30 December 2025
18:10–19:40
Ixmucané Aguilar / Xmukné in Kʼiche
Ondjembo yo Null Vier
The Gun of Null Vier
an radio documentary on the
Genocide in Namibia – 85 min
Documentary by Ixmucané Aguilar © 2022. All rights reserved.
Aural interpretations and poetry:
Prince Kamaazengi, Nesindano Khoes Namise
Sound Designer: Philip Röder
Ondjembo yo Null Vier is a multilayered documentary by Berlin-based Guatemalan artist Ixmucané Aguilar, presenting a portrait of the genocide in Namibia committed by the German Empire between 1904 and 1908. It amplifies inherited testimonies, chants, and mourning rituals shared by OvaHerero and Nama communities today.
Genocide in Namibia is an especially sensitive matter—its history has at times been ignored, underestimated, or even denied outright. In the documentary “Ondjembo yo Null Vier –The Gun of Null Vier”, Ixmucané Aguilar worked in close collaboration with Nama and OvaHerero people who vividly evoke memories and rituals of mourning caused by human loss and land dispossession under German colonial period.
The acoustic component of this work, lasting 85 minutes, broadcasts field recordings of spoken testimony, community chants, and environmental sounds from the Namib Desert. Each voice entrusted to this documentary contributes to a intricated “map” of collective memory, documenting the spatial and social effects of colonial violence—from concentration camps to forced displacement, from the loss of ancestral lands to abuses under the new masters, and to forced labor in German enterprises.
These narratives emerge as documentary fragments—living voices that insist on defending memory as an invocation to witness, and as a refusal to remain passive in the face of social injustice. Rather than a linear historical account of a distant place and its distant past, this work engages narratives as chronicles calling to be recognised as pieces of humanity and time.
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