Extra Academy is a collaboration between the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Sint Lucas Antwerp and Royal conservatory of Antwerp. They organize an open program of lectures, performances, workshops and screenings around artistic practices, reflection and research. Since September 2024 they hold there monthly meetings at Stadsform. The program is in English and open for non students also, no need to register!

How do you work with stories filled with trauma?

Visitors are asked to bring their smartphones and headphones for the interactive listening experience.

Still from InFlowOfWords.

Eliane Esther Bots is a Dutch filmmaker and visual artist based in The Hague. Her practice starts with non-fiction film and extends to installations, audio, performance, and publications. Central to her practice are questions around self-narration: how do people tell their own stories, especially when those stories are shaped by conflict, loss, or a traumatic event? And what responsibility does the listener bear?

During her interactive lecture for EXTRA Academy, Bots focuses on the role of listening with non-fiction filmmaking. How do you work ethically with stories that are entrusted to you? How can you hold space for them, and what forms of attention do they require?

The starting point for the lecture is her recently published non-fiction artist’s book The Daughters, The Interpreters and The Family, in which transcripts, poems, dreams, and drawings come together around conflict-related memories. Three perspectives are central: second-generation Dutch-Bosnian women, interpreters at the Yugoslavia Tribunal, and a family that fled the war in Chechnya. An accompanying audio track guides the audience through this layered constellation of voices via a collective listening experience.

Bots also shows her award-winning film In Flow of Words, which focuses on three interpreters from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. While they spent years translating the testimonies of victims and perpetrators without giving space to their own emotions, the film places their experiences and inner voices at the forefront.

Photos © The Book Photographer.

Bots' work has been screened and awarded at international festivals such as IDFA, Locarno, and the Berlinale. In Flow of Words received a Golden Calf for Best Short Documentary and was nominated for the European Film Awards.