Kumjana Novakova. Photo: Dragica Nikolovska. Courtesy of the artist. 

Kumjana Novakova, Narrating the Impossible: Along the Archive, Against the Archive  

lecture performance  

Starting from her recent film Silence of Reason, Kumjana Novakova unveils the process of transformation of the archive of an international court case tried at the ICTY in The Hague into a fragmented audiovisual women’s archive of survival. Through the gesture of cinematic re-archiving, a major forensic archive that is governed, stored and managed outside of the political and social space it belongs to is reclaimed and activated from inside the geographies of survival. The film and its collective public performance activate a process along the archive and against the archive as they situate us as close as possible to the women witnesses who survived sexual violence and torture on the territory of the Bosnian town of Foča and its surroundings in 1992 and 1993. The event is part of the Summer school Our Many Easts public program 

Kumjana Novakova is a research-based filmmaker working also as film curator and lecturer. Born in Yugoslavia, Novakova has worked in film and the arts since 2006. She has co-founded the Pravo Ljudski Film Festival in Sarajevo and headed the Film Department of the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Skopje. As an artist, Novakova explores the languages of cinema researching relationships related to power, war, memories and (un)belonging. Novakova teaches cinema as an associate lecturer at film.factory of Bela Tarr in Sarajevo, ESCAC School of Cinema, Spain and the MA in Film Research of the Netherlands Film Academy.