Untie to Tie. Colonial Fragments in School Contexts Publication
Remnants of colonialism continue to mark the social norms still found in school curricula and textbooks today.
These ties to the past find expression within structural racism as experienced by so many school children every day—in the schoolyard, in countless classroom interactions, and through that which is not revealed, spoken or conveyed.
This anthology explores these colonial continuities and their effects on discourse, imagery, and the politics of language. Embedded in the arts, education, and social sciences, the authors aim to counter these persistences through alternative representations and striking new perspectives.
This publication accompanies the research and exhibition project Untie to Tie – On Colonial Legacies and contemporary societies, realized by ifa Gallery Berlin, in cooperation with the German Federal Agency for Civic Education/bpb.
“Pallay Pampa. Encrucijadas andinas” por Renata Cervetto
Pallay Pampa. Encrucijadas andinas es la actual exposición que presenta ifa-Galerie en su sede de Mitte, Berlin. Curada por la historiadora del arte y docente Lizet Díaz, este proyecto presenta la obra de cinco artistas peruanos de distintas generaciones – Carolina Estrada, Juan Osorio, Kenyi Quispe, Emilio Santisteban y Daniela Zambrano Almidón -, junto a un ensayo audiovisual basado en la investigación de Adela Pino en colaboración con Isaac Ruiz y Álvaro Acosta.
Si bien la exposición y las obras comenzaron a tomar forma en 2019, la inauguración se vio postergada hasta el corriente año a causa de la pandemia. Su propuesta se enmarca dentro del programa a largo plazo “Untie to tie – On Colonial legacies and contemporary societies” (Desatar para atar – Sobre legados coloniales y sociedades contemporáneas), que ifa-Galerie desarrolla desde 2017. En lineas generales, “Untie to tie” se propone observar estos legados desde las problemáticas de la migración, el racismo, y el medio ambiente. Con el propósito de convocar a generaciones más jóvenes a formar parte de los debates, estos temas se desarrollan por medio de programas públicos presenciales y online, publicaciones como la reciente compilación “Untie to tie: Colonial fragments in school contexts”1 y exposiciones como la actual, que incluye visitas y actividades en español, inglés y alemán a cargo de la artista peruana Karen Michelsen Castañón.
El título Pallay Pampa remite, en lengua quechua, al entramado vertical y horizontal que conforma a los textiles andinos. El área intervenida es Pallay, simboliza lo que se dice o lo dicho; mientras que el área lisa es Pampa, aquello que está por decirse, el discurso futuro. De esta manera, el titulo refiere metafóricamente a la forma de conocimiento andino: como algo que en parte está dado – basado en saberes ancestrales – y en parte abierto, dispuesto al cambio y a la reflexión. En conjunto, la muestra busca aproximar la vivencia del tiempo y cosmovisión andina, como también su complejidad. En este sentido, las obras no se quedan en la mera exposición del tema, sino que profundizan en el diálogo de estas formas de conocimiento con las premisas y formas de hacer del mundo occidental. Las encrucijadas surgen principalmente en el contraste de temporalidades de ambos mundos, las maneras dispares de convivir con el entorno y el cuidado a la madre tierra. A su vez, se cuestiona también la idea de identidad andina, dando a ver cómo esta se conforma y actualiza en un tejido de intercambios en continuo proceso de devenir.
El recorrido y diseño de la exposición fue realizado por el Studio de Manuel Raeder y Rodolfo Samperio. Al ingresar, en el centro del espacio se encuentra Pedagogía textil andina, el video en cuatro canales de Adela Pino, Isaac Ruiz y Álvaro Acosta. Los videos, proyectados sobre una tabla de madera en formato horizontal, introducen el paisaje andino y la cotidianidad de sus habitantes. Sentadas fuera de sus casas entre bolsas de lana, algunas mujeres tejen mientras otras esquilan a las ovejas en un proceso de trabajo colectivo a la vez que pedagógico. Sus diálogos dan cuenta de cómo hasta antes de la pandemia mantenían un ingreso con las ventas de sus tejidos, algo que se vio interrumpido durante 2020, momento en el que fue filmado el video. El resto de las obras se distribuye circularmente en torno a esta. A la derecha, The Birth of Collaboration, el video-instalación de Carolina Estrada da cuenta de las consecuencias del cambio climático en relación a los periodos de lluvia en la zona de Quispillacta, Ayacucho. El agua de lluvia que antes caía de forma equitativa durante ciertos meses, ahora cae de forma concentrada en tan solo unos días. Para aprovecharla, se recurre a la técnica ancestral de la siembra y colecta del agua por medio de bofedales, humedales ubicados en las alturas andinas que ayudan a purificar y regular el agua, proveer de nutrientes a la tierra y a mantener la biodiversidad de la flora y fauna local. El video da cuenta de cómo se está volviendo a esta tecnología hoy en día para poder aprovechar de forma más sustentable este recurso natural.
