‘Special Screening: African Eskimo’

Tété- Michel Kpomassie and Claude Grunitzky will engage in vibrant discussion about life, travel and identity starting from analysis of the film “ The African Eskimo, a documentary about Michel Kpomassie, who as a boy in a remote African village learned about life in Greenland and became determined to visit the country. In the mid-1960s he went to Greenland and stayed for two years.
Tété-Michel Kpomassie is a Togolese traveller and writer. At the age of 16, overwhelmed after reading Robert Gessain’s Les Esquimaux du Groënland à l'Alaska, he left Togo to live for two years in Greenland, among the Inuit. When he returned home, he travelled the continent to tell his incredible journey in schools across Africa. In 1981, he published An African in Greenland, which has been translated into nine languages. Tété-Michel Kopamassie has travelled many times in Greenland and in Norway.
Claude Grunitzky is the founder of TRACE and TRUE Africa, a media tech platform championing young African voices all over the world. In 2017, TRUE Africa was funded by Google’s Digital News Initiative. Grunitzky was raised between Lomé, Togo; Washington, DC; Paris, London and New York. A graduate of MIT, Grunitzky is also the President of The Watermill Center, a laboratory of inspiration and performance, which provides a unique environment for a global community of emerging and established artists and thinkers to gather and explore new ideas together.