“Colonial Memory, Wounded Civilization”

In his essay Discourse on Colonialism, Afro-descendant poet and politician Aimé Césaire pointed out that a civilisation that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a wounded civilisation. For him, in two centuries of bourgeois rule, Europe had been incapable of resolving the two major questions that had given rise to its existence: the question of the proletariat and the colonial question.  More than seventy years have passed since the publication of that essay and Europe has still not resolved either of these issues.

Sunday, 29 September

10.00-11.35

Colonial Memory and the 60th Venice Biennale

The proposal in Block 3 is to present the artistic and curatorial experience of three of the national pavilions participating in the current 60th edition of the Venice Biennale; an event which has brought together an extraordinary variety of artistic practices – most of them operating from non-Eurocentric conceptual frameworks, imaginaries and worldviews – under the title Foreigners Everywhere. Two artists and a curator have been invited to talk about the work they have shared with the public in Venice. Marked by different diasporic processes, all three of them inhabit a multiple, multi-localised identity.

Introduction:

Andrea Pacheco González.

Panellists:

– Cindy Sissokho, curator of the Wellcome Collection, London.
– Mónica de Miranda, Portuguese-Angolan artist: “Curating the Living Archives”.
– Sandra Gamarra, Spanish-Peruvian artist: “Memoria Migrante”.

©️ Still from Greenhouse (2024) by Mónica de Miranda