The newly modernised Central African Museum at Teruvren does not do away with the old, nor does it resolve the question of what purpose an African museum serves in Europe, today. Instead, those visiting when it re-opens will be confronted with the uneasy relationship between past and present that Tervuren will always embody - and with the lingering presence of King Leopold's ghost.
I'll visit
26.05.2018 | by Ana Naomi de Sousa
Politics isn’t, first and foremost, a matter of making allegations and raising awareness; there is no one straw that breaks the camel’s back, and what’s bad can be tolerated indefinitely. Instead, it is a sort of shedding of the skin, by which we become sensitive to this or allergic to that. Nor has it much to do with convincing (discourse), or seducing (marketing), but rather with opening all sorts of spaces to experience another way of living, another definition of reality, another vision of the world. In the struggle for hegemony, the skin – yours, mine, everyone’s – is the battlefield. JEUX SANS FRONTIÈRES #2
Games Without Borders
11.02.2018 | by Amador Fernández-Savater
I want to first discuss the politics around teaching Fanon in today’s postcolonial world, and in particular in a post-Brexit Britain. What is it about Fanon that captures the hearts and minds of so many students, particularly students of colour? I then want to discuss the continuing debate around Fanon’s relationship to Marxism, looking at some of the ways in which Fanon’s work provides a refreshing lens on capitalism in the postcolonial world.
To read
20.08.2017 | by Sara Salem
We would like to invite you on a journey. Not to cross the ocean but to plumb its surface. Forget the solid and luminous history of continents and their lighthouses that tear into the night with dazzling certitudes. Enter instead into the soft shadow of the depths, on the other side of the opaque mirror of water, into an endlessly changing landscape that ignores the old borders and bodily limits. Liquid movement of subversion, waves of voices as well as radio waves, telepathy. Space is the place. This is the place for no monuments other than the bones of those thrown overboard. Migrants whose only compass is despair, pregnant slave women who fertilize the ocean depths.
Afroscreen
20.08.2017 | by vários
the aim of (Re)Imagining African Independence. Film, Visual Arts and Fall of Portuguese Empire is not to undertake an exhaustive survey and analysis of the filmic and audio-visual materials related to the Portuguese post-colonial situation. This collection of essays proposes, more modestly, and first of all, to contribute to a better knowledge of political propaganda films shot during and straight after the liberation wars. Shot by African and foreign filmmakers in different contexts and according to different agendas, these films allow us to explore such diverse questions as how the liberation struggles and Portuguese colonialism were envisaged according to opposing cold-war and geopolitical rhetorics, or how the newly independent countries imagined themselves as nations.
Afroscreen
10.07.2017 | by Maria do Carmo Piçarra and Teresa Castro
Permanecemos incapazes de escutar e compreender o diálogo entre uma androide ameríndia e o milho transgénico – a quem pertence a humanidade, afinal de contas? Para a coexistência destas diferentes cosmologias – modernas, animistas ou tecnofílicas – não existe sonho ou ficção capaz de as apreender num todo, apenas a perceção de que o mundo lhes dá lugar incessantemente e que a posição de inimigo, mais do que a natureza ou a cultura, marca as suas fronteiras.
I'll visit
10.07.2017 | by Pedro Lapa
Miranda’s work is deeply marked by family memories and experiences and, more broadly, by the collective histories of Portugal and Angola. In Panorama, her focus on the psychic and physical remnants of several pasts – colonial, post-independence, post-Cold War, post-civil war – within natural, urban and architectural landscapes of Luanda and beyond serves the larger purpose of examining the contradictions of the present and imagining alternative futures.
I'll visit
05.07.2017 | by Ana Balona de Oliveira
In Europe and the United States, there is also the specific return to colonial form and nostalgia. In Portugal, I’ve been struck by the visible presence of what are still referred to as the “explorers” or the “discoveries,” rather than “colonizers” and “encounter.” The depiction of African bodies in official art and monuments is often stereotyped, almost degrading. I don’t see this, unfortunately, as an exception but as an example of the new divisions. Universities set a poor example here, with minorities and people of color being systematically underrepresented on both sides of the Atlantic.
Face to face
27.06.2017 | by Inês Beleza Barreiros
Part of our task is to build a canon, knowledge, and a way of knowing. This is happening against the backdrop of a movement by South African students to decolonise their universities; Black Lives Matter protests in the United States; and in the context of a much deeper history of national reimagination across Africa and the world.With this history in mind our faculty is working towards what we consider a decolonial social science curriculum. We’ve adopted seven commitments to help us meet this goal, and which we hope will shift educational discourse in a more equitable and representative direction.
