Walter Mignolo (1941, Córdoba, Argentina) is a semiotician and professor at Duke University, who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. In “Enacting the Archives, Decentring the Muses,” Mignolo reads through the Museum of Islamic Art and of Asian Civilizations Museum, attempting to decolonize the single story of western museums by showing how de-westernization works. The author’s argument will be that the de-colonial story of western museums through the appropriation of the museum model ...

In this conversation, we talk about Harsha Walia’s new fantastic book, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket, 2021), which draws an international map of the border imperialist regime in its geographic, historic, and legal complexities. We then proceed in trying to envision the various forms of internationalist solidarities that emerge in the struggle against this global regime, following in particular Indigenous and/or Black resistance. Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013). Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, ...

Invoking the global Black uprising, this conversation between Margarida Waco and Awa Konaté examines Anti-Blackness and the different ways in which institutional and structural violence against Black and Brown bodies is normalised and manifested across the Nordics, i.e. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland in particular. The conversation draws upon Scandinavian colonial history and Denmark’s role in slave trading as frameworks allowing for a critical examination of the cultural and political languages and iconographies associated with the Nordic Paradigm in an attempt to challenge, and finally dismantle the concept of Nordic Exceptionalism. Awa Konaté is a London and Copenhagen based Danish-Ivorian writer ...

The compositions, essays, videos and architectural projects in this collection explore strategies and technologies of investigating beyond the predominantly Western modernist architectural format and the main framework for today’s uncontested architectural sites, trying to obscure, contradict or amplify on the notions of modernity. Echoing processual music terminologies, the dissonant practices and structures transform energy, twist and interfere with the virtual and physical context around, in a macro form on the territory of the complexity drive to change the ideologies of the fixed urban form. Through the approach of decolonial thinking being and doing one question that emerges is how to ...

“Run comrade, the old world is behind you,” is one of the slogans hoisted by the French 1968 movement, which eventually found its way into Soleil Ô (1969), Med Hondo’s best-known film. Filmmaker, actor, and voice-actor, Med Hondo was born in Mauritania, subsequently emigrated to France where he has been living in the Parisian suburbs for more than fifty years. A truly self-made man, Med Hondo began to work in theatre, uncompromisingly making his way toward filmmaking. As a director, he has produced films that unveil the political topicality of the African continent’s history and of its diaspora, and to ...

During the Algerian Revolution the French colonial regime designated large areas as zones interdites (forbidden zones), which consisted of free-fire zones for French military air and ground forces, and were to be cleared of any living beings. Hundreds of thousands of Algerians were forcibly evacuated from the forbidden zones and transferred into militarily controlled camps dubbed the centres de regroupement. Based on private and institutional archives, including the French Service cinématographique des armées (SCA), the exhibition at Archive Kabinett, curated by Samia Henni, features certain aspects of the massive forced resettlement of civilians, and disclosures the ways with which the ...

This issue of the journal resulted from the AntiColonial Records seminar that took place from the 24 to the 26 of October 2018 at Archive Kabinett in Berlin. This format of edited excerpts from transcribed conversations between the three groups of participants is a means to document the multi-voiced gathering and to map various positions and urges informed by anticolonial methods and practices.

Art Biennials and the Mediterranean Conundrum surveys the last twelve editions of Manifesta. Through this examination, the essay evaluates neocolonial strategies that can be used to promote decolonial thinking and exhibition-making. It also situates the biennial as a territory where both fabrication and rethinking of the periphery paradigm occur.

This book foregrounds the centrality of political conflicts in the radical philosophy of Alain Badiou. It is divided into two halves. The first undertakes a reading of Badiou’s wider oeuvre (beyond Being and Event) and demonstrates that his political theory derives from analyses of key revolutionary sequences such as the Paris Commune, October ‘17, May ‘68 and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. From his evolving meditations on these sequences, and from his theoretical borrowings from Marxism, psychoanalysis and set-theory, Badiou has established a complex schema of the possible outcomes of conflict which constitutes a subtle and flexible theory of change. In ...

This episode features some of the most forward-thinking contemporary musicians and visual artists currently based in the Bay Area. There is an unspoken blueprint in the Bay Area arts and music communities allowing artists an organic crossover between practices and languages. A hybridizing of mediums that arises from spaces of deep experimentation. From the Bay Area’s openness and curiosity to the limitations of physical spaces to work and gather in – leading to the creation of multipurpose spaces that host artists across visual art, performance, and music, thus resulting in crossovers. Each in their unique way, the artists featured in this episode ...

It has often been noted that the collapse of the socialist system did not result in research activities that could be compared to postcolonial studies. As Ewa Thompson has observed, “Unlike Western colonies, which have increasingly talked back to their former masters, Russia’s colonies have by and large remained mute.” Instead, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, opinions have been expressed from within different research fields regarding the appropriateness of thinking of post-Soviet societies in terms of postcolonial studies. Nevertheless, asserting that postsocialism continues to remain a useful category for researchers, Caroline Humphrey notes the existence of a growing ...

The smell of bleach figures prominently in my first encounter with Chloé Quenum’s production. During her brief stay and exhibition at Mercer Union in Toronto in 2012, I witnessed the artist excavate an abstract image out of a black cloth by a process of chlorine reduction performed en plein air on the side patio of the gallery. She stressed the textile, washing and manipulating the weave until a new visual field was pulled into existence. The result resembled a rusty sun-print, fleshy yet serene, a skin stretched over a fourfold frame that stood upright by its own counterforces. It held in tension ...