As Felwine Sarr insisted in his conference, the questions steam from the centrality of the canonic interpretation of what is a ‘cultural’ good, what is a collection, how was it formed, and above all, what power-knowledge relationship is at the core of the constitution of these collections; why is it problematic to ‘return’ the objects? Is it because it means European countries have to acknowledge their violent colonial past and that they have robbed the history and cultural production of others? Can we move beyond invisibility towards emergences (Santos, 2014)? Can we overstep the epistemic violence that shapes our times?
To read
13.08.2020 | by Maria Paula Meneses
From the point of view of an uncompromising condemnation of colonialism, the indictment of the present-day practices of the state of Israel is a logical consequence. And to condemn all forms of colonialism is not equivalent to taking on an ideological stance, it is, purely and simply, a moral imperative.
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04.07.2020 | by António Sousa Ribeiro
As academics, we teach about empire, slavery and colonialism because without them, the world makes no sense. Observing the protests against racism in the streets of the US, UK, Australia and elsewhere feels like watching not only a mass movement, but also a classroom, crackling with intellectual energy.
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27.06.2020 | by Sanjay Seth, Francisco Carballo and David Martin
On the basis of our experience as university teachers, we are not surprised that the murder of George Floyd in the US has injected renewed energy into the movements against racism worldwide, not least in Britain. No grounds for shock or surprise here.
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27.06.2020 | by Sanjay Seth, Francisco Carballo and David Martin
According to a government decision of the same year, Independence squares were to be set up in all provincial capitals and to receive identical but smaller statues produced in North Korea by Mansudae Art Studio: the statue erected in the capital is 9 meters high, while those implanted in other cities are 2.9 meters high.
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11.06.2020 | by Roberto Conduru
At the height of the movement, Harlem was the epicenter of American culture. The neighborhood bustled with African American-owned and run publishing houses and newspapers, music companies, playhouses, nightclubs, and cabarets. The literature, music, and fashion they created defined culture and “cool” for blacks and white alike, in America and around the world.
City
15.04.2020 | by vários
O sentimento de vulnerabilidade partilhada que hoje vivemos, enredados na crise encetada pelo coronavírus, interroga-nos, também, sobre os limites da nossa memória para democratizarmos o nosso passado, descolonizando as hierarquias raciais, coloniais e patriarcais que definem o que é alheio. Na “lembrança minha” deveria lembrar-me de inúmeras histórias de fim do mundo, histórias há muito testemunhadas por aqueles e aquelas para quem a COVID-19 é apenas mais episódio de uma continuada exposição à desigual distribuição da precariedade.
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30.03.2020 | by Bruno Sena Martins
Judith Butler discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, and its escalating political and social effects in America. "Unfortunately, in the time of the pandemic, none of us can wait. The ideal must now be kept alive in the social movements that are riveted less on the presidential campaign than the long term struggle that lies ahead of us. These courageous and compassionate visions mocked and rejected by capitalist “realists” had enough air time, compelled enough attention, to let increasing numbers – some for the first time – desire a changed world."
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30.03.2020 | by Judith Butler
Nothing could better show that the art of memory, in the way that Boltanski thinks about it and makes it, is memory itself. It knows its workings and saves it from erasure. This is the lesson that Christian Boltanski repeats to us in all the corners of his immense oeuvre. And that, literally, makes time.
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07.03.2020 | by Roberto Vecchi
Funes’ condition contrasts with [Everything passes except the past], an international workshop about the politics of memory, promoted by the Goethe-Institut, which took place over a few days of September at Culturgest in Lisbon, in tandem with the cinema programme, Re imagining the post-colonial archive. Unlike Funes' condition this event was about reflecting on the relationship between remembering and forgetting the past.
Afroscreen
18.02.2020 | by Inês Ponte
Through the territories of Brazilian northeast where he comes from and never cease to return, to the streets of São Paulo, London, Paris, Naples or a little village in Andaluzia, the artist is always moving. Not more as a traveler then exiled or immigrant, Ícaro Lira does not celebrates nomadism, but is interested in transfigurations – political, economical
and social, but also on intimate ones – brought by these circulations. Starting from his trips, which are above all meetings, he brings back objects: wood pieces, stones, pictures, trash, administrative documents, press articles, but also audio interviews and personal notes. So many traces with unique stories that, juxtaposed and on a set, became a weave of fragile meaning and open to interpretation.
I'll visit
04.02.2020 | by Elena Lespes Muñoz
Through the territories of Brazilian northeast where he comes from and never cease to return, to the streets of São Paulo, London, Paris, Naples or a little village in Andaluzia, the artist is always moving. Not more as a traveler then exiled or immigrant, Ícaro Lira does not celebrates nomadism, but is interested in transfigurations – political, economical
and social, but also on intimate ones – brought by these circulations. Starting from his trips, which are above all meetings, he brings back objects: wood pieces, stones, pictures, trash, administrative documents, press articles, but also audio interviews and personal notes. So many traces with unique stories that, juxtaposed and on a set, became a weave of fragile meaning and open to interpretation.
I'll visit
04.02.2020 | by Elena Lespes Muñoz
Tufo, therefore, has strong religions roots. The same archival documents reveal that, in its origin, the dance was only performed in rituals and festive moments associated to the Muslim faith, but with time the dance was popularized and secularized.
Stages
29.01.2020 | by Hélio Nguane
“When I was little, I was mesmerized listening to the stories told by my grandparents. My grandfather was a sailor. He travelled to the poles for exploration and when he returned he would tell us a lot of stories. It is a very special thing for me to tell my family's stories. What about my grandmother! My grandmother had an incredible imagination. She made up stories. My favorite story was 'Kai Hai'. It was the name of a shark, Kai.
Face to face
29.01.2020 | by Sinem Taş
We can establish, through renewed rituals, a collective ethic of memory. This shows that the fractured past has to be used with a sense of responsibility that is public, and not private, that is of the present, and not of the past. This responsibility concerns not only Northern Ireland, but all the unheralded contexts of divided memory. Ours too.
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28.01.2020 | by Roberto Vecchi
It would be a supreme fantasy to think, naively, that we can fully recognize the black blood that lies beneath the foundations of nation-empires and post-empires if we also leave in place the very stones that sustain and adorn the idea of the nation.
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28.01.2020 | by Bruno Sena Martins
We urgently need a return to culture as the filter between individuals and the political, broadly conceived. Without this we will not escape from the current situation that, not only in Italy, finds its reflection in the protagonist of Paolo Sorrentino’s acclaimed La Grande Bellezza: the tragic, failed, mundane visage of Jep Gambardella.
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28.01.2020 | by Lívia Apa
My research on the nonaligned comes from a cultural and art-historical position. It is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how the non-aligned movement, apart from creating political, or social, or economic alliances was also attempting to create cultural alliances that would counter Western cultural hegemony, and what many in the movement, who were interested in culture, also called Western cultural imperialism.
Face to face
03.01.2020 | by Iolanda Vasile
In France, in spite of the economic context of the Trente Glorieuses being favourable to the absorption of labour, the socioprofessional characteristics of the French people who arrived from Algeria did not correspond to the needs of the French labour market, which required industrially qualified workers. In the Portuguese case the inverse situation pertained.
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02.01.2020 | by Morgane Delaunay
What is at stake in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s book are the living, human ruins of empire. No longer based on the figure of the veteran or the returnee, but on someone from the other side of the line colonialism traced: a black man and, in this case, the complex figure that colonialism generated, the assimilated African who, here, for the first time in Portuguese literature, is at the centre of the narrative.
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26.12.2019 | by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro
