The Search for Decolonial Love

Follows an excerpt from a conversation between Dominican - American writer Junot Díaz and Paula L.M.Moya:

JD: [Nods quietly] One has to understand that all the comments, all the things that Yunior does in Oscar Wao, move him inexorably away from the thing that he most needs: real intimacy which must have vulnerability, forgiveness, acceptance as its prerequisites. So that even though Yunior is sexist, even though he’s misogynist, even though he’s racist, even though he mischaracterizes Oscar’s life, even though he’s narcissistic—at the end he’s left with no true love, doesn’t find himself, doesn’t find that decolonial love that he needs to be an authentic self. In fact, he ends up—like the work that he assembles and stores in the refrigerator—incomplete.

You know how he assembles this work on Oscar, how he says it needed someone else to complete, a someone he fantasizes as Lola’s daughter, Isis? Isis’s name, of course, is a bit of an inside joke, but an important one. Because, what does Isis do, what is she known for mythologically? In the Egyptian legends I grew up on, Isis assembles her lover/brother Osiris, she assembles the pieces of Osiris that have been chopped up and scattered by Set. That’s one of the great mythical tasks of Isis, except—What does she leave out? In the legends it says that Isis doesn’t find Osiris’s penis, but I like to believe she just leaves it out. Osiris comes back to the world alive but penis-less. Which for some is a horror but for others a marked improvement. In keeping with the Isis metaphor I’ve always thought, the thing with Yunior is that he couldn’t reassemble himself in a way that would leave out the metaphoric penis, that would leave out all his attachments to his masculine patriarchal phallocratic privileges. Which is what he needed to do to finally “get” Lola. In the end, Yunior is left . . . with not much. No Lola, no Isis, no Oscar.

Thinking about Yunior as having been raped made (in my mind at least) his fucked-up utterances in the novel have a different resonance. And while he wasn’t yet ready to bear witness to his own rape, it gave him a certain point of view around sexual violence that I don’t think would have been possible otherwise. It helped me produce a novel with a feminist alignment. A novel whose central question is: is it possible to overcome the horrible legacy of slavery and find decolonial love? Is it possible to love one’s broken-by-the-coloniality-of-power self in another broken-by-the-coloniality-of-power person?

PM: You have a new collection of short stories, This is How You Lose Her, appearing in print very soon. And you are also at work on a new novel, a portion of which you had intended to read from yesterday before you decided instead to give that amazing and insightful lecture. Will you tell me a bit about Monstro?
I have to wrestle with all this weirdness, have to wrestle with the voice, have to wrestle with the characters.

JD: Of course. Monstro is an apocalyptic story. An end of the world story set in the DR of the near future. It’s a zombie story. (On that island, how could it not be?) It’s an alien invasion story. It’s a giant monster story. It’s about the Great Powers (China, the United States) attempting to contain the growing infestation by re-invading the Island for, what, the twelfth time? I always say if people on my island know about anything they know about the end of the world. We are after all the eschaton that divided the Old World from the New. The whole reason I started writing this book is because of this image I have of this fourteen-year-old girl, a poor, black, Dominican girl, half-Haitian—one of the Island’s damnés—saving the world. It’s a book is about this girl’s search for—yes—love in a world that has made it its solemn duty to guarantee that poor raced “conventionally unattractive” girls like her are never loved.

PM: That’s so interesting because just a couple of days ago I went to a talk by the Stanford sociologist Corey Fields; he is doing some pilot studies about the impact of race on black women’s love lives. During his talk, Fields mentioned a book by Averil Clarke called Inequalities of Love. The thing about this book is that it talks about the fact that college-educated black women, in particular, date less, marry less, and have fewer romantic relationships than their college-educated white and Latina counterparts, and than non-college-educated black women. But the important intervention that Clarke makes is that she points out that everyone talks about this fact as a kind of difference. Well, sure it is a difference, but it is not just a difference—it’s an inequality. So she frames the situation in terms of an inequality and describes it as a “romantic deprivation” that black women suffer.

JD: Love this!

PM: And this romantic deprivation has all manner of cascading implications for everything else in their lives.


For the full interview with the writer go hERE 

by CinemRead a full interview in two parts with the Dominican/US writer Junot Díaz where he talks about the concept of decolonial love, his concern with race, and the admiration of the writings of women of colour, hERE

Poética da relação

                            
 What follows is an intro to Édouard Glissant's book "Poetics of Relation":


                                                      A BARCA ABERTA

Aquilo que petrifica, na experiência da deportação dos africanos para as Américas, é sem dúvida o desconhecido, enfrentado sem preparação nem desafio.

