MASP

Thursday, October 18th

10h-10h30
Introduction
 
10h30-12h30

ROLANDO VÁZQUEZ | The end of the contemporary, decoloniality and the task of listening
Museums have played a key role in the articulation of the modern/colonial divide. They have been instrumental in the formation of the dominant canon of aesthetics. We will bring to question the notion of contemporaneity. While contemporaneity appears as the defining term of both contemporary art and museums, it has largely remained under-thematized and assumed to be innocuous and inclusive. Contemporaneity defines one of the key axes of differentiation that constitute the colonial difference. The axis of modern time works alongside other forms of exclusion such as race and gender. The field of contemporaneity gets to establish who belongs to the present while turning novelty into an aesthetic criterion. Decoloniality calls for the end of the contemporary as the condition for the possibility to enable the emergence of alternative genealogies of artistic and curatorial practices that transgress the colonial difference and embody the temporalities that have been negated under the contemporary.
 
LUCIANA BALLESTRIN | From post-colonialism to post-democracy? The boundaries of liberal democracy in Latin America and the challenge of the decolonial turn.
The aim is to make a post-colonial reading of liberal democracies in the Global South, having in mind three main goals. The first one is that of analyzing the global context of reflow concerning western liberal democracies and the advancement of authoritarian projects by means of elections, observing the participation of Latin America in the current de-democratization wave. The second is to evidence how the trajectory of democracy, comprising both liberalism and neoliberalism, which is marked and crossed by the continuity and resilience of colonial power (coloniality), turned the trajectory of liberal democracy of the continent into something dangerously pendular, provisory, and, to a certain degree, still-born. Ultimately, I would like to suggest that updating the anti-post-decolonial project requires an in-depth dialogue with the democratic project so as to problematize its (neo)liberal content, an ability of responding to the ascending tropical fascism, in addition of binding the decolonization project, taken under the normative horizon of refoundation, to a non-exclusively liberal democratic project.

NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES | Visual coloniality and the crucible of modern/colonial space and time: notes on the coloniality of being and decolonial aesthetics
Modernity/coloniality includes visual regimes that sustain and naturalize modern/colonial conceptions and images of the self, others, and sub-others in reference to spatio-temporal formations within which selves, others, and sub-others are expected to be found. This presentation will explore images of discovery and conquest, on the one hand, and visual art that questions contemporary relations of colonization (particularly Puerto Rican art), on the other, to flesh out the relevance of the coloniality and decoloniality of being to the decolonial aesthetics.
  
14h-16h

JULIETA GONZÁLEZ | Memories of underdevelopment, art and the decolonial turn in Latin America 1960-1985.
This presentation will address some of the theoretical concerns that informed the research for the exhibition Memories of Underdevelopment. The exhibition aimed to identify early instances of “decolonial” strategies in the visual arts, film and architecture in Latin America during the sixties and seventies as a form of resistance to the rhetoric of developmentalism that prevailed in the region at the time. These artistic strategies preceded by decades the articulation of theories around the notion of coloniality and decoloniality that originated with Aníbal Quijano’s writings on the subject in the early 1990s, and were aligned with the type of critique articulated in the fields of sociology and political economy by dependency theory in the 1960s. The research was also motivated by the need to undertake a critical revision of these practices that goes beyond the category of “Latin American conceptualism.”
 
YAIZA HERNÁNDEZ VELÁZQUEZ | Can the museum liberate us?
During the early 1970s calls to revise, resist or transform the nineteenth century European model of the museum as it expanded itself throughout the world gathered significant momentum. The 1972 International Council of Museums (ICOM) roundtable in Santiago de Chile, inspired by the Latin American political project of “liberation” called for a museum that was integral to the communities it served. The legacy of these debates, now gathered under the label of “New Museology”, has expanded at the same rate as it has been depoliticised. This presentation attempts to distil a different legacy out of the writings of Brazilian museologist Odalice Priosti and her elaboration of a “Museology of Liberation”. Drawing from her insights, the presentation asks what resources such an understanding of what a museum should do could offer to contemporary attempts to “decolonize” art institutions.
 
SHEENA WAGSTAFF | Encyclopedic varia 
Following the dominant European model, those encyclopedic museums that aspire to universalist ambitions of comprehensiveness have come to be contested through some exhibitions and collection-building campaigns that reappraise seriously the primacy of the accepted canon, even as they are enacted from a privileged and incontrovertibly problematic position. The subject of this presentation is the programme at The Met Breuer, a satellite of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that, for strategic reasons, since its opening in 2016, has functioned primarily as a kunsthalle. Several program strands have been consciously devised, each posed as a proposition (either via a thematic or monographic approach) that seeks to broaden the understanding of received authoritative knowledge by digging deep into the history of artifacts and modes of interpretation, including the often vexed circumstances and context of an object’s acquisition. The Met Breuer programme aims to include a questioning of the traditional work of the museum in aspiring towards a “total” inclusive collection in order to achieve as holistic an historical narrative as is possible.
  
