To mark the start of the interdisciplinary workshop ‘(M)y Night at the Museum: Space for Imagination and Critical Action in Contemporary Literature and Art’, organised by the Centre for French Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, the French writer and journalist Christophe Boltanski will be a guest at the Lettrétage. The focus is on his text *King Kasaï*, published in 2023 as part of the *Ma nuit au musée* series, for which he spent a night at the Africa Museum in Tervuren.
The starting point is the taxidermied elephant *King Kasaï* on display there, which was killed in the Congo in 1956 and exhibited at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. Boltanski uses this former symbol as a starting point for reflections on the violent history of Belgian colonial rule in the Congo and the traces it has left behind in the museum and its collections.
In conversation with the ethnologist Drossilia Dikegue Igouwe, moderated by the art historian Anna Helfer, the discussion will focus on questions of memory and decolonisation in museum and literary contexts.
Registration: frankreichzentrum@fu-berlin.de by 20 September 2026.
Participation is also possible online via Webex: Webex access
About the workshop
The Lecture-Débat marks the start of the three-day interdisciplinary workshop ‘(M)y Night at the Museum’ (24–26 September 2026, Freie Universität Berlin), a collaboration between the Centre for French Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, the Institute for the History and Theory of Art at the Catholic Private University of Linz, and the German Forum for Art History in Paris.
The workshop examines the French book series *Ma nuit au musée* from the perspectives of literary studies, art history, cultural studies and museology. Since 2018, as part of the series, writers have spent a night alone in a museum and subsequently written a text about this experience. The workshop focuses on questions concerning the museum as a space of the imagination, memory and time, authorship and the body.
Additional information
Dates
September 2026
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