A primeira treva foi o ser arrancado à terra quotidiana, aos deuses protetores, à comunidade tutelar. Mas isso ainda não é nada. O exílio suporta-se, mesmo quando sidera. A segunda noite foi de torturas, de degenerescência do ser, provocada por tantos incríveis sofrimentos. Imaginem duzentas pessoas amontoadas num espaço que mal poderia conter um terço delas. Imaginem o vómito, a carne viva, os piolhos pululantes, os mortos jacentes, os agonizantes apodrecendo. Imaginem, se forem capazes, a embriaguez vermelha das subidas ao convés, a rampa que é preciso subir, o sol negro no horizonte, a vertigem, esse deslumbramento do céu colado às ondas. Vinte, trinta milhões de deportados durante dois séculos ou mais. A degradação, mais sempiterna que um apocalipse. Mas isso ainda não é nada.

(Édouard Glissant: Poética da relação)

Manthia Diawara's lecture on Édouard Glissant and their journey documented in the film "One World in Relation" can be found hERE

Border Dwellers (SP)

                                      Carlos Motta, still from "Nefandus", part of the "Nefandus Trilogy", 2013.

How to talk about things that don't exist? Border Dwellers is a collab between a frequent traveller-thinker and a filmmaker from the tropics. It is inspired by the journeys across the Atlantic, such as the recent trip by Caribbean poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and African theorist and filmmaker Manthia Diawara from UK to Martinique on the board of Queen Mary II (recorded by Diawara); or the trip by French philosopher Félix Guattari to Brazil following the invitation by the psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik, in the aftermath of the military dictatorship, when new things began to emerge, which resulted in a book- Molecular Revolution in Brazil.

Border Dwellers is also much indebted to Tropicália movement, to which we would like to pay a homage, in form of “inverse antropofagia”, digesting Brazil's artistic and intellectual stimuli, and this way shifting the focus south.

As Madina Tlostanova puts it: “I would not even say that I consciously chose border thinking. Rather it chose me! When you are the border, when the border cuts through you, when you do not cross borders in order to find yourself on either side, you do not discuss borders from some zero point positionality, but instead you dwell in the border, you do not really have much choice but to be a border thinker.”

In São Paulo we would like to present a freshly squeezed and meticulously curated screening followed by Q&A, where the public is encouraged to engage as an active participant. Border Dwellers (SP) features a constellation of artworks that delve deeply into the issues proposed by this edition of the biennale (such as the “turn” or paradigmatic shift we're assisting), and elaborate on “things that don't exist”, unfolding artworks which we believe would have a special resonnance within the Brazilian context and beyond.

“Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation” is a forementioned transatlantic journey filmed by Manthia Diawara, during which Glissant shares his thoughts, at the same time poetic and philosophical, while arguing for “one world in relation”. His ideas, inspired by the condition of archipelagos (islands in relation), take shape according to the poetics of multiplicity- a fragmentary theory of global relations.

“Waiting” by Zarina Bhimji, an artist who explores history and memory, especially of postcolonial Africa and Europe, was shot in a factory in Kenya, based on the previous research into this slice of history. The resulting artwork is an “abstraction that hovers somewhere between film and painting- a monochrome that combined with a soundtrack becomes immersive.”

“Nefandus” by Carlos Motta is the first film from the Nefandus Trilogy that explores the relationship between colonialism and homosexuality from the viewpoint of the colonized. It is at the same time a personal and historical account, as well as a poetic journey into a vast and nameless landscape haunted by the ghosts from the past - a dark river in the tropical forests of Colombia. In other words: Decolonial aesthetics.

“Otolith II” by the Otolith Group (Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar) is the second film in the Otolith Trilogy. Shot partly in a Mumbai slum and narrated by a fictional character Dr. Sagar, it interconnects the harsh reality and improvisation of the life in the slum with “third world” feminist concerns and outwordly gravity.

“Ativu” by César Schofield Cardoso is a video inspired by resistance fighter Amílcar Cabral, a leading figure of the independence movement in Guiné-Bissau and Cape Verd, that reconnects his poetic legacy with the present-day activist positions from the archipelago.

