In her book Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon contends that a ghost is “not simply a dead person,” but a form by which something that was lost makes itself known or apparent to us, even if fleetingly or in a barely visible manner. Forces from the past and their shadowy manifestations control present life in more complicated ways than we tend to admit. A great many things, Gordon argues, “haunt like a ghost and, by way of this haunting, demand reparation, justice or at least a response.” In this seminar we will look into representations of hauntings in film, in order to examine the entanglements of horror and history.

Dr. Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. She is a guest professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg (AdBK) and a theory tutor at the Dutch Art Institute. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Third Text, Afterall, e-flux journal, Manifesta Journal, and Texte zur Kunst. She is the editor of a forthcoming book series on the antipolitical turn to be published by Sternberg Press. Together with Kader Attia and Anselm Franke, she organized the conference and podcast series “The White West: Whose Universal,” which took place at HKW Berlin, and she was a member of the 2022 Berlin Biennial artistic team.