this human world- 10 Years of Dialogue through Film and Research

On 6 December 2025 APPEAR in cooperation with “this human world”-  Human Rights Film Festival organised the premiear  of the film “How To Build A Library”, at the TOP Kino, an Austrian premiere. The film offered an intimate, ground-level portrait of two Nairobi women working to transform a former whites-only colonial library into an inclusive cultural centre. With clear, grounded storytelling, it foregrounded local voices and everyday challenges—community building, negotiating power structures, and securing resources—while probing wider questions of public space, cultural memory, and access to knowledge. After the screening Dr. Gabriele Slezak led a focused discussion on decolonising knowledge. Drawing on Gayatri C. Spivak’s concept of epistemic violence, she called for “unlearning” discriminatory biases and asked: Which stories are told or omitted in libraries and archives? Who tells them, and in whose interest? How do colonial afterlives shape education and research today? The conversation linked these questions to APPEAR collaborations highlighting practical steps toward change across libraries, archives, and museums, and underscoring the partnership’s ongoing commitment to rethinking whose knowledge counts.