual lyricism and playful surrealism flow effortlessly into one another. Vigo, son of a notorious anarchist, left behind a film that defies categorisation and was lovingly picked up by the Nouvelle Vague after his early death. Even today, L'Atalante's influence continues to resonate with superfan Leos Carax, among others. Immerse yourself in this damp cabin allegory and discover why Vigo is called “the embodiment of cinema”.

This screening is linked to the launch of the book Barge Life (2024), a philosophical exposition of L'Atalante, and will be introduced by author Florian Deroo.

Traversées (Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud, 1983, Belgium-France-Tunisia, 91’).

At 18:00 there will be a screening for students, followed by a second screening for the general public at 20:30, without a lecture. Tickets for the first screening can be found here, while tickets for the 20:30 screening will be available online in January.

All hands on deck, KASKcinema and Studium Generale are shipmates for this special screening of Traversées. On New Year's Eve 1980, Tunisian Youssef takes a ferry trip from Ostend to Dover. However, as he enters the new year in the middle of the English Channel, his visa expires. At the mercy of the administrative inflexibility of nation states, he finds himself in an impossible situation. Without a valid passport, he is refused entry by both British and Belgian border guards and is doomed to remain adrift between the two nations.

This long-lost gem of a film by Tunisian filmmaker Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud is one of the more eccentric treasures of Belgian film history. With Kafkaesque wit and psychological sensitivity, Mahmoud questions the absurdities of national borders. The result is a poetic parable that, 30 years later, also turns out to be a prophetic nightmare. While Youssef plots his escape, the threat of right-wing nationalists looms over the interior and the walls of Fortress Europe are further fortified. Borders seem to slowly multiply to almost metaphysical proportions.

Prior to this screening, film scholar Lennart Soberon will give an introduction on the representation of border landscapes. Although we easily recognise classic border iconography such as checkpoints and fences, modern borderscapes are characterised by their opaque nature. In order to identify state violence, we must also be aware of the administrative, digital and emotional barriers through which power reproduces itself.

• Lennart Soberon is a researcher in film studies (VUB) and artistic coordinator at KASKcinema. As part of the Reel Borders project, he works on the cinematic representation of national borders.
  

This lecture and film screening will take place at KASKcinema. There is ongoing work in the street near KASKcinema, but it is possible to drive up to the entrance at Godshuizenlaan 4. The venue is accessible to wheelchair users and a limited number of spaces are available in the auditorium. The toilet for wheelchair users is located on the first floor and is accessible by lift (90 cm wide, 1 m 35 deep). There is another toilet available further down the corridor past the KASKcafe for those who use a wider wheelchair. A written version of the introduction will be provided. The introduction is in Dutch. The film itself is in several languages and subtitled in English. If you have any further questions about accessibility facilities, please contact the organisation: anais.vanertvelde@hogent.be.

On New Year's Eve 1980, Youssef from Tunisia takes a ferry from Ostend to Dover. However, as he enters the new year in the middle of the English Channel, his visa expires. At the mercy of the administrative inflexibility of nation states, he finds himself in an impossible situation. Without a valid passport, he is refused entry by both British and Belgian border guards and is doomed to remain adrift between the two nations.

This long-lost gem of a film by Tunisian filmmaker Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud is one of the more eccentric treasures of Belgian film history. With Kafkaesque wit and psychological sensitivity, Mahmoud questions the absurdities of national borders. The result is a poetic parable that, 30 years later, also turns out to be a prophetic nightmare. While Youssef plots his escape, the threat of right-wing nationalists looms over the interior and the walls of Fortress Europe are further fortified. Borders seem to slowly multiply to almost metaphysical proportions.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud.

Lebanese journalist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab is known for her politically engaged films, which she made during a career spanning from the 1970s until her death in 2019. With more than forty titles to her name, Saab brought the untold stories of the Arab world to the screen and gave a voice to marginalised and oppressed communities. During this evening, we revisit her combative yet nuanced oeuvre with two of her most powerful achievements.

In the short film Palestinian Women (1974), Palestinian women resist the Israeli occupation of their land through education and armed resistance. With Letter From Beirut (1978), Saab returns to Lebanon, where she directs herself in a poetic narrative that questions the creeping continuation of the conflict. She then leaves for South Lebanon, which is occupied by Israel. There, for the first time since the start of the civil war, she documents the Palestinian resistance at the border.

This evening takes place in the context of the book Jocelyne Saab: Inventory 1973–1983 (2024), about the rise of left-wing political movements, armed revolutions and public struggle in the Arab world. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with authors Mohanad Yaqubi, Mathilde Rouxel and Elettra Bisogno.

Tickets are available via the website of VIERNULVIER. Students and staff of HOGENT, Ghent University, Artevelde, KASK & Conservatorium can send an email to helena.verheye@hogent.be with a photo of their staff or student card to receive a discount code for a free ticket.

