As part of the public program accompanying Rene Matić’s exhibition AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH, this workshop series expands on questions of identity and belonging through various forms of collective study. The program includes a screening, a performance by mandhla., and a lecture performance by Octavia Bürgel. 

For Rene Matić, the search for “home” has always been an underlying theme in their practice—be it through photography, film, sound, or poetry. Experiencing the world from within the diaspora, Matić turns to the in-between crevices of their own layered identities (Black, British, and queer) to look for narratives of care and survival in the face of alienation and unbelonging. Through their lens, Matić makes visible the myriad ways people step out of the comfort zone of discretely defined senses of self to find each other in this fractured world. 

Matić understands home as being everywhere, as a utopia that has always already existed, a hidden place where the personal and the political contrast and converge in and as a blur. This blur is an optics born from displacement, yet it also speaks to our refusal to be defined or pinned down, as well as our capacity to open up ourselves to connection and kinship. The blur is also subversive, introducing a “glitch” into systems where prevailing politics seeks to keep people apart and isolated. As photographer Zun Lee writes in his essay Home Is Where We Displace Our Selves, “[...] abolition starts with the self, so we may lose our individuated selves in favor of a blurred, irreducible sociality of the senses.”[1]

Through this workshop series, we invite participants to explore ways of blurring boundaries and risking the comfort of selfhood in connection with Matić’s work. Together, we will examine how personal and collective histories can give renewed and plural meanings to home.

Rene Matić’s film Many Rivers (2022, 30 min) is a moving portrait of the artist’s father, Paul, and the struggles he has faced throughout life. From the perspective of an intimate family story, the film sheds light on the divisive, often violent structures of race and class in post-war Britain. Abandoned by his Irish mother and growing up as a black child with a distanced father in Peterborough in the UK, Paul has found a sense of belonging and community among the local skinheads. The British skinhead subculture emerged in the late 60s when white and British Jamaican kids danced side by side to ska and reggae. It later became associated with the far right and football scenes. For Matić, the skinhead culture is the perfect metaphor for the lived experience of in-betweenness, bringing together different strands of origin, history, and identity. At the crux of Paul’s story is a working class diaspora’s survival and triumph. As Matić describes, “this story is about the cause and effect of pain and suffering, and what, if anything, saves us in the end.”

The screening will be followed by a discussion, moderated by Nan Xi (Assistant Curator) and Pauline Herrmann (Curatorial Fellow). The discussion will draw inspiration from photographer Zun Lee's essay Home Is Where We Displace Our Selves and will be held in English. Free entry with limited capacity, registration required. Please RSVP to info ​@​ cca.berlin.