Cure Out and About with Markus Messling
WHEN
WHERE
University of Amsterdam & Online
LANGUAGE
ENGLISH
PROGRAMME
On 20 February, CURE Director Markus Messling will deliver a lecture on “Cultural Practices of Reparation: Aims and Case Studies” as part of the REPAIR Lecture series organised by the Anthropology Department of the University of Amsterdam (UvA).
Kader Attia coined the famous dictum that ‘reparation is the awareness of the wound’. Many forms of destruction — caused by violence, cultural loss, natural disasters, or global heating — are irreversible. In cases shaped by historical guilt, legal measures and material compensation can provide recognition and are often necessary steps toward reparation. Yet irreparable damage frequently persists across generations. This is where cultural practices come in: literature and film, archives and testimonies, theatre and museums, public debate, rituals and forums. They create spaces in which contradictions, ambivalence, and even utopian possibilities can be explored. The lecture illustrates this through concrete examples and introduces the Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE), founded in Saarbrücken in 2024.
The REPAIR Lectures are an interdisciplinary series on contemporary reparation claims and policies worldwide. Delivered by leading experts, they examine how such claims emerge, how they function politically, economically, and morally, and what they reveal about today’s societies. The series is hosted by the REPAIR project at the UvA’s Anthropology Department and co‑sponsored by the Amsterdam Centre for Conflict Studies (ACCS).
To attend the event, please register here.
