Programme of readings and viewings from August - December 2020

Following the posthumanist thread of recent meetings, and in the spirit of this moment challenging ourselves to move out of our Eurocentric positions, we are going to shift our attention towards Decolonial theory, focusing initially on Latin America, and trying to engage with arts practice.

Because much of what we look at may not be translated into English, you can right-click on a webpage and you should see Translate to English in the menu.

Sketch for programme:

August 4th Ruben Yepes, 2016, C’undúa: Activist Art in Downtown Bogotá.

http://field-journal.com/issue-3/cundua-activist-art-in-downtown-bogota

[Optional, but very interesting and relevant:

Brian Holmes, 2012, EVENTWORK, The Fourfold Matrix of Contemporary Social Movements

https://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/eventwork/

Watching:

There is a full video available for C’undúa. It has a French language narrator at the start, but once you get in a bit further it's live material from the original work. Not English language, but that's part of our de-centering of the Anglophone privilege :-)

https://vimeo.com/19431640

7 min video on Tucaman Arde

https://vimeo.com/146694527]

September 8th: Macarena Gomez-Baris, 2017, The Extractive Zone, Preface and Chapter 1 (in resources).

Watching:

Trailer for Burden of Dreams

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/burdenofdreams

Brilliant 15 minute talk/ performance by MARIA GALINDO of MUJERES CREANDO

https://youtu.be/AoOJfVwRSIo

October 6th: Adetty Pérez Miles, 2019, Unbound Philosophies and Histories: Epistemic Disobedience in Contemporary Latin American Art (in resources).

Draws from an essay that would be beneficial (but not necessary) to read: Walter D. Mignolo, 2009, Epistemic Disobedience,Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom (in resources).

Watch this Mujeres Creando performance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=255&v=RDU64HcMaZo&feature=emb_logo

November (date tbc): 3 x short pieces:

Edouard Glissant, 1997, Closed Place, Open Word, from Poetics of Relation [in Resources]

Iconoclasistas, 2019, New devices for thinking the common, in Field Journal

http://field-journal.com/editorial/new-devices-for-thinking-the-common

Untangling the Strategies of Capital: Towards a Critical Atlas of Ecuador by the Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador [Resources].

[A few of you contributed very very generously to the campaign to release the artist Tony Balseca during the October rising in Ecuador.the Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador have made a map of those events:

https://geografiacriticaecuador.org/2019/10/11/mapas-e-informacion-de-la-represion-policial-en-ecuador-durante-el-paro-nacional-7-9-oct-2019/ FYI!]

Mapping is an incredibly important tool in terms of colonisation and decolonialism, employed in Latin American political movements. We could begin to look at the work of Iconoclasistas, a really important Argentinian mapping collective. To begin, I suggest following pages, in this sequence:

If you start on this page, look at the dossier (make it full screen, use up and down arrows) you won't be able to read the text, but you will see how they conduct their workshops, and the kinds of resources that they make available.

https://iconoclasistas.net/dossier-de-mapeo/

This lays out a brief account of how they conduct 'point of view' workshops https://iconoclasistas.net/decolonizar-deconstruir-decodificar-2019/

If you go to the cartographies page, you can sroll down yourselves and click on any of them. They range from geographical to historical to metaphorical - I like this one

'Latin American anti colonial chronology - popular uprisings from 1492 - present day'.

December Freya Schiwy 2007, DECOLONIZATION AND THE QUESTION OF SUBJECTIVITY Gender, race, and binary thinking (in Resources)

Watching:

Schwiy mentions a work of social filmmaking from Boliva, Q'ati Q'ati. I found a version of it - it's not really watchable - it's in Quichua with Spanish subtitles, and quite poor quality - but still it is a visual reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLZ5KKLjX1E