Centre for the Study of State Violence Grand Opening

Opening Ceremony
6-8 p.m. | Nipissing Theatre
MC: Dr. Scott Russell, Nipissing Chancellor 

Film screening of “aadizookewinini” by Nipissing University graduate, Megan Paulin, MA History.

Performance of “Containment” by Derek Neal, composed for a quartet for piano, trumpet, flute, and violin. Performed by Chloe Weston on Piano, Janis Herzog on trumpet, Graham Finlay on flute, and Jennifer Hedican on violin.

Keynote Address: Dr. Lilia Topouzova, Associate Professor, University of Toronto

After Violence: History, Memory, and the Work of Bearing Witness

ABSTRACT: What does it mean to spend a life documenting political violence? What happens when that life is also the subject? Lilia Topouzova grew up under, and in the long aftermath of, Bulgaria's communist authoritarian regime, and came of age in Canada. For more than two decades, her research has moved between archives, oral history, documentary film, creative nonfiction, and contemporary art, tracing the experiences of survivors and perpetrators of the gulag through the purged files of the secret police that sought to erase them. In this lecture, she reflects on how to work with partial evidence and incomplete testimony as both a scholar and an artist—an unsilencing that is, by necessity, an interdisciplinary practice, one that makes apparent that what can be archived cannot always be filmed, and what can be filmed cannot always be written. The lecture asks what it means to bear witness, and what ethical responsibilities emerge when the subjects of one's research become part of one's own life.

Reception
8-10 p.m. | Small Cafeteria 

Appetizers & Cash Bar