A continuación, en un ambiente separado, el video Suma Quamaña en la ciudad, de Daniela Almidón, se proyecta desde el techo hacia una amplia mesa baja. El perímetro adopta la forma del Lago Titicaca, y el espacio circundante se encuentra conectado por medio de un hilo de alpaca. El video expone el diálogo que mantiene la artista con el Yatiri (sabio) Apu Qullana Mallku, quien va revelando en la conversación sus saberes y prácticas en torno a la cosmovisión andina. Algo que puede pasar desapercibido para el espectador, es que el Lago Titicaca es parte de un sistema circulatorio de aguas subterráneas que culmina en el mar y un lugar sagrado por su ubicación entre dos wak´as – Pachaqamac y Titiqaqa -, que originalmente conformaba el centro del Tawantinsuyu. Menos evidente quizás, el circuito de hilos que se despliega en torno al perímetro del video puede remitir a los multiples intercambios que mantiene la comunidad andina con este organismo complejo y multiple que es la Pacha. Este intercambio se realiza a partir del sarnaqami, la caminata, e implica a la actividad productiva no como algo meramente terrenal sino también sagrado, ya que involucra intercambios con las deidades.
Parte de los temas elaborados por el Yatiri es la noción del tiempo. En la cosmovisión andina, el pasado y el futuro están habitados simultáneamente desde el presente, no hay un tiempo lineal (occidental), sino cíclico. Así entramos a dos de las obras de Kenyi Quispe: Contigo, (una hoja con una parte de la canción “Contigo Perú”), y ¿Qué viene después del futuro?, conformada por un texto y una piedra con la grabación “Life implies death” (La vida implica la muerte). La noción de tiempo es también desarrollada, en la sala contigua, en las obra de Juan Osorio. Su instalación PACHA – Dynamische Parität (Paridad Dinámica) cuelga del techo en láminas de plexiglas en forma de acordeón, donde se puede entrever un poema del escritor peruano José María Arguedas junto a conceptos Quechuas y Aymaras en torno a la Pacha. Al lado, sobre el suelo, un televisor proyecta Tiempo/Time/Zeit/Pacha, un video basado en el film “Runan Caycu” (1973) que da cuenta de la vida del campesino cuzqueño Saturnino Huilca. El video esta intervenido por el artista, y en vez de transcurrir normalmente, los eventos suceden hacia atrás. Por otro lado, la lectura de las palabras en la instalación PACHA quiebra con la lectura tradicional de izquierda a derecha, invitando a leer los posibles significados que residen entre las palabras.
La obra de Emilio Santisteban se despliega sobre el suelo. 我们都有吃饭的权利(Todos tenemos derecho a comer)está conformada por 324 papas Andretta, cada una con la inscripción de una palabra que en conjunto remite a un relato acerca de la interconexión entre seres y entes en el mundo, del agricultor altiplánico Santos Vilca Cayo. A medida que pasa el tiempo, las papas brotan y las palabras se van deformando hasta desaparecer. El texto convoca a todos los seres vivientes en la tierra, desde granos, verduras, animales, plantas, flores y mismo las enfermedades, que también forman parte del ecosistema en el cual vivimos. El andino considera sus cultivos como seres vivos con quienes conversa cariñosamente, canjeando sus dones en respetuosa reciprocidad. Por último, la tercer obra de Kenyi Quispe puede funcionar tanto en el cierre como en el comienzo de esta exposición. La historiadora del arte Julia Bryan-Wilson dice, en relación al trabajo textil, que la exploración de la fibra puede mutar en una forma de escritura. Es así que, en el margen superior de los muros de la sala, podemos leer el poema de Kenyi Quispe inspirado en el viaje que realizó junto a otros de los artistas y la curadora al lago Titicaca en 2019.
El recorrido por esta exposición nos conduce a reflexionar sobre la actualidad de los saberes ancestrales andinos mediante su formas comunales de autogestión, su resistencia comunitaria y la idea de un tiempo multiple, que quiebra con las metas de productividad y especialización que sostienen a la construcción de conocimiento occidental. Como extranjera en esta ciudad, y comentando sobre una cultura que no es la propia, me pregunto cómo se traducen estas vivencias y conocimientos en la actualidad y en una ciudad como Berlin, atravesada actualmente por la polémica apertura del Humboldt Forum. Las obras presentes en Pallay Pampa dan cuenta del complejo entramado que caracteriza a esta cultura, a la vez que interpelan a nuestra propia configuración del mundo, a nuestra formación por fuera de espacios institucionales, a la convivencia con nuestro entorno natural, humano y espiritual. En lo personal, me remiten a seguir accionando desde el conocimiento que radica en el corazón, el hígado y los pulmones, conocido como amuyt´aña en lengua aymara. Aprovechemos este momento de crisis y transición para volver nuestra atención a las cosas frágiles y pequeñas, capaces de anunciar otro tipo de praxis y consciencia que nos permita imaginar un nuevo porvenir2.
1Untie to tie. Colonial fragments in schoolcontexts. Diallo Aicha, Niemann Annika, Shabafrouz Miriam (eds), ifa-Galerie Berlin, Bonn 2021.
2 Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera, Un mundo ch´ ixi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2018.
Alle Bewohner dieser Erde berufen sich auf die Kartoffeln, die Gerste, den Hafer, den Weizen, die wilden und neuen Arten der Quinoa, Knollenfrüchte wie die Oka und die Papa Lisa, die Bohnen, Erbsen, und alle anderen Nutzpflanzen, die aus unserer Gegend stammen. Dann benennen wir auch den Kaffee und sagen ihm “komm von dort wo du gut und schmackhaft gedeihst”, den Maniok, die Süßkartoffel, den Mais, den Reis, die Sonnenblume, die Kichererbse, die Linsen, die Banane, die Avocado, die Passionsfrucht, den Kürbis, die Kokosnuss und andere Pflanzen, die hier vielleicht gar nicht wachsen. Wir nennen die Schafe, die Kühe, die Lamas, die Esel, die Schweine, die Meerschweinchen, die Katzen und sogar auch die Hunde. Wir bitten den Wurm, der seines Weges kommt: „Bitte ernähre dich nicht von den Stängeln der Kartoffelpflanzen, Bohnen, Erbsen oder anderen lebenswichtigen Teilen dieser Pflanzen. Für dich gibt es nämlich genügend Gras und Weiden, die du gütlich essen kannst; dort ist dein Platz, gehe dort hin und du wirst auch dort leben, denn hier kann dich ja der Fuchs jeder Zeit fangen und fressen“. Wir sagen dann zu dem Fuchs: „Sag uns bitte, wie die nächste Saison in der Landwirtschaft aussehen wird. Und du sollst keines unserer Schafe fressen, sondern du wirst große Kaninchen und Hasen fressen und niemand wird dich dann dort stören“. Wir sagen zu den Algen: “Ihr habt uns aufgezogen, als es keine Kartoffeln gab, und wir möchten dir ein Geschenk überreichen”. Wir sagen zu den Blumen: „Blüht und so werden auch wir blühen, verdorrt nicht oder wir könnten sonst auch verdorren. Ihr werdet wie eine gute Medizin sein, die uns heilen wird und Ihr werdet zusätzlich unsere Herzen erfreuen”. Dann sagen wir zu der Krankheit: „Du und wir, beide sind wir Kinder der Erde, gehe an andere Orte, an denen dich niemand stören wird”. Alle, die wir bitten, anhören und ansehen, respektieren wir und sie bekommen von uns Essen, weil sie das Recht haben zu essen.
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Freie Version von Emilio Santisteban, basierend auf einer Geschichte von Santos Vilca Cayo, einem Bauern aus dem Andenhochland, auf die Jorge Apaza Ticona in “Manos sabias para criar la vida. Tecnología andina” (Symposium des 49. Internationalen Kongresses der Amerikanisten, Quito, Juli 1997). Deutsche Übersetzung von Thomas Steeb, deutscher Landwirt in den peruanischen Anden.
