A Night at the Museum. Christophe Boltanski in conversation about King Kasaï (2023)
To kick off the interdisciplinary workshop "(M)y Night at the Museum: Spaces of Imagination and Critical Acts in Contemporary Literature and Art" hosted by the Centre français at Freie Universität Berlin, French author and journalist Christophe Boltanski will be a guest at Lettrétage. The event focuses on his 2023 book King Kasaï from the series Ma nuit au musée, for which he spent a night at the Africa Museum in Tervuren. The starting point is the taxidermied elephant "King Kasaï," which was killed in the Congo in 1956 and displayed at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. Boltanski uses this former symbol as a springboard to reflect on the violent history of Belgian colonial rule in the Congo and the traces it has left within the museum and its collections. In conversation with ethnologist Drossilia Dikegue Igouwe, and moderated by art historian Anna Helfer, the discussion will explore questions of memory and decolonization in both museum and literary contexts.
Registration: frankreichzentrum@fu-berlin.de by September 20, 2026.
You can also join us online via Webex: Webex access
To the workshop
The lecture-débat serves as the opening for the three-day interdisciplinary workshop "(M)y Night at the Museum" (September 24–26, 2026, Freie Universität Berlin), a collaboration between the Centre for French Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, the Institute for History and Theory of Art at the Catholic Private University Linz, and the German Center for Art History Paris.
The workshop examines the French book series Ma nuit au musée from the perspectives of literary, art, and cultural studies, as well as museology. Since 2018, writers have spent a night alone in a museum as part of the series and subsequently written a text about the experience. The workshop focuses on questions regarding the museum as a space of imagination, memory and time, authorship, and the body.
Christophe Boltanski
Christophe Boltanski is a writer and journalist who has worked for, among others, Libération and the Nouvel Observateur. His journalistic work has repeatedly taken him to sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. In 2010, he was awarded the Prix Bayeux-Calvados for war correspondents for his reporting on a mine in the Congo. He received the Prix Femina for his novel La Cache (2015). His other publications include Le Guetteur (2018), Les Vies de Jacob (2021), and King Kasaï (2023).
Drossilia Dikegue Igouwe
Drossilia Dikegue Igouwe is an ethnologist who earned her doctorate at the University of Augsburg, focusing on the restitution and re-evaluation of museum objects from Central Africa. She recently completed her academic traineeship in the Africa Department at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin and currently works as a freelance curator.
Anna Helfer
Anna Helfer is an art historian and research associate at the Collaborative Research Center "Intervening Arts" at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on artistic practices of intervention and decolonization, as well as the intertwined histories of Europe and Africa.
