Sandra Muteteri Heremans is a visual artist and filmmaker with a background in art history and anthropology. Born in Rwanda and raised for the most part in Belgium, Heremans is interested in the artistic and political legacies of the twentieth-century in today’s world. Her current research for a film in progress investigates the experiences of African students who studied in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Through these protagonists, Heremans charts transnational lives in the context of newly independent states, showing the complex entanglements between the communist “Second World” and the national liberation movements the “Third World” sought to establish, and in so doing, excavates and reactivates histories buried under decades of myopic “First World” triumphalism.
In Search of Gilbert and Idrissa: African Students in the USSR – Performing the Past by Heremans employs screenplay as a research method to investigate the personal experiences of African students, their personal lives, personal positioning, and (non)negotiation with communist ideology; the long path embedded in international debates atmosphere before arriving in the USSR and after their return to their homelands. Through the figures of Gilbert and Idrissa, the story’s protagonists, the artist explores the historical potentiality of two intersecting narratives: postcolonial and East European, through counternarratives coming from more informal archives in the development of her research, such as oral histories and family archives. The performance and the reading are experiments in rehearsing ways of engaging with oral knowledge beyond reproducing the violence inherent as much in the Cold War era as in the present world.
In Search of Gilbert and Idrissa: African Students in the USSR – Performing the Past is a work-in-progress that has been iterated through the following formats:
In Search of Gilbert and Idrissa: African Students in the USSR - Performing the Past is work-in-progress dat reeds in verschillende vormen werd gepresenteerd:
- As a performative reading: In Search of Gilbert and Idrissa: African Students in the USSR - Performing the Past, Decoratelier (as part of MOUSSEM STAGES), Brussels, 2023.
- Performance and reading: In Search of Gilbert and Idrissa: African Students in the USSR – Performing the Past, The Mosaic Rooms, Contemporary Culture from the Arab World and Beyond, London, 2023
- Online publication: In Search of Gilbert and Idrissa: African Students in the USSR. Artistic Research through the Development of Fictional Characters, Prospections, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, 2022;
- Lecture-performance and publication, as part of Lectures on the Weather, Performance and fieldwork, curator: Anna Smolak, Tranzit.ro/Bucharest and Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, Silistea Snagovului, Romania, 2022;
- Publication: In search of Basebya Gilbert: Exploring the experience of African students in the USSR through fiction, in: Luntumbue, V., et al (eds.), Places in the Sun: Post-Colonial Dialogues in Europe and Beyond. Brussels: Institute for a Greater Europe, 2021;
- Lecture-performance, as part of the artistic residency program at WIELS, Brussels; June 2021;
