A listing of recent events at the Columbia Maison Française is displayed below. Please also visit our Video and Audio Recordings page for access to recordings of selected past events. Click here for News about the Maison Française.
Location: Lawn on east side of Buell Hall (in between Buell and Philosophy)
Participants to include Leang Seckon (Cambodian artist, creator of Flowering Parachute Skirt), Arn Chorn-Pond (genocide survivor and founder of Cambodian Living Arts), John Rowan (National President of Vietnam Veterans of America) and Paul Critchlow (Vietnam veteran, graduate of Columbia School of Journalism and Vice Chairman of Public Markets at Bank of America)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
A parachute from the Vietnam War, transformed by Cambodian artist Leang Seckon into an emblem of reconciliation, will be the centerpiece of a public peace gathering involving Vietnamese and Cambodian survivors of that war as well as U.S. veterans at Columbia University.
The parachute, which fell to earth in Seckon’s village during the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, has been repurposed into a sculpture, Flowering Parachute Skirt, and decorated with flowers cut from sarongs from his home village as well as from fabrics given by the Cambodian-American community in the Bronx – turning it into the skirt of a fantastical soldier figure.
Arn Chorn-Pond, genocide survivor and founder of Cambodian Living Arts, will join Seckon, along with other survivors and U.S. veterans, in a ritual to help both groups heal from the trauma of that war. “By adding beauty to this object of war, I hope to transform it into an instrument of peace and healing,” Seckon said.
Limited seating. PLEASE NOTE: Online registration closed on 4/10 at 2 p.m. However, this does not mean event is full, so you are welcome to attend without registration.
Conference opens on April 10th at 2:30 p.m. with keynote by Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Leo Spitzer (Dartmouth College): Small Acts of Repair: The Unclaimed Legacy of Transnistria
The aftermath of mass murders is felt not only by the victims and their families but also by their descendants, who find themselves in the paradoxical situation of suffering the psychological effects of events they did not experience themselves.
It is this transmission of trauma that the notion of postmemory – developed in 1997 by Marianne Hirsch in her book Family Frames: Photography Narrative and Postmemory, and more recently in her 2012 book The Generation of Postmemory -- attempts to describe. Hirsch demonstrates how an indirect form of memory may develop in individuals who did not experience a traumatic event personally but feel its active presence within their family.
A panel discussion with Oluchi Enuha (iROKOtv Plus business), Ngozi Odita (founder of Society HAE and Executive Director, Social Media Week Lagos), Nikyatu Jusu (filmmaker/teacher), Priscilla Djirackor (editor, Buni TV), Aminata Diop (editor-in-chief, Tamaji Magazine) and Frances Bodomo (filmmaker)
Moderated by Derica Shields, film critic for Okayafrica
This panel examines how the next generation of African media makers are using new technological tools in exciting and evolving ways to amplify their voices and find new audiences. These media makers’ use of Skype, cell phones, and portable cameras is leading to an explosion of voices across the digital landscape, from blogs, to new forms of guerilla filmmaking, to new networks of distribution. These media makers are pooling their resources, creating new opportunities for filmmakers who in previous generations lacked the necessary tools to make films. The panel features filmmakers, new media distributors, critics, and academics. Film clips will also be shown.
Event organized by the African Film Festival and co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française, Institute of African Studies and School of the Arts Film Division
A roundtable with Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Frédéric Worms, Mathias Girel, and Larry McGrath
Special Centennial Event
2013 marks the centennial of a memorable visit by French philosopher Henri Bergson to Columbia University as a visiting professor and Columbia President Butler's personal guest. The Maison Française Centennial in 2013 is an opportunity for this panel of Bergson specialists to evoke the relationship between Bergsonism and American philosophy, pragmatism and William James in particular, and to examine the continuing influence of Bergson's major concepts, including temporality, life, difference, and novelty.
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a Professor of French and Philosophy at Columbia, whose many publications include Bergson Postcolonial. Frédéric Worms is the Director of the International Center for the Study of Contemporary French Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy at University of Lille III, and the author of many books and editions on Bergson. Mathias Girel is Professor of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and a specialist of pragmatism. Larry McGrath is a PhD candidate at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation examines Bergson's 1913 trip to the U.S.
