On 18 June, Hannes Verhoustraete, artistic researcher at KASK & Conservatoire, will defend his doctorate to obtain the title Doctor of Arts. On behalf of the candidate and his promoters, Dr. Jasper Rigole (HOGENT - KASK & Conservatorium) and Prof. Dr. Berber Bevernage (UGent), we would like to invite you to this occasion. 

The public defense will start at 16:00 in auditorium Servais on Campus Bijloke. Afterwards, you are welcome to attend the reception. Please confirm your attendance by sending an e-mail to hannes.verhoustraete@hogent.be.

The day before, the two films that are part of the PhD project will be screened at KASK Cinema — at 18:00 Un pays plus beau qu'avant (2019, 67') and at 20:00 Broken View (2023, 75'). On 18 June, Broken View will be screened again after the reception at 20:00. 

Hegemony and historiography: the documentary film essay as palimpsest

How can the past be approached in a cinematic way, as a series of problems to do with the composition of images, sounds and words in a film form? How does historical research relate to the sensory? What happens to the appearances we perceive, process in body and mind to reconfigure them through representational registers that we hope resonate with others? I envisioned the film essay as the space within which I would explore these questions. Rather than trying to theorize the essay, historiography or hegemony, I decided to approach them from my practice as a filmmaker – filming and writing essays. I departed from the practical exploration of a poetics that seeks to break away from the forms that have hitherto been instrumental in establishing and advancing hegemonies, their monopoly on the historical narrative and the representation of society in the present and past. I was primarily concerned with the form in which ideas and history appear to us through the senses, the problem of representing worlds that are no longer there, of ideas that have no body of their own.

On 18 June, Hannes Verhoustraete, artistic researcher at KASK & Conservatorium, will defend his doctorate to obtain the title Doctor of Arts. The day before, the two films that are part of the PhD project will be screened at KASKcinema — at 18:00 Un pays plus beau qu'avant (2019, 67') and at 20:00 Broken View (2023, 75'). Both screenings are free and don't require a reservation.

Broken View (2023) is a poetic essay film on the colonial gaze and the magic lantern. This early type of image projector was used in Belgian colonial propaganda, showcasing the good works of the Church, State and industry. Lantern projections were an effective way of selling the colonial project to a somewhat reluctant Belgian public. However fragile images made of glass may be, many thousands survived. Often lavishly hand colored, these tainted, horribly beautiful images helped shape the ways in which Europeans viewed, thought of, spoke about, and treated the colonial other. This tension between aesthetic experience and the reverberations of colonial ideology is central to the film. In composing an associative fabric of assemblages and collages, the film attempts to map the colonial gaze from a broken view, how it persists across time and shapes the way we view, think of, and speak about the past.

On 18 June, Hannes Verhoustraete, artistic researcher at KASK & Conservatorium, will defend his doctorate to obtain the title Doctor of Arts. The day before, the two films that are part of the PhD project will be screened at KASKcinema — at 18:00 Un pays plus beau qu'avant (2019, 67') and at 20:00 Broken View (2023, 75'). Both screenings are free and don't require a reservation.

Un pays plus beau qu’avant (2019) is a documentary film about a Congolese businessman in Brussels. The wanderings of Jean-Simon reveal a microcosm of informal commerce within the Congolese community. The everyday economic urgency of this ‘humble salesman’ is tied to the political and humanitarian urgency that animates the diaspora faced with the situation in Congo today and colonial history. The film orbits around these two imperatives, in a negotiation between here and elsewhere, the past and the present.