A Picture Book Journey
Colonial Echoes - Traumatic Landscapes
Film screening & discussion with Sima Luipert and Wala' Maaitah in the frame of "Fractured Lifeworlds"
11. September 2026
19.00-22.00
19.00-22.00
Save the Date
For free
For adults
in English
At the beginning of the 20th century, Germany established its first extermination camp on Shark Island in present-day Namibia. Thousands of Ovaherero and Nama were murdered there during the first German genocide. After the camp closed, its traces were erased, but its resonance reached into National Socialism and still shapes the lives of survivors' descendants today. From the unburied remains on Shark Island to the Fractured Lifeworlds of the present, this screening and discussion asks what lines connect transnational topographies of violence, and what the struggle for justice means when repression does not end.
Waterberg Photographic RestitutionGerman Colonial Genocide in Namibia: Shark Island
2024, 36 min, English
By Forensis and Forensic Architecture in collaboration with NTLA and the Ovaherero Genocide Foundation
The film reconstructs the colonial landscape and the atrocities committed there. It was created by the research collective Forensic Architecture together with the Nama Traditional Leaders Association (NTLA) and the Ovaherero Genocide Foundation.
Following the screening, Sima Luipert (NTLA) and social psychologist Wala' Maaitah open a space for approaching transgenerational trauma not as an abstract concept but as something people carry through their lives. What power does it hold over those who inherit it, and how can it be reclaimed as a form of agency? And how do landscapes of genocide connect Shark Island, Berlin, and Gaza?
The evening brings together cinematic reconstruction, personal testimony, and scholarly reflection, an invitation to feel how the stories of land, bodies, and resistance are woven together.
This event accompanies the exhibition Fractured Lifeworlds: Ovaherero and Nama Claims for Intergenerational Justice, the result of five years of research by Forensis and Forensic Architecture in partnership with ECCHR, the NTLA, and further partners across Germany and Namibia. The public program for Fractured Lifeworlds is kindly supported in part by medico international and the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