‘Onvertaalbaar’ is Lisette Ma Neza's intimate search for her own language. She grew up in a multilingual environment and discovered that no language is complete. Through untranslatable words, memories and encounters, she explores how language barriers both clash and merge, and how multilingualism can be both vulnerable and enriching.

‘There are few people who can touch you with words in such a way that it seems as if they are holding up a mirror to you and opening a window to their magical inner world. Lisette does this time and time again, and I am grateful to be able to read her and learn from her.’ – Dalilla Hermans, author and theatre maker

Lisette will read from her book and theatre maker Aminata Demba will talk to her. Afterwards, you can buy the book at the book stand and we will conclude with drinks and music. Untranslatable by Lisette Ma Neza is a publication in the Karakters series, pocket-sized essays on philosophy and cultural criticism. The Karakters are a collaboration between Studium Generale, Academia Press, deBuren and rekto:verso.

• Lisette Ma Neza grew up in the Netherlands speaking French, English, Dutch and Kinyarwanda. She moved to Brussels to study audiovisual arts at the LUCA School of Arts, and she still lives there today. She is now an award-winning slam poet, the official city poet of Brussels, and gives poetry workshops at the Paleis in Antwerp and the Koninklijke Vlaamse Schouwburg (KVS).
• Aminata Demba is an actress, presenter, moderator and artistic team member at the theatre company Laika vzw. In recent years, she has been a creator and performer in various theatre productions at NT Gent and KVS, among others. In addition to her acting career, she is the driving force behind RepresentBelgium, an initiative to make our visual culture in the audiovisual sector more inclusive for underrepresented groups. She also gives lectures on the theme to film students and is often asked to speak or moderate events.
• Graziela Dekeyser is an Assistant Professor in the Education, Culture and Society research group at KU Leuven. Her research expertise lies at the intersection of multilingualism, emotions and educational inequality.In the coming years, she will focus specifically on how current pedagogical issues and new school concepts in primary education can contribute to pedagogical policy in a diversifying educational landscape. Graziela is also strongly committed to close cooperation with the education sector, including through her chairmanship of the LOP Primary Education Antwerp.

The Ballroom is accessible to wheelchair users. The lift at the reception takes you to the right floor. A sign language interpreter will be provided for this lecture. If you have any further questions about accessibility facilities, please contact the organisation: anais.vanertvelde@hogent.be

More information about the accessibility of the venue

This lecture is part of the Dag van de Filosofie, tickets will be available starting from February 10 via www.dagvandefilosofie.be

Monsters and the monstrous have always evoked the contradictory responses of fascination and fear. The boundaries between the human and the monstrous are dangerously porous and how these boundaries are drawn works to define who we are and how we define the normal (body). A sense of ontological, epistemological and ethical uncertainty and confusion that can resolve either in outright horror at the human inability to control a seemingly threatening materiality, or in a move towards alternative and more hopeful modes of becoming.

It’s little exaggeration to say that the representation of the monstrous/the anomalously embodied/the strange leaks and flows across material, political, philosophical, artistic and bioscientific imaginaries alike. The very excessiveness of corporeality that promises to productively transgress conventional expectations and boundaries can be both scholarly and fun, and under conditions of promise can revalue what has been figured as the excluded other.

Following the lecture, Margrit Shildrick will engage in a conversation with Professor of Ethics and Moral Philosophy Seppe Segers. This afternoon is a collaboration between the Dag van de Filosofie, Ghent University and Studium Generale Gent.

• Margrit Shildrick is Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at Stockholm University and works mainly in the field of biophilosophy. Her projects include an ongoing collaboration with Queer Death Studies; excursions into bioart and its posthumanist implications; and rethinking the concept of the gift as far more than exchange. Books include Leaky Bodies and Boundaries (1997), Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (2002), Dangerous Discourses: Subjectivity, Sexuality and Disability (2009), and Visceral Prostheses: Somatechnics and Posthuman Embodiment (2023).
• Seppe Segers is a professor of ethics and moral science at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Science at Ghent University. He teaches ethics, moral science and feminist criticism, exploring the open meaning of “morality”, the relationships between description and prescription, and between moral value and non-moral value (if such a thing exists). Most of his published work deals with applied ethics.

This lecture and aftertalk will be in English and will take place in the Zwarte Zaal at KASK & Conservatorium. The Zwarte Zaal is located on the ground floor and is accessible to wheelchair users, there’s also an accessible toilet in the hallway of KASKcafé. In case you use a wheelchair, go via the entrance of KASKcinema instead of the Louis Pasteurlaan entrance. There are works in the street of KASKcinema, but it’s possible to pass bu the entrance at Godshuizenlaan 4. A translation into Flemish sign language will be provided. If you have any further questions about accessibility facilities, please contact the organisation: anais.vanertvelde@hogent.be

British biologist Charles Elton is often regarded as the founder of research into animals and plants that colonise new areas. His 1958 book The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants is considered the official starting point for this field of study. However, naturalists had been observing life forms establishing themselves in unfamiliar environments long before that.

