The Power of Culture

What does the abbreviation VOC stand for? United East India Company or Perish Under Corruption? This is part of a study which Ade Darmawan and Reza Afisina are conducting during their stay at the Utrecht Casco House.

What do you do if you suddenly wake up after sleeping in a cave for 309 years? That is what happens to the characters in Walid Al Alphy's stage play People of the cave, performed on 25 September 2009 in the Rotterdam theatre.

People laughed at the idea of Dutch-Iraqi filmmaker Mohammed Al-Daradji at the time, but now his mobile cinema is touring Iraq.

Lebanese video artist, curator and photographer Akram Zaatari is also an 'archive artist', since he claims that collecting is an art form. The old photographs he showes differ significantly from the images we normally see from the Middle East. Recently he was a guest at The Human Body Special, as part of  the Café Mediterranée programme in Amsterdam.

How can a general history be distilled from the chaos of events? It's questions like these which the Lebanese artist poses himself and his audience during his perfomances.

According to the Angolese writer, identity is always the central issue in the modern literature of young countries.

There is no unambiguous message in the work of the Angolese artist and poet. With his sharp wit and clear language he makes his audience laugh and uneasily fall silent at the same time.

Invitation to a voyage is a compilation of the best French-language poetry from the African isles in the Indian Ocean. Poet Nassuf Djailani hopes 'his' Mayotte wil get its place on the map in the literary sense.