Framed by two films, visitors can listen to selections of 1960s and 70s Jamaican music from ska to reggae, while David Scott talks about the music and its contexts. 

In collaboration with the RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms, University of Potsdam, where Scott is a Mercator Fellow for the summer.


Negus – Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry
Invernomuto, Italy 2013, 11', Jamaican English

Embodied through Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry—godfather of dub music and foundational to the sound and culture of reggae—the film explores the convergence of history, myth, and magic through the ambivalent and manifold legacies of Ethiopia’s last emperor Haile Selassie I.


A David Scott Playlist
Performance Lecture

Taking on different forms of violence across the globe, colonialism has shaped not only infrastructure, resource distribution, and politics, but also the sonic environments that engage and connect people and movements. During the age of formal decolonization, music and musicians from colonized spaces were first and foremost activists and used their art to express anti-colonial visions for the future. Their music was, and must be considered as, part of the anti-colonial struggle. Together with Jamaican anthropologist David Scott, visitors take a journey through the ska and reggae soundscapes of 1960s and 70s Jamaica to explore how they shaped and accompanied movements of liberation.


PICO: Un Parlante de África en América
Invernomuto, Jim Christopher Nedd, Italy/USA 2017, 60', Spanish with English subtitles

The documentary film explores the extravagant cultural richness of the picó tradition: wooden structures covered in striking painted artworks, which house the powerful sound systems that animate the streets, bars, and restaurants in the Afro-Colombian cities of Barranquilla and Cartagena.

 

Further events featuring David Scott:

Sat., 3.6.2023 16:00
Between Revolution and Repair: Rereading Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”
Keynote Lecture

Fri., 7.7.2023 16:00–20:00
on movement(s) and collective(s)—Black Radicals in/and Berlin
Keynote Conversation