Ancestral Claims
Colonial violence is not in the past: It is still with and among us, inscribed in the very materiality of contemporaneity. The natural materials and slave labour forcefully extracted by European imperialism have not disappeared. They remain transformed into capital – the same capital that continues to profit from the labour of disproportionately imprisoned Black people and lands claimed by indigenous communities.
(How) Can this debt ever be repaid? In their collaborative artistic work, philosopher and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva and artist-author Arjuna Neuman reflect on decolonisation as, in da Silva’s words, ‘the restoration of the total value extracted from Native Lands and expropriated from Slave Labour’. Defying universalist norms of thought established by the European Enlightenment, da Silva and Neuman counter the linearity of history and the separation of space to interrogate the presence of colonialism now, here, with us.
Lama El Khatib and Sam Nimmrichter will be in conversation with the artists. The discussion will be accompanied by somatic exercises by Daliah Touré and a listening session by artist Nicole L’Huillier to facilitate a layered collective study. No prior knowledge is needed.
The talk takes place in cooperation with Kunsthalle Wien and will be hosted by Andrea Popelka (Kunsthalle Wien) and Anna Leon (TQW).
In collaboration with Kunsthalle Wien as part of the exhibition Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims
is a prolific author, artist, philosopher, and professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, researching crucial global issues, which she approaches from a decolonial Black feminist perspective.
is an artist, filmmaker, and writer working with the essay form, in which ‘essay’ is an inherently future-oriented and experimental mode, becoming the guiding principle for research and production, which shifts between the bodily, haptic, and affective through to the geopolitical, planetary and cosmological.
is a theorist, writer, and researcher at FU Berlin, interested in questions of instrumentality, speculation and their entanglement with histories of colonialism and raciality.
is a writer and cultural worker, working at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin as a curatorial coordinator, researcher, and producer since 2018. Her work draws on abolitionist traditions and is invested in the poetics of ‘the labour of the dead’.
is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher from Santiago, Chile. Her practice centers on exploring sounds and vibrations as construction materials to delve into questions of agency, identity, collectivity, and the activation of a vibrational imagination. Her work materializes through installations, sonic/vibrational sculptures, custom-made (listening and/or sounding) apparatuses, performances, experimental compositions, membranal poems, and writing.
In English