The Academy (with a capital A and in singular) is for us a field of contestation. And, without a doubt, we are all positioned in it once we dare to enter it, dialogue with it, challenge it, inhabit it and/or co-construct it. Many of us have occupied this space by choice and with conviction. We face this reality every minute of our lives. That is why the manifesto “We all know” resonates and challenges us when it states that epistemic extractivism is structural and not just an isolated event in the Academy. When it affirms that the Academy is hierarchical and hierarchizing and that it promotes the accumulation of power of those at the top.
28.04.2023 | by várias
In light of current public debates sparked by the publication of the chapter "The walls spoke when no one else would: Autoethnographic notes on sexual-power gatekeeping within avant-garde academia," included in the edited volume Sexual Misconduct in Academia: Informing an Ethics of Care in the University (Routledge 2023), we express our full solidarity with the authors. We extend the same solidarity to other voices that came out publicly, as well as to all those subjected to abuses of power and other forms of violence both in academic contexts and beyond. This document is a collective and unfinished contribution to an ongoing debate.
18.04.2023 | by várias
In Portugal we have no racial-ethnic categorization legally approved. That means we are not legally able to identify social inequalities in terms of race. This is an important warning of how Portuguese society works and how this social silence from politics informs us that they are not interested in identifying this problem. But we can do this visually. Just look who are the people that are leading art institutions and curatorship to understand this gap. I created a blog - an informal exercise - where I put some information about this gap.
13.03.2023 | by Rodrigo Ribeiro Saturnino (ROD)
Institutionalized violence shapes who people are—victims and perpetrators alike—to an extent that only the recovery of the condition of plurality can undo it. This points to the most basic right immanent to the human condition, which imperialism constantly compromises: the right not to act against others; in its positive formulation: the right to act alongside and with one another. “Accepting this right in its two forms as fundamental is necessary in order to imagine reparations, so the bliss of being active and repairing what was broken can be attained.
11.08.2022 | by Ariella Aisha Azoulay
The focus of the Paris conference was on Glissant’s key concepts of relation, opacity, creolization, and disaffiliation. The Martinique-born writer and thinker was, of course, the first philosopher of post-filiation, by which I refer not only to his rebellious thesis of disaffiliation, in the sense of breaking with a genealogy and tradition of Western and non-Western philosophies concerned with binary opposition and contradiction, but also to him as a self-engendered philosopher. By this I mean that he re-created himself in order to surpass a pathological inextricability, which he associated with our contemporary human condition. Indeed, to say that Glissant is a post-filiation philosopher is mostly to recognize his role as a theorizer of the concept of relation, which moves beyond the oppositional discourse of the same and the other, operating instead with a new vision of difference as an assembler of the “dissimilars.”
06.07.2022 | by Manthia Diawara
When our grandmother beheaded chicken, my brother begged: "don't kill the animals, let's go buy food at the supermarket". When did this happen? Ignoring the death of other beings in order to live. Wishing we didn't know about the destruction around our bubble. Was it when our parents moved from the countryside to the city? Was it when our thumb started to touch the screen more often? Animals? Only pets. Jungles? Only urban ones. In our houses, we clean up everything that reminds us of the dust from where we came from. Little pigs go to school, cats wear boots, play the piano and speak French, crickets are our consciousness, Elsa is the name of a depression, Katrina of a hurricane, Bárbara of a storm. Savagery instead of a country. Elements of land and sea as resources. People as users. Identities as consumption objects. Consuming, consuming to stabilise this fucked up disruption.
07.01.2022 | by Marta Lança
Hoje o Tarrafal é um museu e monumento nacional e, desde 2004, integra a lista indicativa de Património Mundial da UNESCO. Portugal, para além de ter ajudado com a criação e desenvolvimento deste museu, anunciou em 2019 que iria apoiar Cabo Verde com a sua candidatura do Tarrafal à UNESCO. Recentemente, foram levadas a cabo obras de restauro do espaço, por uma empresa portuguesa, e no próximo 5 de Julho, os governos de Cabo Verde e Portugal vão assinar um memorando de entendimento para a candidatura deste espaço à UNESCO.
24.06.2021 | by Sofia Lovegrove
In her first solo exhibition at Simone Cadinelli Art Gallery, Jeane Terra shows works that are related, directly or indirectly, to the events in Atafona, that are about the ruins produced by the clash between the sea and the city; such events point to the fact that everything that was, is or will be built is going to turn into rubble.
16.05.2021 | by Agnaldo Farias
Audre Lorde asks, “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” Lorde’s critique of hierarchies within what is then a predominantly white, middle-class, heteronormative, able-bodied second-wave feminism invites reevaluation of the chalk circles of individual identity that fix structural inequality and prevent viable liberation from taking shape. An existentialism disconnected from dynamic modes of praxis grounded in “the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences” fortifies oppression.
