every 4th sunday of the month is scifi sunday! with screenings, discussions, guests, stay tuned for surprising space explorations.

27 April 18h – Chinese SciFi

Zu Gast: Jessica Imbach, Junior Professor in Freiburg and specialist for aesthetics and politics of genre fiction in China, focusing in particular on science fiction

Wir werden also über Fortschrittsglauben und -geschichten in China reden – und wie sich das vom Westen unterscheidet. Gibt es überhaupt so etwas wie eine “chinesische” SciFi-Tradition? Was wäre daran charakteristisch? Lässt sich via SciFi Gesellschaftskritik leichter an den Zensoren vorbeischmuggeln?

What started in 1985 as an intellectual debate on the meaning and relevance of tradition (Confucianism in particular), science, and Western theory to China’s integration into the global economic system, was by the time it violently ended in 1989 a nation-wide discussion on national identity and globalisation that also had an enormous influence on popular culture.

Und was hat es mit dem Sinofuturismus auf sich?

The construction of the Chinese city as a digital object thus rests on a certain set of anxieties distinct to the West, besides the futurism represented by Chongqing. These anxieties focus on a fear of China’s rise and the loss of the dynamism, novelty, and urban modernity that historically were viewed as the exclusive domain of a handful of Euro-American cities. The result of this is that the city of the future is imagined in terms of a direct usurpation of the urban modernity that European and North-American cities have nominally abandoned—as such, what it recognizes as futuristic in Beijing or Chongqing is limited to the tropes that it understands as belonging to the lost future-past of the modernist Western city.

and afterwards – maybe a movie, if we feel like it? some chinese blockbusting?

23 Mar 17h – The smell and taste of SciFi

as part of the Todoli rare citrus spring edition (21-23 march):

diesen monat soll es um geschmäcker und gerüche auf fremden planeten gehen – wie imaginieren wir andere geschmackswelten?

very special guest: Lorenza Mondada, Professor of linguistics, Uni Basel and specialized in the language we use for taste and smell – she is interestd in the embodied grounding of sensory semantics, qualia, sensory lexicons, and terminological repertoires.

I’ll bring the anthropological diversity in relation to the senses (as a kind of natural experiment in being confronted to otherness) and the issue of ineffability (the experience of lacking words to say things related to sensoriality). We can of course also speak of what I have researched, smelling and tasting in social interaction, including how people learn to taste and become professional tasters, etc.

wir reden aber auch über ausserirdische pflanzen/früchte bzw. darüber wie diese imaginiert werden. können wir uns überhaupt gerüche/geschmäcker vorstellen, die vollkommen ‘alien’ sind? welche interkulturellen unterschiede gibt es beim riechen/schmecken, gibt es geschmacksrichtungen für die wir gar keine knospen haben – die uns also immer fremd bleiben werden, und grundsätzlich: was ist die funktion (und wo sind die grenzen) des ‘ganz anderen’ in der scifi-imagination?

23 Feb – the big DEFA SciFi binge

we start with a marvel:

4 DEFA sci-fi movies in a row — from 1960 to 1976 futures, from collectivist, internationalist political messages about the persisting dangers of nuclear arms to flirts with individualism and private happiness to the slow death of science fiction utopianism sunday feb 23, coffee and introduction from 4pm, we’ll have pizza or smth in between  DEFA, the state-owned film studio of the GDR, produced 4 sci-fi films between 1960 and 1976. we will watch them all in a row! (ca. 1h30 each) Der Schweigende Stern (1960) Signale – ein Weltraumabenteuer (1970) Eolomea (1972) Im Staub der Sterne (1976)

DEFA avoided the phrase ‘science fiction’ in favour of the vaguer but revealing ‘utopian film’. This deliberate renaming underscores both the ideological disquiet and political ambition that science fiction aroused in the East. On the one hand ‘science fiction’ seemed problematically far removed from the socialist realism that the regime favoured; on the other hand such a renaming imputed to the genre a utopian spirit, one that would recast it in unalloyed political idealism and collectivity. Hence, the earlier utopian films celebrated triumphs of a deliberately international crew, rather like an Eastern-led, escape-velocity United Nations that promised an internationalist future for deep space and its human inhabitants.

next sci-fi sunday apr 27, more program details coming soon!