Studiegids

Content

The current decolonization process has many voices, perspectives, and positions. Decolonization is not a univocal, nor linear route, and several obstacles and barriers must be overcome. Which artistic strategies can we imagine to fortify this process and to decolonize ourselves? Which artistic practices can we develop to incorporate more multiplicity in our working ways, presentational modes and (historical) narratives?

The seminar starts with an introduction into the Western history of ‘othering’; a deeply rooted often unconscious mechanism of oppositional dualism that situates otherness - as undesirable and unwanted - outside the self. This leads to polarization, intolerance (also towards ourselves), inequality, and systematic exclusion. As is manifestly clear in our colonial amnesia that is part of a monolithic history, that silences other histories and marginalizes other experiences. How can we recognize and reformulate/make tangible marginalized genealogies, and stimulate self-reflexive awareness of the hierarchic excluding mechanisms we are part of? And how can we create (space for) new multiple narratives, that acknowledge interdependency and reciprocity, and that correspond to the multiplicity of today’s world?

Following an interdisciplinary approach - integrating the site-specificity of the Ter Beken campus with its park and various outdoor spaces - we will work with outdoor observations, body-based and (auto-)ethnographic research methods in combination with a practice of listening, bodily performative experimentation, the exploration of alternative epistemologies and ontologies, and the study of decolonial literature (Catherine Walsh and Walter Mignolo, Achille Mbembe, Rolando Vazquez, Gloria Wekker, Arthuro Escobar, Sylvia Rivera Cusicanqui, a.o.). We will address topics such as: systematic discrimination and trauma, extractionism, migration and belonging, placelessness and connectedness, the nomadic artist, shared histories and identities (like Afropeanism), pluriform visions of personhood, non-linear time perspectives and transhistorical storytelling, reframing the archive, positionality, identity politics and safe spaces, co-creation as a strategy for collective maker- and authorship, aesthetics of the 21st century, multispecies etnography and pluriversal practices.

Course material

Presentations and texts available on Toledo. 

Format: more information

This seminar requires active participation by the students: reading texts and preparing comments to participate in the discussions, and making 1 short presentation. 

The format is interdisciplinairy: combining a practice of listening, bodily performative experimentation, and the study of decolonial literature and/or non-Western ontologies/epistemologies/artistic practices, etc...

Students can integrate personal research matters that are related to the treated subjects: research of family histories/archives, personal experiences and ambitions, collaborations, etc....