Neil Beloufa's “Kempinski” is a fiction-doc that features people in Mali revealing their hopes and dreams for the future. The “actors” recount in present tense how they envisage the future to come. Their imaginaries reflect (un)realizable utopias. And precisely there lies their potential. Since we arrived at a point in history- perhaps a major historical turning point, a rupture in space and time- where we cannot any longer continue to “move forward”, putting the Western fiction of progress into question.

+ Free journal for take-away.

TROPICAL = RESISTANCE

TROPICAL = FREEDOM

Rosana Sancin + Victoria Verissimo

Cape Verd Islands, February 27, 2014.

"I charge you to leave this body"

                                         ruby amanze: "i know who are. you are me.", 2013.

"Learning how to fly was the most necessary skill to acquire. To be okay at living in between, it was imperative that she remain light, leaving as gentle of a mark on the surface for fear it might crumble beneath her. This is how she became a ghost. Always a hybrid. Sometimes an alien. Borders are just pencil lines.

How can you divide something that is fluid [space]?

The whole world is mine."

: : Excerpt  from "I charge you to leave this body" by ruby onyinyechi amanze. Read the whole text and engage with the original drawings made by the artist hERE

The Decolonial Option

SPIRITUAL REVOLUTIONS &
"THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA"

BE.BOP 2014
BLACK EUROPE 
BODY POLITICS

02. - 31.5. 2014
BERLIN + COPENHAGEN

Find out more HERE

Micropolítica: Cartografias do desejo

Suely Rolnik justifies her constant migration from one field of knowledge to another by arguing that '... what I was searching for was in none of them.' Her interest in what she calls the 'politics of desire' or 'micro-politics' grew out of her understanding that 'the colonial experience... was the repression of the body's knowledge, which was present in the cultures who founded Brazil, namely the African, native Indian and the Jewish-Arab cultures. Thus the primordial resistance, from a micro-political perspective, consists in summoning this knowledge.'

Molecular Revolution in Brazil

Yes, I believe that there is a multiple people, a people of mutants, a people of potentialities that appears and disappears, that is embodied in social, literary, and musical events.... I think that we're in a period of productivity, proliferation, creation, utterly fabulous revolutions from the viewpoint of this emergence of a people. That's molecular revolution: it isn't a slogan or a program, it's something that I feel, that I live....
—from Molecular Revolution in Brazil

Following Brazil's first democratic election after two decades of military dictatorship, French philosopher Felix Guattari traveled through Brazil in 1982 with Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik and discovered an exciting, new political vitality. In the infancy of its new republic, Brazil was moving against traditional hierarchies of control and totalitarian regimes and founding a revolution of ideas and politics. Molecular Revolution in Brazil documents the conversations, discussions, and debates that arose during the trip, including a dialogue between Guattari and Brazil's future President Luis Ignacia Lula da Silva, then a young gubernatorial candidate. Through these exchanges, Guattari cuts through to the shadowy practices of globalization gone awry and boldly charts a revolution in practice.

Assembled and edited by Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil is organized thematically; aphoristic at times, it presents a lesser-known, more overtly political aspect of Guattari's work. Originally published in Brazil in 1986 as Micropolitica: Cartografias do desejo, the book became a crucial reference for political movements in Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s. It now provides English-speaking readers with an invaluable picture of the radical thought and optimism that lies at the root of Lula's Brazil.

Alfredo Jaar: Venezia, Venezia

                                             Alfredo Jaar, "Venezia, Venezia", Chile Pavillion, Venice biennale, 2013.

" [...] What Venezia, Venezia offers is of a different caliber. Its aim is to set before us, to make evident, the complete obsolence of such ways of representing the global powers- and thence too of the place assigned to all other countries, naturally including Chile. The work on dislay in the Chilean pavillion submerges the old hegemonies of the former great powers and makes the critical faculty an unfettered excercise in freedom, an excercise in power rather than submission, an invitation to participate in thought emanating from every conceivable part of the world and coming together at this Biennale and in the catalogue of the pavilion of Chile. And where, if not in art, can we hope for this broad global space of horizontal communication and free thought to be created?

The work in this national pavilion is contemporary, challenging and empowered, but not aggressive: slow, phantasmal and fluid, it is the metaphor that reveals the action of a different set of powers, in which the jostling for inclusion and exclusion between countries, territories and peoples goes on, sometimes dramatically, but with different logics.

In these circumestances, awarness of national feeling, of a possible "national identity," can be seen as an ongoing process, a collective, always active work in progress, invariably in relation to a country's history and the shifting global circumstances in which it takes place. An incessant producing of itself. It is thus akin, metaphorically at least, to the pioneering concept of autopoiesis that was put forward in Chile in the 1970s by two Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and that has since exerted intellectual influence around the world."

