In Bisa's artwork , color is a language that speaks about African American evolution from enslavement in the United States to today's ongoing fight for Black liberation Bisa also draws on her Ghanaian heritage by illustrating the vibrancy of Africa's textile and fabric traditions. These artistic methods allow her to examine several themes including family, community, youth and power.
Face to face
06.01.2021 | by Ugonna-Ora Owoh
Guardians put themselves on the line to defend the ideals sacred to democracy. In 2020, they fought on many fronts. When George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis in May, it was proof—if anyone needed it—that Black lives are still not treated as equal in America. In the aftermath of his death, a wave of outrage surged and was harnessed by organizers, both veteran and newly energized, to bring millions to the streets and spotlight the inequities in a world that claims to be far better than it is. The movement for racial justice found its voice in multitudes: a mother in Kenosha delivering her frank report to Joe Biden; a sister in Paris calling for police accountability in her brother’s death. In this extraordinary year, they guarded truth—lived truth.
To read
29.12.2020 | by Justin Worland
In the face of this new narrative that acknowledges artistic production and an appreciation of it by African communities, how do secular cultural traditions of African countries interact today with artistic training and production, in the case of Afrodescendant artists, who were born and raised in European countries? How do events in the history of Africa and Africans combine with the artistic languages of the "European schools" and, in particular, with contemporary themes?
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28.12.2020 | by António Pinto Ribeiro
My own difficult experience teaching literature bears this out. Students’ response to every African story is that “the white man stole our culture, we are ashamed of our identity and need to return to our cultures”. But even as they limit colonialism to an exclusively cultural enterprise, they are not able to connect with stories of the past to which they say we should return to.
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22.12.2020 | by Wandia Njoya
One group that is getting extra attention in this war of propaganda is rappers, as hip hop has long played a central role in the cultural political imagination of Cuba. Last month, Havana rapper Denis Solís was arrested by Cuban police for “insulting an officer.” Soon after, an artist and activist group he belongs to called the San Isidro Movement mobilized an occupation of a public square and went on a hunger strike to demand his release. Videos of the subsequent crackdown by the Cuban authorities went viral, and hundreds came out in the following days to protest the heavy-handed treatment. The protests fizzled out after stalled negotiations with the government, but the damage to the government’s public image had already been done.
Games Without Borders
22.12.2020 | by Luna Olavarría Gallegos and Boima Tucker
Angolans have made themselves in- and outside Angola, in conversation with the world. In the departures and arrivals, they carry with them the intangible and immaterial: intuition, faith, dance, and the sad and deep look of permanent uncertainty. But they also take with them the smile of resistance that can hide sadness and misfortunes. Perhaps at arrivals and departures there isn’t much to say. Perhaps all that is needed is to listen in silence and with a hug. A hug that knows how to listen.
Afroscreen
21.12.2020 | by André Castro Soares
An analysis of territorial occupation of African cities resulting from rapid urbanization should take into account not only the neo-liberal globalization trends but also the recent (and violent) decolonization process. In this sense, a series of rights have been neglected and excluded from African national agendas, with serious implications for the configuration of African cities.
City
18.12.2020 | by Andréia Moassab
Hudnall records for posterity the architecture of weathered shotgun houses and the vibrant lives within them. He depicts people at ease, celebrating holidays, dressed in their Sunday finery, and kids in the thrall of summertime. “These are the young Floyds coming up,” he says. “They need to be cared for and guided. Rather than holding up a sign and marching for a day or two, then forgetting about it, come here, talk to people, get to know them.”
Games Without Borders
14.12.2020 | by Earlie Hudnall and Paul Moakley
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.
Mukanda
14.12.2020 | by Nikkolas Smith
Today, tens of thousands of girls under the age of 18 were married off. Today, one in three women can expect to experience some form of physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. This needs to change, and it needs to change now. Each of these numbers tells a personal story and each one of these women or girls could have been my friend, my sister, my mother, my daughter, or me. That is what motivates me to create a better world for women and girls, no matter where they may be.
Face to face
14.12.2020 | by Regina Jane Jere and Natalia Kanem
What I seek in these encounters with overseas veterans is something I am unable to translate into a simple, telegraphic formula. Among these veterans there is a very strong sense of community, an almost familiar, almost tribal communion, which at certain times seems to me incompatible with a broader sense of community. It is a communion that tends to exclude me and all those who have not shared the same experience. What I seek in these conversations are the moments, similar to epiphanies, when veterans express belonging to a larger, more comprehensive human community, necessarily organized around moral values.
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13.12.2020 | by Paulo Faria
AbstractSince this is a matter that is not yet resolved, where the strength of ideologies and re-uses may change deeply or even reverse the ways it is evoked, the colonial past may become a problem (Vecchi, 2018a). This is the case of Portuguese colonialism which is frequently invoked to stress resentments: whether from the country that was colonised or the colonising country (Ferro, 2009). As soon as the Portuguese Revolution of 25 April 1974 took place, Mozambique promoted the elimination of colonialism symbols. This predictable attitude, aiming to show that the colonisation had ended, was later amended by the future Governments, with the colonial stat-ues (at least, the ones that remained) being relocated to a place where they may be observed and contextualised. This action aimed to preserve the memory, which may enable the development of intercultural dynamics, softening the mentioned resentment: promoting questioning, in order to understand certain logics and, at the same time, filling gaps in the forgotten memory and in the Mozambican identity (Khan, Falconi & Krakowska, 2016). This paper refers to the cases related to the new life of two colonial statues in Maputo – Mouzinho de Albuquerque and Salazar –, during the post-colonial period and the permanence, until today, of the first monumental trace of Estado Novo [Second Republic] (Monumento aos Mortos da Primeira Guerra Mundial [World War I monument]), showing the importance that the preservation of memory has in a country or a na-tion’s life, even when it is associated with the former coloniser. This sort of mental decolonisation (Mbembe, 2017; Thiong’o, 1986), aims the questioning of the way the colonial past weighs on the current intercultural relations, in Mozambique, when the country establishes a relation with the former coloniser, allowing its inhabitants to look at the past as a way to build future dynamics.
