Henrik Ernstson on "One Table Two Elephants"
Special Lecture
28.09.2016 16:00 – 18:00
Location: Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Germany
Henrik Ernstson will present his film One Table Two Elephants (by Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson, 2016), an environmental film essay about bushmen b-boys, a flower kingdom and the ghost of a princess. The screening will be followed by a discussion of the movie.
The trailer can be found here. Entering the city through its plants and wetlands, the many-layered, painful and liberating history of the city emerges as we meet how biologists, hip hoppers, and wetland activists each searches for ways to craft symbols of unity and cohesion. But this is a fraught and difficult task. Perhaps not even desirable. Plants, aliens, memories and ghosts keep troubling efforts of weaving stories about this place called Cape Town. Situated and grounded in lived experiences across a range of groups, this film tries to be a vehicle for more general conversations about history/histories, post/de-colonization and the caring for nature, city, people and oneself. It's directed towards a wide audience, from the general public to students and scholars.
Dr. Henrik Ernstson is a Research Fellow at the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm and an Honorary Visiting Scholar at the African Centre for Cities at University of Cape Town, South Africa. He recently concluded a Postdoc with Stanford University’s Department of History (2013-2015). In his work he is developing a situated approach to urban political ecology with a special focus on global South urbanism and he extensive collaboration in South Africa, Uganda, UK, USA and Sweden and he has lead interdisciplinary research groups with studies in Cape Town, New Orleans, Stockholm and now recently in Kampala, but also ‘post-disciplinary’ collaborations around film and speculative design as research methods within the growing field of the Environmental Humanities. More information about his work at Situated Ecologies can be found here.