Mukanda
15.06.2017 | by Jess Auerbach
The idea of freedom as a point of arrival – an accomplishment that lies behind us, materialized and monumentalized; freedom as a ballot, a single gesture hinged to a turning point; freedom carved in stone, set on a hill, allegorized in a recognizable form; freedom as a lofty place we ascend to, is one that can be counterpoised to freedom as departure, as work and process; an immaterial, contingent ideal; an ambition and responsibility which escapes and evades one’s grasp, but to which one continuously commits.
I'll visit
08.06.2017 | by Nancy Dantas
Philosophy students should be encouraged to engage with the challenging work of thinkers like Kwami Anthony Appiah, Franz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, Enrique Dussell and Walter Mignolo just as they do with Parfit and Strawson. Should we not all be in the business of engaging, to quote Nietzsche, with 'what may be thought against our thought'?
Mukanda
04.04.2017 | by World Philosophies
Duplo vê*, is at once, the name for the letter W in Portuguese (inspired by the title W ou les souvenirs d’enfance by George Perec) and also the “double sight” of a cross-eyed God. Duplo vê could have a subtitle: essay on the strabismus of God.
Mukanda
17.02.2017 | by Mattia Denisse
Our duty, as creative people, to paraphrase the late Nina Simone, should always be to reflect the times we live in. We do this also by challenging constructions of history that have and continue to favour the powerful as we fight for the future we want to see and experience in the world, beyond our own physical existences.
Face to face
31.01.2017 | by Gabi Ngcobo and Katerina Valdivia Bruch
For centuries enslaved Africans were taken to Europe and America to serve as workforce. These individuals were forced into submission and considered sub-human. They were brutalized and treated worse than animals by other individuals, and their institutions, which thought of themselves as civilized and modern. These enslaved men and women suffered and despaired, and dreamt of a life before, and of a land more familiar and kind. So, out of the insanity of misery and helplessness, they would eat the soil in the hope of being taken back to that time and land of before.
I'll visit
10.11.2016 | by Ana Rita Canhão
Art’s potential is something that can’t be measured, what the encounter with an artwork can do to a subject, how the freedom trapped in a sculpture, a painting, a statement can influence a singularity and masses cannot be said. That also explains our position: we don’t have any superstitious belief in the immediate political efficacy of our work, this is somehow not our main worry, artworks hopefully survive artists and the time for our work to truly touch people might not even have come yet. Like any artist we work because we need to, it’s our way to stay alive.
Face to face
11.10.2016 | by Leonardo Araújo, Alex Flynn and Claire Fontaine
Art has always been able to gather critical tools of action from different contexts of knowledge in order to intervene in institutions, politics, and social problems. This makes it a privileged place to find new strategies for empistemodiversity. At the same time, art has always maintained a strict border between itself and popular culture, to ensure that art is on the same level as the Western sciences. What if this border disappeared? How do we construct a new language that uses popular knowledge not as a theme for contemporary art, but as a spark for creating new regimes of representation and new structures of thought? How can contemporary art contribute to the learning of epistemodiversity?
To read
10.10.2016 | by María Iñigo Clavo
We want a black dyke for president.
We want a person with AIDS for president and we want a trans person for vice president and we want someone with no health insurance and we want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. We want a latino faggot for president who saw their best friends die in a mass shooting. We want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and we want a candidate who is a part-time hooker. We want a differently abled refugee for president. We want a president with no airconditioning, who has stood in line at the clinic, who stole their last meal and has been unemployed and was sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported.
Face to face
15.09.2016 | by Pedro Marum
It comes to the present time and looks at African struggle fighters – the construction of the sole hero- and the possibilities that the archive should include other partners by featuring their spouses names in the conversation, however, open to other additions and manners in which to author our histories.
Face to face
31.05.2016 | by Euridice Kala
Our original strategy was always to bring African artists to the international stage, which I think is what is missing, and maybe one day we would be very happy to go but I think there are many other places where we can go, which we are trying to do already, for example, workshops for galleries, for artists. I think there’s much more on the educational side of things that we can bring with our knowledge to the continent than having a commercial initiative about sales.
Face to face
08.05.2016 | by Icaro Ferraz Vidal Junior
Lots of people are beginning to think about politics, learning how to think about the city, relations and institutions. There are people from all over the place, from universities, associations and schools. And the Government is feeling it, they fear our advances. But to say that popular uprisings in Brazil are brainless and devoid of focus is simplistic, because everything is focus. JEUX SANS FRONTIÈRES #2
Games Without Borders
09.04.2016 | by