Adriana Valdés

Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Water Between

Renée Green, "Endless Dreams and Water Between", details of the installation, 2008.


'Endless Dreams and Water Between' is a project by the artist Renée Green, commissioned by the National Maritime Museum. The material cultures of maritime history are intertwined with desires and dreams that are carried across the oceans through experience, representation, misrepresentation and projections of past and present.
This exhibition pays attention to the varied ways cultures perceive and conceive of the world. These understandings and perceptions are developed through struggles for happiness, the imaginary, systems for comprehension and dreams, as well as by the pursuit of these very desires. Renée Green has consistently returned to ideas of time and the sea throughout her artistic practice. 'Endless Dreams and Water Between' brings poetics to the ways that islands shape our understanding of our place in the world by taking us on a journey through the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The exhibition opens with three films meditating on what has been imagined and enacted in a world of uncertainty. Each investigates operations of chance, distance, tenuous connection and attempts to imagine ideal forms of existence. Alongside these, 'Endless Dreams and Water Between' draws together four film projections, sound works, banners, diagrams and drawings.

These varied elements include traces of several fictional characters’ reflections upon, and engagement with, islands – sites that are filled with endless dreams. The islands, which are the focus here, are Manhattan, Majorca, islands of the San Francisco Bay, the northern California Pacific rim and San Francisco itself. California was thought to be an island by Westerners for centuries – a misperception based both on its climate and on desires for preferable futures that became projected on to this imagined island state.

Long histories encompassing geological time and the many migrations of life over many bodies of water emerge throughout 'Endless Dreams and Water Between' as Renée Green’s characters follow their various networks of interest, instigated by curiosity and physical encounters in the island locations they inhabit. Every island imagines itself central.

Each of the simultaneously insular and paradoxically cosmopolitan locations presented in 'Endless Dreams and Water Between' perceive of themselves in this way. Renée Green is fascinated by the ways that historical and fictional documents have the ability to reveal contrary versions of dreams and their trajectories amidst surrounding water. Here various stories emerge, overlap and eventually converge.

Some of these stories relate water and islands to time and history in order to frame human actions. Other narratives look to the division of the world into continents as a question rather than an assertion, in the process reconsidering geographical concepts that are often taken for granted.

From the Greeks to the present, generations of Westerners have been fascinated by islands. Over time, Europeans’ perceptions and concerns for islands have shifted from seeing them as imaginary spaces to locations of material and oceanic control – all the while operating as contested places of perceived potential and escape, as tabula rasae are also part of the Western imagination. 'Endless Dreams and Water Between' intertwines these stories of relationships to water and islands with fictional accounts of contemporary island inhabitants and voyagers. Crossing the Mediterranean Sea, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, as well as the Hudson River, San Francisco Bay and the waters of the Balearic Islands, these journeys point to the assumptions, understandings and creation of island-ideas and idea-islands.

(Source: www.rmg.co.uk)

"Plantation Memories" by Grada Kilomba, Part I

Multitudes: A Platform for the Fragile, the Uncertain and the Provisional

                                          The Otolith Group, "Hydra Decapita", still.

MULTITUDES:

Multitudes was founded by members of The Otolith Group in 1998; it is dedicated to the distribution of alternative networks of information on art, culture, tactical media, politics informed by the multiple perspectives of the Global South.

Multitudes contributes to contemporary modes of knowledge production that demands a critical engagement with the political and cultural conditions of the present thereby affirming the potential of intervention within the disorientations of the now.

We offer essays and articles that critique neoliberalism as a global reassertion of class power that operates through the deregulation and privatization of the world's resources, leading to the impoverishment of the majority of the world's people and the simultaneous escalation of racism and nationalism across the globe.

These political and economic modes of power create impossible conditions for life. Multitudes offers a platform for the fragile, the uncertain and the provisional; it provides a space in which questions of race, class, gender and technology can be complicated, reformulated, reimagined and reenvisioned.

The Otolith Group was founded in 2002. Based in London, their work engages with archival materials, with futurity and with the histories of the transnational. The Group sees its work as a series of explorations with image, sound, text, objects and curation that observe different affective and aesthetic registers, allowing for questions of location and disorientation and creating platforms for discussion on contemporary art practice.

Multitudes used to exist on a private list before it was moved onto Yahoo. It will move again soon and evolve to be a more detailed and participatory platform. (Source: otolithgroup.org)