Keynote
16h30-17h30

LEWIS R. GORDON | Decolonizing black aesthetics
This talk offers a critique of the tendency to de-aestheticize Black aesthetics through collapsing the study of Black aesthetic production into ethnography or instrumental politics. I will respond through first offering a summary of what an aesthetic approach would be and also offer a model of political aesthetics that could address the significance of the Black in Euromodernity as a political idea while remaining attuned to Black lived-reality as an experience that transcends being reduced only to moral and political categories. Given the constraints of time, I will use recent cinema as the audio-visual exemplar.
  
Friday, October 19th
 
10h30-12h30

SHELA SHEIKH | “That which we cannot not want:” environmental racism, more-than-human witnessing and the paradoxes of representation
According to classical theories of testimony, the one who bears witness is a sovereign subject who speaks in their own name and stands before the law and/or the other to promise a truth. Taking leave from the poststructuralist and posthumanist deconstruction of the human subject, this presentation argues for the necessity of an expanded notion of witnessing — one that is comprised of more-than-human collectivities. This is all the more urgent in the context of global environmental violence in which, through the legacies of imperial science and taxonomy and modernity/coloniality, what is threatened and violated is both “nature” and racialized populations. Guided by a selection of contemporary artistic and speculative practices, I ask what such more-than-human witness collectivities might look like. To what degree might such forms of witnessing function not only metaphorically or poetically, but also in the realms of law and evidence? In situations in which the rights of humans and nonhumans alike must be defended, how might artistic practices help us to navigate the age-old conundrums of political and aesthetic representation, in which ‘speaking for’ or ‘giving voice’ to both the dispossessed and nature runs the risk of further replicating the original colonial matrix of being and power that it seeks to contest and overturn? 

ESTEFANÍA PEÑAFIEL LOAIZA | Dialogues: from appropriation to regurgitation
I will be presenting a series of art projects dealing with mental spaces and actual territories, in which fiction is appealed as an attempt to decenter the gaze and subvert the established coordinates of time and space. Some of these works propose a revision of my country’s history and its foundational texts (i.e. “cuenta regresiva”, “a certain idea of paradise”), while others establish a utopic and plastic dialogue with literature and poetry (the “cartographies” series). In each of these practices, the body is strongly implied in the act of reading and writing, and the ideas of the Self and the Other are closely intertwined. These works deal with notions such as ingestion, mastication, digestion, and more precisely, regurgitation. 

ELIZABETH A. POVINELLI | Mangled surfaces, insistent images 
The Karrabing Film Collective (KFC) is a group of family and friends, most of whom come from the northwestern coast of the Top End of the Northern Territory, Australia. It emerged in 2009 in the disastrous intersection of the late liberal politics of cultural recognition and of neoliberal extractive capitalism that left many of the families who would become the KFC homeless. Film and art installations are a means of representing their precarious position, creating a context around a future that could be practiced, and enticing younger members to learn about their ancestral lands by enacting them in new narrative forms. This presentation discusses the relationship between the social and financial making of our films and art installations. Rather than flawed, how can we see this surface as the truth of the contemporary refusal of the KFC to be captured by the recognition machinery of the state and arts industry even as we welcome both to rethink themselves in light of our worlds and work.

14h-16h

CANDICE HOPKINS | Towards a decolonial practice of listening
“We have no ear lids. We are condemned to listen.” These are the opening lines of composer R. Murray Schafer’s essay “Open Ears”. While we can’t close our ears, it doesn’t mean that we listen to everything that is being said, something particularly true for those whose ears seem closed more often than they are open. How can we attune ourselves to pick up different frequencies, to feel what reverberates, to hear what sounds at the margins? Hopkins looks at the intersections between sound and protest in Indigenous art and activism towards what might be considered a decolonial practice of listening.