City
13.12.2020 | by Vítor de Sousa
German colonial experience, as is well-known, was relatively short: the defeat of the Reich in 1918 brought about its abrupt end, since the several punitive measures set up by the Treaty of Versailles included the obligation for Germany to surrender all colonial territories in its possession. This goes a long way to explain why, contrary to the Holocaust, the history of German colonialism – although it was similarly marked by forms of extreme violence, culminating in the genocide of the Herero and Nama
peoples in 1904-1906 in so-called German South-West Africa – is today largely absent from German public memory, having, concomitantly, been long subalternized by German historic research.
City
13.12.2020 | by António Sousa Ribeiro
This essay investigates the ways in which contemporary artistic practices have been working towards an epistemic and ethico-political decolonization of the present by means of critical examinations of several sorts of colonial archives, whether public or private, familial or anonymous. Through the lens of specific artworks by the artists Ângela Ferreira, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Délio Jasse, Daniel Barroca and Raquel Schefer, this essay examines the extent to which the aesthetics of these video, photographic and sculptural practices puts forth a politics and ethics of history and memory relevant to thinking critically about the colonial amnesias and imperial nostalgias which still pervade a post-colonial condition marked by neo-colonial patterns of globalization and by uneasy relationships with diasporic and migrant communities.
Games Without Borders
06.12.2020 | by Ana Balona de Oliveira
This article examines the impact of contemporary curating and cultural programming in the configuration of critical perspectives on Portugal’s postcolonial identity. It argues that visual creativity is forging a new paradigm in the Portuguese cultural field. In this context, postcolonial discourses are not silenced but, rather, aligned with international agendas in broader cultural initiatives mirroring the transformation of the main Portuguese cities into cosmopolitan, multicultural, and multiethnic enclaves.
Games Without Borders
01.12.2020 | by Marta Lança and Carlos Garrido Castellano
In the jury, we decided to use this year's excellent crop of films to award not only the awards traditionally bestowed by the festival but also a handful of special prizes and honourable mentions. For this, we offered the following official rationale, both on why we attributed the extra bling, but also on why we enthusiastically applauded this year's programming choices.
Afroscreen
01.12.2020 | by P.J. Marcellino
Somewhere in between there is something more human that tries to understand these people, imagine if you had to flee your home and you could one carry one thing with you, how would you continue to be yourself? On top of fleeing and experiencing a traumatic conflict you turn up in a place that is supposed to be civilized and you get treated like an abomination. This project is about to try to humanize migrants and make them individuals and real people, our friends, our neighbors.
Face to face
26.11.2020 | by Alícia Gaspar and Rachael Kiddey
It has to do with the colonial history of Europe as a whole: I see this phenomenon of migration from the global south to the global north as the latest phase in the long history of racialized capitalism and colonialism. Many of these people who are trying to cross are coming from previously colonized countries by Europe. We know that, that long history of colonization has an impact in the present in terms of structural inequality, poverty, dispossession and war, and at the same time that we are seeing is the inability of Europe to come to terms with its own history. Which is a history of colonization, of course, instigated by proto-capitalism and capitalist developments as well as the hierarchy of racialization and the legacy of whiteness and white supremacy which fueled the whole colonial condition.
Face to face
25.11.2020 | by Alícia Gaspar and Yannis Hamilakis
As night falls on São Teotónio, the lights are still on at the school. Three times a week, it stays open until midnight to hold classes for adults from the region, who come here at the end of a long day in the greenhouses – knowing they will need to speak some Portuguese in order to qualify for permanent residency. There are currently 500 adult students registered for night classes – almost matching the daytime intake of 600 children. Moldovan Vitali Siminionov, who picks flowers for a living, and whose two children both study at the school, joked: “They’re always correcting me saying ‘Dad, that’s not how you say it!”
Games Without Borders
24.11.2020 | by Ana Naomi de Sousa
Stuart Hall once wrote that James in The Black Jacobins was the first to centre Atlantic slavery in world history – so in this sense the importance of James’s work to these debates is self-evident. Certainly, James’s short discussion on the economic roots of British parliamentary abolitionism formed the essential outline of Eric Williams’s more famous and lengthy contribution in this field – as Williams himself acknowledged, though in my opinion James’s grasp of the modernity of colonial slavery and the slave ships and plantations thanks to his underlying theoretical grasp of the uneven and combined nature of capitalist development meant his analysis of the exact relationship between capitalism and slavery is more sophisticated than that of Williams in many respects.
Face to face
18.11.2020 | by Christian Hogsbjerg, Charles Forsdick and The Public Archive