Claudia Andrea Gotta and Karen Michelsen Castañón reflect on “The Listening and the Winds” #2
In this second podcast episode historian, teacher and activist Claudia Andrea Gotta and artist Karen Michelsen Castañón discuss aspects of the exhibition Listening and the Winds related to the textiles produced by the women’s weaving collective Thañí/Viene del monte and in particular converse about the relationsship between textiles, testimonies and territories.
English translation: JD Pluecker
German translation: Luisa Donnerberg
Music: Marcelo Berrini
K: Welcome to this second podcast episode. We have come together to have a conversation that begins with the exhibition La escucha y los vientos [Listening and the Winds] at the ifa Gallery in Berlin. Claudia, today we are going to focus on the elements of the show that have to do with the textiles in the exhibition, particularly the woven pieces produced by the women’s weaving collective Thañí/Viene del monte/Comes From the Brushlands. The weavers call these fabrics SILAT, or messages. We can think of these fabrics that unfold in the space of the exhibit as extended nets. The women participating in the exhibit tell the story of these nets in the exhibit brochure; they come from the interwoven bags that in Quechua are known as llicas, and these bags are used while traveling to collect and store things. Indeed, the word can also refer to the fine threads of a spiderweb. What is the relationship then between the llica—this woven bag—and the territories where it is woven?
C: The interwoven fibers of the bags, of these llicas, of these objects that have other uses in daily life, they are made by hand by women and in some cases by men—in some towns women do not always do the weaving—and within the weft and the weave are interwoven forms of ancestral knowledge, which are still possible because there is still chaguar fiber available, because there are still fibers in the native brushlands. This is also a form of struggle. It is not possible to continue making these works if the brushlands are destroyed, and making these bags—used for a variety of purposes depending on their size and the person carrying them—will no longer be necessary if it is no longer possible to go out searching in these different territories for the things that Mother Earth provides us. So then, the bags that are on display there are a living reminder of this, of these fabricator’s hands, of the messages that are continually renewed and that in many cases are the legacy of a long chain of generations that not only have taught others to weave, but also to communicate through the weavings, but that above all they are finding a reason for being, not just in terms of carrying messages but also for utilitarian purposes. These peoples are hunters, gatherers, and fisherpeople, with a form of fishing that entails something more similar to gathering or hunting than what we understand in our societies as fishing. They can continue using them if only the white man—who has positioned himself above all other expressions of life—ceases to invade their territories. If not, the bags will no longer have a reason to exist. In these objects, we come face to face with a society that resists a hegemonic model, that co-exists in a territory with the other life forms. A society that although it cannot fight, it actually does not desire to fight against the hegemonic model, a society that wants to continue living in community in communal territories and communally.
K: The women’s weaving collective Thañí/Viene del monte/Comes From the Brushlands is also part of the association Lhaka Honhat/Nuestra tierra/Our Earth and—according to the exhibit brochure, “has been struggling for the last 30 years for recognition of communal property, for those who have always lived in this territory.” In March of last year, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in favor in this case of Lhaka Honhat. So then, what does this decision mean for these territories and the communities that live within them?
