This commentary on Gregg Mitman and Sarita Siegel’s In the Shadow of Ebola is intended as a post-script to the forum on the film which appeared earlier this year. Lachenal prepared this text, written in Paris, for a special session of the African Studies Association meetings in San Diego on 20 November 2015.
The first time I saw the film, …
A French version of this piece was originally published in Libération on 18 September 2014.
“It is useless to laboriously interpret disaster movies in terms of their relation to an ‘objective’ social crisis or even to an ‘objective’ phantasm of disaster,” wrote Jean Baudrillard in 1981. “It is in another sense that (…) it is the social itself that, in …
Drive by the building. Roll down the window. Look in the opposite direction. Chat with the driver. Shoot. Several times. Keep looking elsewhere. Hide the camera under your legs. Close the window.
I took this picture of the Institut d’Enseignement Médical (IEM, Institute of Medical Education) in December 2007 in Kasa-Vubu, Kinshasa. The IEM was designed in the late fifties …
This series is an exercise in fieldwork through material fragments – of coming to grips with the present pasts of scientific institutions in the ‘tropics’. It is about what biomedicine leaves behind – rusted instruments, congealed and unlabeled bloods slides – and the losses, pleasures, failures, and desires these leftovers relay. It is about photographs, blueprints, monuments and archives – …
In the Transcriptions series History and HIV, we would like to explore and discuss the various ways in which the past matters in the present HIV epidemic. Firstly how can we historicize HIV? That is, how to understand the virus, its emergence and the current epidemic historically over the long XXth century – taking HIV as a character of …