ESTHER GABARA | Art as fiction: Amerindian concepts for visual theory
This presentation introduces the methodology of a book in progress, for which research into dominant lineages in contemporary art of the Americas led me to Amerindian thought as a source of answers to theoretical questions that the art critical bibliography could not resolve. In this project, I seek to articulate a theory of fiction proper to contemporary visual art, during the period that neoliberal economic, political, and social experiments were enacted across the American continent (1960s-2000s). If fiction is a word often used to describe the diverse practices of contemporary visual art, it has not yet received an extended articulation of its distinction from narrative fiction. Indigenous thought from the Andes, Mesoamerica, and the Amazon provides key concepts to understand these forms of what I call “non-literary fiction.” This methodology of articulating art theory takes up the challenge that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro posed to anthropology, that of “taking indigenous ideas as concepts, and following through on the consequences of such a decision.” 
 
SUELY ROLNIK | Decolonizing the creative drive
The micropolitical basis of the colonial-capitalistic regime is an abuse of the vital forces of the biosphere. For the humans, this abuse currently reaches such drive in its very birth, thus deviating from its ethical fate: a power of creation of other modes of existence and their senses each time life becomes smothered by the forms of present. In such a deviation, the exercise of “creating” new worlds (something life requires for persevering) becomes sterile, then reducing itself to the exercise of “creativity” (detached from life) that draws new scenarios for the accumulation of capital and a stimulus to the voracity of consumption. Faced with this context, it is not enough to intervene in the macropolitical sphere of sharing rights and goods, one must equally intervene in the micropolitical sphere: to decolonize the unconscious structured by the abuse, so as to take back in hand the fate of life in its essence of transfiguring force. In this sphere, the boundaries between art, clinic, and politics become indiscernible.

Keynote
16h30-17h30

BAMBI CEUPPENS | Decolonizing a colonial monument
The Royal Museum for Central Africa was created by King Leopold II with the money he made in Congo. It was inaugurated in 1910. Its last major renovation took place in 1958, two years before the Congolese independence. The museum was often called the last colonial museum in the world. Although it is not true that no changes were made since 1958, it is true that until its closure for a major renovation in 2013, the permanent exhibition retained a colonial perspective on Africa and Africans and largely ignored the colonial past that had shaped and created it. This presentation will deal with the major challenges involved in decolonizing this colonial monument with particular reference to collaboration with members of “host communities” who are the moral, if not legal owners of the collections.

BAMBI CEUPPENS
Holds a PhD in Social Anthropology. She is a senior researcher at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), a guest lecturer in Anthropology of the Arts at the Ghent School of Arts and visiting professor in Non-Western art at Sint Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp. Her research focuses on Congolese art, the Belgian-Congolese colonial past and cultural heritage, Congolese in Belgium, museum representations of Africa(ns), the decolonization of ex-colonial museums and autochthony. She has curated the exhibition Indépendance! Congolese Tell their Stories of Fifty Years of Independence (RMCA, 2010). She is one of two general curators of the new permanent exhibition of the RMCA and curator of the gallery on the African presence in Belgium, postcolonial history and representations of Africa(ns).

CANDICE HOPKINS
Senior Curator of the Toronto Biennial of Art and co-curator of the SITE Santa Fe biennial, Casa Tomada. She was a part of the curatorial team for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, and a co-curator of the major exhibitions Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, and the 2014 SITElines biennial, Unsettled Landscapes, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her writing is published widely and her recent essays and presentations include “Outlawed Social Life” for South as a State of Mind. She is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation.

ELIZABETH A. POVINELLI
An anthropologist and filmmaker. She is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York, and one of the founding members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Her recent publications include Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016). Povinelli lives and works in New York and Darwin.

ESTEFANÍA PEÑAFIEL LOAIZA
Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza was born in Quito, Ecuador, and since 2002 lives and works in Paris. Her artistic practice has been constantly motivated by questions related to her own displacements and relocations, between her country of origin and the one in which she is currently established. This situation has driven her to explore, in a wide specter, notions such as territories, migrations, frontiers, memory and history, visibility and invisibility. She works with different languages and medias, like installations, video, photography and actions.

ESTHER GABARA
E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. A specialist in modern and contemporary Latin American literature and visual culture, she was the faculty guest curator of the traveling exhibition Pop América, 1965-1975 (Nasher Museum, Duke/McNay Art Museum, 2018/19). She is the author of Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Duke University Press, 2008), as well as numerous scholarly articles and exhibition catalogues, including La Raza (Autry Museum of the American West, 2017), Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero (Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College, 2017), and Estudios de cultura visual en América Latina (IIE/UNAM, Mexico, 2018). 

JULIETA GONZÁLEZ
Artistic director of Museo Jumex in Mexico City. She has also held curatorial positions at Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, the Bronx Museum, Tate Modern, Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, and Museo Alejandro Otero. She has organized over 60 exhibitions internationally, amongst which are Memorias del subdesarrollo (MCASD, Museo Jumex, MALI); Juan Downey: A Communications Utopia (Museo Tamayo, Mexico City), and also been involved as co-curator or guest curator of international exhibitions, such as Biennale de Lyon (2007), Insite San Diego/Tijuana (2005), and Prague Biennale (2003). She holds an MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory from Goldsmiths, London.

