Fanon’s Shadow explores Peter Weiss’s experimentation with epic forms in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975–1981). Hell proposes to read Die Ästhetik as a counter-epic shaped by Dante’s Divine Comedy and Frantz Fanon’s On Violence (1960). She analyzes Weiss’s textualization of the Great Altar at Pergamon at the beginning of Die Ästhetik as a Fanonian reading. Staging Fanon’s Hegelian model of liberation through violence, this ekphrasis pre-structures Weiss’s entire epic and generates the text’s metaphor of slavery. However, Die Ästhetik ultimately shifts away from this celebration of violence toward a Dantean preoccupation with memory, suffering, and death.

The lecture draws on Hell’s book project, Epic’s Shadows, juxtaposing Weiss’s counter-epic and William Kentridge’s shadow frieze, Triumphs and Laments (2016–2023). Exploring their works through a postclassicist lens, Hell examines how these artists work on Europe’s (neo-)Roman legacy. Weiss’s collective ekphrasis and Kentridge’s fragmented frieze radically reimagine the ancient genre of the triumphal relief. Generating experimental epic forms, they critically revive Europe’s classical heritage, foregrounding empire and slavery.