Léopold Lambert met with Indigenous Lakota activists Madonna Thunder Hawk and Marcella Gilbert during their passage in France to present Christina D. King and Elizabeth A. Castle’s film Warrior Women that portrays their struggle over two generation — Madonna is Marcella’s mother. In this conversation, we talked about four episodes of Indigenous resistance in Turtle Island (North America): the occupations of Alcatraz (1969), Mount Rushmore (1971), Wounded Knee (1973) and Standing Rock (2016), all of which were experienced by Madonna. Madonna Thunderhawk is an Oohenumpa Lakota. Born and raised across the Oceti Sakowin homelands, she first became active in the late 1960s as a ...

In this conversation recorded in our office, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn answers Léopold Lambert’s questions about the way she interprets or/and constructs various kinds of archives through her artistic work. The first part of the conversation addresses diasporic archives through her project The Making of an Archive (2014-now), which undertakes to digitize photographs from immigrant families in Canada and Sweden. They then proceed to interrogate the colonial archives in Jacqueline’s work following her 2015 residency in the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm that led to the exhibition Black Atlas (2016). Through phrases such as “How did the world came to Europe” ...

Author and activist Andrew Ross surveys the contributions of Palestinian labor to the building of Israel.

ASHLEY DAWSON talks about extreme cities, or urban densities like New York City, where social inequalities and uneven effects of colonial violence and capitalist development are increasingly exacerbated by extreme weather and environmental degradation. He calls on the power of storytelling and the need to collectively imagine different futures. Dawson works across the fields of postcolonial studies, environmental humanities, and climate justice. He is professor of English at CUNY Graduate Center and College of Staten Island, and leads a Climate Action Lab.

This podcast episode is a bit different from the ones we usually publish — and not just because of our new opening credits edited by Andrei Popoviciu! Taking advantage of his visit in Chicago, Léopold talked with our past contributor Imran Mohammad. In November 2017, he wrote a text for us about the Rohingya genocide that he fled while he was living his fourth year of detention in an Australian camp detaining hundreds of exiled people on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. A few weeks later and while many detainees organized forms of revolt, the camp ceased to operate and ...

In this interview by Léopold Lambert, Mpho Matsipa describes the spirit and contents of the exhibition she curated in 2018. Entitled “African Mobilities: This is not a Refugee Camp Exhibition,” this powerfully-curated gathering of artworks provides the bases of a conversation about the notions of mobilities and temporalities in the context of the African continent, from the mind-expanding maps of the Chimurenga Library and the cartographic entanglements by Dana Whariba, Thembinkosi Goniwe and Nolan Oswald Dennis to the futurist vision of Olalekan Jeyifous and Wale Lawal. Mpho Matsipa received her PhD in Architecture from UC Berkeley. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor ...

In Learning and Unlearning, which began as a series of discussions held from 2017-19, we ask questions about world-making. By unlearning our relationship to the places and temporalities we occupy, can we learn new ways of inhabiting the world? And by reconsidering our relation to work and well-being, can we find new ways to see, feel and understand the world? This recalibration of how we see the world and consequently how we live our lives is the central concern of the artists, educators and thinkers whose writings follow. Unlearning, for us, is not a reactionary opposition to intellectualism and the academy. ...

Léopold met with Nadia Ben Youssef during the second Black and Palestinian Solidarity conference in Naarm (Melbourne) on Indigenous Wurundjeri land, organized by Gary Foley and Suzannah Henty in November 2019. In this conversation, Nadia recounts the history of the 1955 Bandung Conference through the perspective of her grand father, Tunisian revolutionary Salah Ben Youssef who was representing Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco in the fight against French colonialism. The discussion addresses the way the Bandung spirit was broken by France’s neocolonial strategies that manufactured new types of dependencies for former colonies in Africa. They conclude the conversation with considerations of ...

In this conversation with Léopold Lambert in the Center for Applied Legal Studies at Wits University (Johannesburg) that he directs, Tshepo Madlingozi exposes the many reasons that made the 1996 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) a reinforcement of settler colonialism and white supremacy in South Africa. Associating the theoretical framework of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness with a legal examination of the way “transitional justice” has been operating since the official end of the Apartheid in 1994, Tshepo shows us that actual decolonization of what he calls “the country with no name” has never been on the table. Tshepo Madlingozi is a ...