LEWIS R. GORDON
A philosopher and musician. Professor of Philosophy with affiliation in Jewish Studies, Caribbean and Latin American Studies, Asian and Asian American Studies, and International Studies at UCONN-Storrs. His many books include Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Humanities Press, 1995), Her Majesty’s Other Children (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), Existentia Africana (Routledge, 2000), Disciplinary Decadence (Routledge, 2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and, more recently, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (Fordham University Press, 2015), and Geopolitics and Decolonization: Perspectives from the Global South (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), in collaboration with Fernanda Frizzo Bragato.

LUCIANA BALLESTRIN
Graduated in Social Science at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (2003), with a Master’s degree in Political Science from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (2006) and a PhD in Political Science from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, comprising a doctorate internship at Universidade de Coimbra (2008). She is currently an Associate Professor IV of Political Science at the International Studies course and the post-grad program in Political Science at Universidade Federal de Pelotas. She acts and researches on topics regarding Contemporary Political Theory, specially themes related with democracy, violence, and post-colonialism.

NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES
Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies, and of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His publications include Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Duke University Press, 2008), and the collection of essays La descolonización y el giro decolonial, compiled by the Universidad de la Tierra (Chiapas, Mexico) in 2011. He also guest edited two special issues on “mapping the decolonial turn” for the journal Transmodernity. He is currently working in an edited anthology of Latin American decolonial feminisms with Yuderkys Espinoza and María Lugones, and in two book projects: Theorizing the Decolonial Turn and Fanonian Meditations.

ROLANDO VÁZQUEZ
Teaches sociology at the University College Roosevelt and is affiliated to Gender Studies and ICON at the University of Utrecht. He curated the workshop: “Staging the End of the Contemporary” for MaerzMusik at the Berliner Festspiele. With Walter Mignolo he coordinates since 2019 the Middelburg Decolonial Summer School. They co-authored the article “Decolonial Aesthesis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings.” His work seeks to transgress the dominion of contemporaneity, heteronormativity and modernity/coloniality. Through the question of precedence and relational temporalities, he aims to contribute to decolonizing institutions, epistemology, aesthetics, and subjectivity.
 
SHEENA WAGSTAFF
Sheena Wagstaff leads The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s work in Modern and Contemporary Art. Wagstaff initiates and directs the Met Breuer’s international exhibition program and she is also responsible for building and expanding the collection culturally and geographically, working with a team of curators with trans-cultural expertise in 20th and 21st century art. Prior to The Met, Wagstaff was Chief Curator of Tate Modern and has also held positions at Tate Britain; The Frick Art Museum, Pittsburgh; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. 

SHELA SHEIKH
Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she convenes the MA Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy, and co-chairs the Critical Ecologies research stream. She is currently working on a multi-platform research project around colonialism, botany, and the politics of planting. As part of this, she has co-edited, with Ros Gray, “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions” (Third Text special issue, 2018); and, with Uriel Orlow, Theatrum Botanicum (Sternberg Press, 2018).

SUELY ROLNIK
Psychoanalyst, critic of the current production regimes of culture and subjectivity, and full professor at PUC-SP. Among others, she is the author of Esferas da insurreição (N-1, 2018), Anthropophagie Zombie (Black Jack, 2012), Archivmanie (Documenta 13, 2011), as well as coauthor of Micropolítica. Cartografias do desejo (Vozes, 1986) along with Félix Guattari. She is also the director of Arquivo para uma Obra-Acontecimento (records of 65 interviews about Lygia Clark; 2002-2011), and cocurator of the exhibition Lygia Clark, do objeto ao acontecimento (Musée de Beaux-arts de Nantes, 2005, and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2006) along with Corinne Diserens. 

YAIZA HERNÁNDEZ VELÁZQUEZ
Lecturer at Central Saint Martins-University of the Arts London, where she runs the MRes Art in Exhibition Studies in collaboration with Afterall. Her research focuses on on art institutions in a broad sense as sites of philosophical and political import and on the way in which “theory” has both informed and curtailed those political efforts. Recent publications include “Imagining Curatorial Practice after 1972” in Curating after the Global (Bard College-MIT Press, 2018), “A constituent education” in The Constituent Museum (Valiz-L’Internationale, 2018) and “El arte de la institución” in Cohabitar Entre- (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2017).