C: First of all, this organization is pan-communitarian, we could call it, because not only is it comprised of an important number of communities that exceed 130 in number—I believe it is 132 or 133—but also it contains a group that is significant because it is pluri-ethnic, it is multi-ethnic because it contains five indigenous or original peoples in the province of Salta, located in the northwestern part of our country. The nations that are present there are the Wichí, the Qom, the Tapiete, the Chulupí or Nivaclé and the Chorote. These five peoples—who each one have their own names for themselves in each one of their languages and several also have different names for their neighbors (but these are the most well-known names)—all of them are present in this organization, Lhaka Honhat, and in this emblematic case that marked such an important moment at the beginning of last year with the definitive verdict of the IACHR. After this definitive verdict in March 2020 in this case known as 12094, the case of Lhaka Honhat at the Inter-American Court, became a paradigmatic event, but we know almost nothing about the concrete advances made, because this took place in the beginning of this huge standstill in all aspects of our lives brought on by the arrival of COVID-19 across all the territories of the planet. I think that, or I consider, because above all this is an analysis, that the case of Lhaka Honhat is going to be successful, but we have not yet seen the results because we are in this critical moment of change. But we cannot stop thinking that this is going to be an almost spasm-like event in the wider context in which the pandemic itself allowed for the continuation of the on-going destruction of all the territories that were inhabited ancestrally and continue to be inhabited, and whose rights are unalienable and unquestionable in terms of all the indigenous peoples who inhabit the territory of my country. We can think about this across the length of the entirety of Abya Yala and this has to do with the fact that the bulldozers, the trucks, the usurpers, the landowners did not stop. They did not stop during the whole of 2020, but rather continued invading, dismantling, clearcutting, repressing and even, all of the local authorities were backing these actions, because if indigenous people protested by taking over a roadway or going to town to denounce the activities, they were sanctioned for violating the quarantine orders, but the men with the power and the money were never sanctioned for their activities. So this is what is especially worrisome for us. Even though the success of Lhaka Honhat at the IACHR is a victory for all of us involved in this struggle, we have to continue to be cautious in terms of, on the one hand, continuing to emphasize this victory, but without losing track of the reality that prevails in all of the other Indigenous territories that have surely taken the case of Lhaka Honhat as an example to strengthen their own internal organization, because the victory of Lhaka Honhat is no credit to the IACHR. The IACHR has only done what it has to do. The credit should go to the complex and really legitimate organization of Lhaka Honhat, that not only brings together an important number of players and communities, but which has also taken up the possible instruments and has not sold out its own rights. Because this is also what must be valued, to continue thinking with the actual criteria established by Indigenous politics, about what is actually meant by traditional rights and a life in harmony with other forms of life. These are all of the elements that they have thought so deeply about at the moment when—following the requirements imposed by the law and hegemonic power structure—they defend their own rights, and this is what we must celebrate and provide as an example, but it is a struggle that in many other territories is still on the horizon. Because the advancement of these forces that have objectified and commercialized life is a constant all across the territories of Abya Yala. We can see it just by traveling through the territories where previously what predominated was wildness, vibrancy, the sounds of nature; now these same spaces are crisscrossed by cement, large infrastructure projects, all at the service of the commercialization of so-called natural resources, which actually for us are communal property. These are the gifts of Mother Earth given to us so that we might be able to live well.
K: Thank you, Claudia. Could you talk about a few historical precedents in terms of the legal process of recognition of Indigenous communal property for these territories in particular?
C: Yes, of course. In order for our listeners to perhaps have a more complete accounting, we should say that this region—as in all of Abya Yala—was actually always inhabited by these peoples, from time immemorial. And what begins to be seen at the start of the twentieth century, particularly at the beginning of the 1910s, is the arrival of a significant number of criollos (people of European descent) to the region, and these criollos begin to impose their own production models. This begins to give rise to conflicts just as in all the regions of Abya Yala. Some took place during the actual process of invasion, but others arose much later, as is the case in our country where it has taken decades for this to become visible. In 1966, I think, or in the 1960s, in that province, as in many others, the first reservations for Indigenous peoples were created. This is a process that one must get to know because the state begins to record the conflicts, though of course in terms that are always plagued with colonialism and racism, but it cannot ignore it all and some measures must be implemented. So in the 1960s in the face of these developments and this conflict between criollos and Indigenous peoples, the state begins to create Indigenous reservations. Then by the 1970s, at the very beginning of that decade, one of the lots—Lot 55—that is involved in the conflict, known by the name of the Indigenous commission Lhaka Honhat, is declared by a decree to be an Indigenous reservation. This is the first point that must be remembered. When this arrives to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 1998, we have to think that Lot 55 was already in existence, and it was considered an Indigenous reservation ever since the 1970s. The conflict is over Lot 55 and Lot 14. Despite the existing legislation, and this must be recognized, we cannot ignore the fact that the States [in Abya Yala] have enacted legislation but the problem is that these laws are not enforced. In the early 1980s, there was an initial large gathering in Misión La Paz