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- Convenors:
-
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn
(University of California, Los Angeles)
Maria Íñigo Clavo (Open University of Barcelona)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 03/017
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to detail how artistic and curatorial practice has informed the decolonial turn that so characterises contemporary scholarly thought and theorise how such practice may point to the decolonialities of tomorrow.
Long Abstract:
'Arts of the decolonial' seeks to detail how artistic and curatorial practice has informed the decolonial turn that so characterises contemporary scholarly thought and theorise how such practice may point to the decolonialities of tomorrow. While anthropological and art historical study has generally focused on how art is informed by, or otherwise illustrates, scholarly perspectives on decoloniality, this panel questions how artistic and/or curatorial practices might theorise or articulate diverse decolonialities to dynamically transform the canon. If we understand art as generative, how does the work of art practitioners of indigenous, diasporic and peripheral populations challenge Eurocentric paradigms of critical thought? How might, for example, such artistic practice disrupt notions of linear time? How might we conceptualise the reflexive curatorial practice of institutions that work from within a colonial matrix? What might be the sorts of languages that artists provide for thinking about the relation between objects and spectators, the commons and knowledge, theory and practice? How might such languages prefigure the decolonialities of tomorrow, and what might the theoretical basis upon which such contributions are enunciated? If indeed artistic and curatorial practice has played an important role in the facilitation of the decolonial zeitgeist, how might such practitioners be reshaping the very terrain upon which this edifice has been built in the present moment?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses how Latin American artistic practice dismantles the linear temporality of coloniality. Drawing on ethnography it focuses on art's potential to enact diverse futures from a non-linear standpoint, a subversive refusal to comply with the colonial project's teleological violence.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses recent theorisations of art's potential to enact non-linear temporalities, thus calling into question the ordered teleological violence of colonial matrices of sociality. Addressing theories of 'imminence', 'becoming' and 'critical fabulation', the paper takes its lead from Néstor García Canclini's understanding of how art situates us 'in a prior moment, when the real is [still] possible, when it has not yet broken down'. By placing artistic practice into dialogue with the prefigurative politics of David Graeber and Ailton Krenak, the colonial project's teleological impetus is revealed as normative and regulatory and resolutely premised on a linear understanding of time. Drawing on ethnographic work located in Brazil, the paper demonstrates how art disaggregates space and time, opening possibilities for the unexpected and unforeseen - a decoloniality latent with open-ended meanings and being. What are the consequences of such a theorisation? If we accept that much artistic work in Latin America does not, and never did, obey linear coloniality, then each work is not discrete and bounded; instead, each work, within its particular set of ancestral relations, is a vessel of interpenetrating moments and realities. Art inscribes in the now - in a creative gesture - a future as yet uninscribed; Latin American art, in its refusal to conform to linearity must necessarily present the continual elaboration of the new.
Paper short abstract:
The performance of Trópicos Mecânicos (Mueda) (2021) and the black female cyborg therein offer a powerful figuration of the chronopolitical stakes involved in the decolonization of the arts, creatively and critically disrupting the analogy presumed between Europe/the future and Africa/the past.
Paper long abstract:
“This cyborg hand of mine is not the future of Africa. It is the past of Europe.” This pronouncement from Z - a character in the performance Trópicos Mecânicos (Mueda), by Felipe Bragança with the Teatro Griot and Catarina Wallenstein (2021) - imaginatively disrupts a widely held Eurocentric conception of time. It displaces a figuration commonly associated with the future - including afro-futurism - into an uncertain past, even as it refigures that time as a corporeal disjuncture between Africa and Europe. As such, that cyborg hand constitutes a metonym of the performance of which it is part, creatively and critically disrupting the analogical relation presumed between Europe and the future and Africa and the past. The performance intervenes in the linear conception of the history of that colonial relation - in this case regarding the Massacre of Mueda, as carried out by Portuguese soldiers in Mozambique in 1960 - through revisiting the multiply mediated memories of that incident in and through Ruy Guerra's Mueda, Memória e Massacre (1979-80), filmed twenty years later portraying the street-theatre reenactment of the incident by town residents. In this presentation, we flesh out how the performance offers a powerful figuration of the chronopolitical stakes involved in the decolonization of the arts. Here, for instance, the black female cyborg played by Zia Soares offers an extra-fictional response to that same performer's earlier call for the need to decolonize anachronistic conceptions implicated in decisions regarding the financing of the arts in Europe (Soares, 2019, memoirs.ces.uc.pt)
Paper short abstract:
This paper outlines a reflexive ethics of collaborative art-making and epistemic hybridity in order to challenge rigid biopolitical categorizations of people. As a case study, I engage with collective behaviors of resistance to anti-Asian violence referred to as flocking (Jeung 2022).
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, using decolonial theoretical approaches, I analyze creative and collaborative processes within the new media art project titled, ‘Flocking,’ which attempts to destabilize Eurocentric epistemic stances on corporeality. As a researcher, scholar, artist, and activist, my practice relies on a continuously reflexive approach to my own perspective. Through a feminist theoretical approach known as ‘standpoint theory’ (Harding 2004), I consider how my affinity with Chicanx politics can extend towards understanding other transnational and antiracist movements. This, in turn, informs my analysis of peoples’ responses to anti-Asian acts of racism in the United States. I engage in the method of anthropological content analysis of public media texts and interviews (c. 2020-2022) associated with collective acts of resistance known as ‘flocking’ (Jeung 2022). Through analyzing ‘Flocking,’ I bring to the fore collective knowledge making, social relations, and practices of collective dissent by socially marginalized groups. Ultimately, assembling an extended reality (XR) project informed by decolonial theoretical approaches provides an opportunity to design inclusive, interactive, and polymodal art and epistemological processes that challenge articulations of Eurocentric biopolitics.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the Bloco Afro Ilú Obá de Min's performance, this paper reflects on the questions it raises, "breaking the boxes" into which Western thought is divided. Is it art or religion? Is it a political practice? A rite? Does it enact a historical past, an imagined future or the present moment?
Paper long abstract:
The present paper focuses on the Bloco Afro Ilú Obá de Min, a Brazilian street carnival group based in the city of São Paulo. Today the group is formed by 430 Black and white women, working to preserve and to diffuse the "Black culture"; and to empower women in Brazilian society through the "afro-descendant performances" - rhythms, songs, dances and corporealities of African matrix - that become ways of revindication of its African ancestry and resistance against racism and sexism.
Nevertheless, experiencing a bloco's live performance means, first of all, "to break the boxes" into which Western thought is divided. Is it art or religion? Is it a political practice? A rite? Does it enact a historical past, an imagined future or the present moment? And what if it is all these things at the same time.
This paper, particularly, starting from these questions, reflects on the bloco's performances as expression of a "way of being and staying in the world", that is, as practices based on specific ontological and epistemological conceptions. By the way, these performances are also understood as expression of its "ancestralidade", a fundamental concept in Afro-Brazilian religions, that reflects a "spiral time" conception, as well.