As early as the eighteenth century, the famous Swedish scholar Carolus Linnaeus observed that exotic plants sometimes spread on their own and take root in the wild. He was the first to map how these newcomers spread across the world. Humans in particular play a key role in this.

Unlike today, Linnaeus did not see these successful exotic species as a threat, but as an enrichment of the native nature. It was none other than Charles Darwin who was the first to label a successful exotic species as “invasive”.

During his voyage on the Beagle, he saw how a European garden plant was rapidly spreading across the pampas of South America, displacing typical pampas plants. Not long after, Europe was hit by its first real plant invasion: a seemingly innocent aquatic plant from North America captivated science, politics and the press.

In this lecture, botanical philosopher Norbert Peeters will talk more about this forgotten history of thinking about plants that establish themselves in new areas. He will base his talk on his recent doctoral research. After the lecture, Norbert Peeters will talk to Tim Adriaens, a landscape ecologist specialising in invasive species. Helen Weeres, Saïda Ragas and Malika Soudani will provide literary and cinematic interventions on the subject of being exotic.

• Norbert Peeters is a botanical philosopher, writer and university teacher in Philosophy at Wageningen University & Research. Peeters studied Archaeology and Philosophy. At Leiden University, he is writing a dissertation on the conceptual history of invasion ecology, in which he writes about the earliest developments in thinking about invasive plants. As a botanical philosopher, he is interested in the extraordinary world of plants. Following Darwin's vision of the plant kingdom, Peeters argues for a different way of looking at and describing plants. In 2016, he made his debut with Botanical Revolution: The Plant Theory of Charles Darwin. He subsequently wrote Rumphius' Herbarium: Stories from the Ambonese Flora (2020) and Wilderness Varnish: A Philosopher in the Vondelpark (2021), among other works. In 2023, he co-edited the reissue of Flora Batava: the wild plants of the Netherlands.
• Helen Weeres has a background in poetry, literary and cultural analysis, and gender studies, and works in the (research) arts alongside regenerative farmers, scientists, and other artists. Helen's practice is fuelled by poetry and a fascination with artefacts and instruments that inspire regenerative interactions between humans and a broader ecosystem. Themes such as human-inclusive ecosystems, lost (pagan) rituals and folklore, queer ecology, and human-soil relationships are often central to Helen's evocative poems, performances, installations, and (inter)active gatherings. Helen is co-organiser and coordinator of Queer miQ, an “open” stage that invites FLINTAQ* people to “queer” the microphone. In 2025-2026, Helen will develop new literary work outside the book in collaboration with TILT, made possible in part by the Dutch Foundation for Literature.
• Saïda Ragas is an illustrator and comic strip artist. Her work is based on her idealistic, sex-positive and feminist ideas. Through playful and colourful images, she shares personal experiences, social footnotes and dream images. In 2024, Saïda was a finalist in the annual illustration competition De Stoute Stift (The Naughty Pencil) organised by deBuren. Together with Kato Kagenaar, Saïda is part of the sex-positive art collective HALFNAAKT.
• Malika Soudani is an author and teacher of creative writing in primary and secondary education in the Netherlands. In 2021, she graduated in Creative Writing at ArtEZ Arnhem with the poetry collection Waar ik een slaapkamer heb gehad (Where I had a bedroom). She did an internship at production house SLAA and worked as a PR assistant for Read My World. In the summer of 2019, Malika took part in deBuren's annual writing residency in Paris.

• Malika organises writing workshops and courses on themes such as spirituality, sexuality and (solo) intimacy. She recites her work at various venues and enjoys participating in panel discussions on social issues. In the summer, she is one of the writing workshop staff at Buitenkunst, where she also works as a cook.
• Tim Adriaens started as a landscape ecologist at the Institute for Nature Conservation in 2000, working on area visions and ecological networks. He then started a project on invasive species at the institute. He coordinates research on invasive species and is very active in international projects on sustainable control, setting up surveillance and warning systems, citizen science, horizon scanning and risk analysis, impact research and human dimensions research of biological invasions. He has many international projects in his portfolio, such as LIFE, Interreg and Horizon projects, as well as assignments for the European Commission and the IUCN. Tim has been part of the INBO management team since 2024. He is responsible for the Species Diversity, Open Science Lab for Biodiversity, Wildlife Management and Invasive Species teams. Tim is very active in the public debate on invasive species and their management. He often comments in the media on invasive species such as raccoons, Asian hornets, African clawed frogs and plant invasions, and their impact on nature conservation and management.

This lecture will take place in the Botanical Garden of the GUM. More information about the accessibility of the venue can be found on their website. A sign language interpreter will be provided for this lecture. If you have any further questions about accessibility facilities, please contact the organisation: anais.vanertvelde@hogent.be. Questions can be asked at the reception desk on site.