Paper short abstract:

Moving from the project 'MapsUrbe: The invisible City, Mapuche mapping of Santiago, Chile', the proposed paper addresses the process of collective elaboration of alternative and anti-colonial epistemologies with young Mapuche artists and intellectuals in the urban context of Santiago, Chile.

Paper long abstract:

Moving from the project 'MapsUrbe: The invisible City, Mapuche mapping of Santiago, Chile' (2017-2019), the proposed paper addresses the process of collective elaboration of alternative and anti-colonial epistemologies with young Mapuche artists and intellectuals in the urban context of Santiago, Chile.

At the intersection of Santiago's urban space materiality and the immaterial practices, interpretations and lived experiences of the Mapuche diaspora, the projects explored subversive aesthetics and collective imaginations as ways of producing meanings and knowledge. The construction of alternative epistemologies went through the exercise of thinking through the city and its landscapes, re-imagining both the past and the future and crafting alternative spatialities and temporalities. Disrupting the linear unfolding of History, subterranean memories, imaginations and ways of being in the world emerged within the capital city, playing with unexpected connections and routings. Seeking co-constructed epistemological elaborations and form of representation, the MapsUrbe project developed at the intersection of experimental ethnography (Irving 2007), site-specific theatre and performance (Pearson 2010), and critical cartography (Bryan and Wood 2010), engaging in the decolonisation of knowledge and representation.

Moving from the final artistic exhibition and performance (December 2018 - January 2019), the proposed paper elaborates on the articulation of meanings conveyed by the artistic and political gesture of 'performing the Mapuche city'. Driving on the imaginative dimension of politics and on the theoretical and epistemological significance of collective creative work, it undertakes the challenge of a redefinition of the political and poetical horizons of knowledge production and reproduction.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I focus on how contemporary art practitioners in in São Paulo's Residência Artística Cambridge engage with notions of epistemic disobedience and the production of knowledge, both responding to, and generating theoretical insights for a decolonial practice.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I focus on how contemporary art practitioners engage with notions of epistemic disobedience and the production of knowledge, both responding to, and generating theoretical insights for a decolonial practice. Based on ethnography of a year-long artistic residency programme, the Residência Artística Cambridge, a programme conducted within a 17 storey occupied building in the centre of São Paulo, I highlight how an artistic practice based on contexts rather than objects led artists to encounter, respond to and articulate an entirely different notion of 'participation' than that put forward by Claire Bishop (2004, 2006, 2012) or Nicolas Bourriaud (2002). This type of participation finds an echo with the emphasis the modernidad/colonialidad network and Global South platform more widely places upon knowledge generation and I suggest that what characterized and shaped these processes was their location: marginal to the apparel of mainstream academia, and positioned at the porous frontier of institutional and non-institutional contemporary art spaces, these practices occur instead from within a skein of networks and hierarchies deriving from multiple modes of life. If shifting the basis of our knowledge is shifting our way of being in this world, the artists of the Residência point toward how artistic practice can be theorized as relational and transformational, resignifying meaning to bring about as yet unknown imaginaries and societal change.

Paper short abstract:

I propose a paper and an example of a visual and sound installation on the realities of exotic and self-exoticizing representations, between the colonial past and the present of the tropical pictorialism of Trinidad and Tobago (WI).

Paper long abstract:

I propose an example of a visual and sound installation I created, that aims to demonstrate the construction of colonial pictorialism, by deconstructing the fictionalization of tropical representations of landscapes and of postcolonial identities on the territory of Trinidad and Tobago (WI), the location of my PhD fieldwork.

Colonial pictorialism represents the "new world" as a paradise created by European civilization that responds to its exotic imaginings.

The installation superposes paintings of colonial landscapes with personal contemporary digital photography. This visual corpus is accompanied by a sound installation in which the audience listens to self-exoticizing contemporary biographies while watching the new exoticized images.

The ultimate aim of my work is to see if it is possible to question the historical fictional construction of "the Tropics" by appropriating a new contemporary fictionality.

I propose to show one image and one oral story from the installation and to discuss in a paper format the decolonial and postcolonial theoretical frames that guide this art/anthropologic project. With this research, I wish to propose a different methodology that deals with colonial and postcolonial issues, specifically exotic and self-exoticizing representations. In the paper, I will explain the questions about decolonialization that took place during the fieldwork, and during the debates about the project in Trinidad, my own role as a foreign researcher in this process, and the attempts to make anthropological methodologies communicate with new artistic ways of researching. The paper describes the theoretical frames I used to create a decolonial method of investigation.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation reflects on experiences of artistic creation in the context of Singapore's commemoration of the bicentennial anniversary of British colonisation, and the artists' affective and analytical responses to the inexorable colonial legacy

Paper long abstract:

For Singapore, 2019 marks the year of the nation's bicentennial commemoration - a state-led initiative marking 200 years since the island was colonised by Sir Stamford Raffles. Discussions of the Bicentennial have been variously marked with disgust around the whitewashing of colonialism, and commendation of the sorely-needed opportunity for critical discourse on Singapore's colonial history. Neither does there seem to be an entirely coherent 'official stance'-for one, the Bicentennial Office maintains that the Bicentennial is in fact a commemoration of 700 years of history, because the Singapore story 'actually began in 1299'.

The Bicentennial programme has lined up numerous creative endeavours, including The Future Of Our Pasts Festival (TFOOPFest), a series of artistic approaches by young Singaporeans to lesser-known stories of Singapore's history. The proposed presentation draws on my experiences as a project creator for TFOOPFest and other discourses around the Bicentennial to explore some of the responses generated by issues of de/colonisation. While the project my team envisioned initially seemed to have little direct connection to British colonisation, the context of the Bicentennial proved difficult to ignore. Questions and possibilities arose of how best to handle the legacy of colonialism; merely mentioning marginal historical figures did not in itself seem sufficient to challenge the 'great man' historiography that Singapore struggles to escape.

As the creative process progressed, the haunting presence of Raffles that possessed us only grew stronger and more intimate. The exorcism remains a work in progress.