A panel discussion with Éric Fassin and Mary Anne Case
A proposed law in France to allow gay couples to marry and adopt children has prompted mass demonstrations for and against "le mariage pour tous" and vigorous discussions in the French news media and in Parliament. In the U.S., 9 states and Washington DC have by now legalized same-sex marriage, and this term, the Supreme Court is considering two cases that may prove momentous. On the anniversary of the passage of the first same-sex marriage law (the Netherlands, April 1, 2001), leading experts compare French and American legal approaches and social debates around gay marriage.
Éric Fassin is a sociologist at Paris 8 University. His work focuses on sexual and racial politics from a comparative perspective. His publications include Le sexe politique (2009) and Linversion de la question homosexuelle (2008), as well as Démocratie précaire (2012). He contributes to public debates on key social issues including gay rights and immigration politics.
Mary Anne Case is Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School, and Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor, Columbia Law School. Her work to date has focused on a feminist, constitutional, comparative and historical perspective on the regulation of sex, gender, sexuality and the family. She has published a number of law review articles on questions of same-sex marriage, including "What Feminists Have to Lose in Same-Sex Marriage Litigation,"57 UCLA Law Review 1199 (2010).
Screening to coincide with the exhibit of works by Vann Nath and Séra
Rithy Panh is a critically acclaimed Cambodian documentary film director and screenwriter. His films focus on the aftermath of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. His family was expelled from Phnom Penh in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge, and many of them died in remote labor camps in rural Cambodia.
In this documentary, Vann Nath and Chum Me, two survivors of the Khmer Rouge's Tuol Sleng Prison, are reunited and revisit the former prison, now a museum in Phnom Penh. They meet their former captors guards, interrogators, a doctor and a photographer in a chilling, confrontational review of Cambodia's violent history.
Exhibit generally open for public viewing Mondays-Fridays, 12-5:30 p.m., plus first and last Saturdays (April 13 and May 4, 12-5:30 p.m.). Please check back here for any exceptions or changes to this schedule.
PLEASE NOTE: The exhibit will be closed May 1-2 due to a conference. The exhibit will be open on May 3 from 3-5:30 p.m. and on the last day, Saturday, May 4, 12-5:30 p.m.
Exhibit featured in a Columbia News video:
Exhibit curated by Soko Phay-Vakalis and Pierre Bayard
This exhibit features seventy works of visual arts (paintings, drawings, photographs) made by the great contemporary artists Vann Nath and Séra (both survivors of the genocide), as well as works by emerging artists who were invited to create artworks evoking the genocide during three "memory workshops" held between 2008 and 2012. This exhibit highlights the dynamism and the strength of creation of three generations of Cambodian artists. The diversity and the polysemy of their artworks testify also to the passage from I to we, from an intimate way of living and thinking to a collective consciousness.
Additional works are on display at the Italian Academy, 1161 Amsterdam.
Introduction by Jorge Otero-Pailos and response by Stephen Murray
Event location: Italian Academy, 1161 Amsterdam Avenue
Between gothic and classical styles, Notre Dame de Paris was the most accomplished cathedral in Europe in the early 13th century. Seven centuries later, Viollet le Ducs work made it the most emblematic example of 19th century restoration. The Cathedral is a double icon and a masterpiece of both the 13th and 19th centuries, and Benjamin Moutons contemporary interventions challenge us to once again rethink historic preservation for the 21st century. Benjamin Mouton is Chief Architect and Inspector General of Historical Monuments, and his responsibilities include the restoration of Notre-Dame.
Event presented by the Historic Preservation Program in collaboration with the Richard Morris Hunt Foundation, Columbia Maison Française, and Department of Art and Archeology.
Panelists discuss French policies put into place by the French Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation (Commission pour l'Indemnisation des Victimes de Spoliations, CIVS), created in September 1999 to compensate Jewish families and individuals despoiled in France as a result of the anti-Semitic legislation adopted during World War II. They also explore debates around whether this model of "reparation" can be applied to other categories of victims including descendants of slaves.
Anne Grynberg is Professor of Contemporary History at INALCO, University of Paris I-Sorbonne, and Scientific Director of the History Committee of the CIVS.
Jacques Revel is a Professor of History and former President of the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.His scholarship centers on historiography and the social and cultural history of Early and Modern Europe. His publications include Jeux déchelles: La micro-analyse à lexpérience (1996), Histories: French Constructions of the Past, with Lynn Hunt (1996), Fernand Braudel et lhistoire (1999), Les usages politiques du passé (2001), and Penser par cas (2005).