03.03.2021 | by Keelyn Bradley
“The amount we know about our African heritage varies from individual to individual,” says Johnson Artur. What they do have in common however, is a history of struggle against a commonly encountered resistance to the presence of black people in Russia. “Those who grew up and live in Russia still have to justify on a daily basis the fact that they are Russians too.” Johnson Artur hopes her project will go some to connecting and making visible the generation of black Russians that have grown up calling the country home.
17.02.2021 | by Red Africa
A lot of my pieces are social experiments to say, “What do you feel when you see this human life?” If your first reaction is to say, “They deserved to die because …,” that says a lot about who you are. I hope my art will speak to those people who are so quick to justify the taking of a human life, so that they think: “Wait. This person should still be on this earth. They deserved better.” Up until now, I’ve been creating art and advocating for Black lives from my perspective, of not wanting me to be pulled over and killed by the police.
14.12.2020 | by Nikkolas Smith
So what does being tropical mean? Being less concrete and assertive in our ideas and convictions? There’s certainly an art to filling the arid hours and empty nights here.
The bad news comes, here as everywhere, first thing in the morning. I retreat to the intimacy of my bookshelves and flick through a few tomes, while outside, the day quickly passes from fresh to mild to heat wave. It’s absurd to try and fit the news of someone’s death into the context of whatever story you have at hand, some false, pseudo-writerly notion of anguish. It’s as if a ghost has settled in between the lines and started hopping from noun to pronoun, though verbs would doubtless take it further.
29.10.2020 | by Joaquim Arena
The ASAA condemns the use of the police and military by African states to mete out violence against its citizens. We especially condemn the ongoing brutalities in Nigeria, spurred by the violation of human rights and abuses by the erstwhile Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). The Anti- Robbery Squad (SARS) was a Nigerian police force unit that was created in late 1992 to deal with crimes associated with robbery, motor vehicle theft, kidnapping, cattle rustling and crimes involving firearms. However, over the years, SARS has been linked to extrajudicial killings, extortion, torture, framing citizens for crimes they didn’t commit, and blackmail.
22.10.2020 | by ASAA
In the last weeks, political tensions in Portugal have arisen following public demonstrations of extreme right organizations that have also threatened anti-racist activists. On August 11, black antiracist activist Mamadou Ba and other nine persons (antiracist, antifascist and LGBT rights activists, MPs and trade union leaders) received an e-mail sent by a neo-Nazi movement that threatened them and their families if they did not leave the country in the next 48 hours.
02.09.2020 | by vários
There is something poetic in a city cut through by a river, like the imperturbable flow of the Mondego between the banks from which Coimbra sprawls. The river is the image of continuity and impermanence, its time a tangent to infinity. Our existences, as fleeting as the people who cross it, the bridges that cut across it and the waters that pass through it, are the height of discontinuity; our time is minuscule compared to the river.
19.12.2019 | by Lígia Afonso, Agnaldo Farias and Nuno de Brito Rocha
They create a network of different approaches to the rural and simultaneously call attention to ecological concerns. The works constitute potent signifiers within a global discourse of regionalism as well as representing a call to (poetic) action within our natural environment.
04.12.2019 | by vários
Keating accumulates the disregarded and overlooked traces of the Irish presence in Jamaica, inserting previously muted voices into the archive. In doing so, she critiques the dominant Western constructions of nationhood and identity, producing an alternative to the master narratives that shape one’ worldviews in the West.
19.11.2019 | by Miguel Amado
Reflecting on the relationship between humans and plants, this exhibition explores different narratives of technological mediation of the plant kingdom. The study of plants as infrastructure has raised interest among the scientific community over the last centuries, inspiring generations of researchers, as well as the development of technocosmologies and cybernetic systems.
15.10.2019 | by Margarida Mendes
Although depleted of the colossal perspective lent to it by space navigation in the 1970s, the idea of humanity as a species was progressively turned into an immanent geological colossus capable of influencing the world’s cardinal rhythms – or at least such has been the description of its reach. Anthropocene is the geological epoch of the human species, it is said, and the proof lies in the sedimentary deposits that originated in the first nuclear experiments held in the 1950s. What is of course ignored is that this idea of “species” was artificially inseminated by the normative and cisgender marriage between modernity and colonialism, and that the colossal perspective is still believed to stop and stand outside motionless in front of the globe...
08.10.2019 | by
Or about this faraway socialist family whose stench of betrayal sullies our ideals. Make yourself, with all the others, into a mass of militant workers. Neurotics. Gentrified. You’ve got to walk down the white stripes that cross the Open Space of shuttered hives glistening in the sun: elbowing to keep your place, emphasizing your success to excess. The law of the jungle is the strongest survive.
27.04.2019 | by Joëlle Sambi