of 27 Indigenous leaders who are already quite conscious of the increasing criollo presence in the territory and along with this presence what also arrives is a voracious production model, and this development in the territory is extremely troubling. It is extremely troubling because they note how conditions in their territory are deteriorating, along with the harmonious relationship with Mother Nature that they had always attempted to preserve. This relationship is increasingly threatened. So then and there, they make it known that they want a definitive solution to this problem from the State and that there is no way in which they would accept the subdivision of the lots into individual properties, because they do not know the meaning of private property. This is important because this is how they posit this fact. They say that they are rooted in a relationship of harmonious dependency with nature and that on the other hand, they do not know the meaning of private property. We should emphasize the point about the word “meaning.” It is not that they do not accept its existence, but that within their culture this is not feasible. The conflict progresses through a series of moments in which national and provincial governments take an array of diverse positions. This is important to keep in mind because this conflict is part of the political changes taking place in the country. By 1991 and after multiple problems faced in the process, the possibility of being listened to becomes less and less probable. In 1991, they finally are able to achieve a certain awareness of the problem at the level of the provincial government, as they develop and present three maps, which are the result of an extraordinarily significant participatory process in the communities. And in addition, this process is also accompanied by a census of the population of these five ethnic groups in which it is demonstrated that they are greater in number than the criollos. But, in the midst of all this, there is a change in the government. Even though five days prior to the inauguration of the new national administration, the governor of Salta declares that he is going to grant Lots 55 and 14 to the communities and that he will block the activities of the criollos. This action is suspended, because the governor belongs to a party in opposition to the new national government. This is important to mention, because it makes clear how traditional state political actors hold diverging positions on claims that are simply unquestionable within the Indigenous political sphere. In 1992, in the midst of all of the commotion brought on by the Quincentenary, this complex, solid, and multiethnic organization is formed under the name of Lhaka Honhat, which means “our land.” So then, the tactic is not only to demand a definitive solution to the adjudication of these two lots and the meaning of communal property, but also to concretely denounce this highly exploitative model that pillages Mother Earth, as the market and capital bleed the brushlands dry. And then not only is there is a demand for the territory, but also efforts to denounce the indiscriminate clearcutting of woodlands, the wire fences being imposed on the landscape and the destruction of native wildlife. All of this is documented in different legal records. In 2012, there was an additional demand proffered, now based on GPS maps, in which a plethora of national and international entities join up with the Lhaka Honhat. This is crucial because this issue transcends borders. And thus finally the Inter-American Court begins to provide a response. The responses occurred at distinct moments from 1998 through 2020. Throughout these 22 years of conflict, there were moments when there could have been—we could call it—a friendly meeting-of-the-minds for the parties involved, promoted by this international organism, but nevertheless it took 22 years to reach its final ruling. By 2012, the IACHR publishes a background report that summarizes all of the rights violated by the Argentinian state, and it calls on the State to recognize definitively their rights over the more than 400,000 hectares held by these five peoples who comprise Lhaka Honhat. In addition, the Court says that the Argentinian state can no longer continue to permit deforestation and wire fences cutting through the territory. It admonishes the state to remove these wire fences and to refrain from any kind of construction work in the territory. Because remember that all of this began with an attempt to build an international bridge without previous consultation with Indigenous peoples. This consultation had to be free and informed as ordered by Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization, as well as being outlined in a plethora of national accords and legal cases, which demand governments carry out consultations prior to any construction work or project that is proposed for territories recognized as Indigenous.
K: I think it is important to add that this bridge was going to be built as part of the efforts of Mercosur.
C: Yes, of course.
K: It is a very symbolic then of the economic system you are discussing, which is still destroying these territories.
C: Yes, definitely. We can also think about what happened in the middle of the Administration of Evo Morales, long before the coup by Añez, with that highway that also was set to cross through Indigenous territory in the Isidro Sécure National Park. This is known as the conflict of the Tipnis, when the capitalist model is imposed despite the rights recognized as being held by the Indigenous peoples, because this is a territory that was receiving support from the government at the time of the Plurinational Republic of Bolivia. Despite this, a neighboring government like Brazil—which was looking for an outlet to the Pacific Ocean, even though Bolivia itself does not have one—was interested in building a highway that would cross through that territory. Here, we find the same situation: this international bridge is part of this hegemonic model that besides being backed up by Mercosur, we must also remember that the territory of Lhaka Honhat includes the border between Bolivia and Paraguay. So that bridge connected our country with these two neighboring nations, but the lines were traced on our territory in accordance with the needs of the market and capital. The same thing happens when we insist that the river is not a hidrovía [hydroway], it is not a highway made out of water for ships to pass through. These territories are territories of life and that is the frame used by Lhaka Honhat for their defense. We also have to say this now, because we are in a great struggle around the consolidation of a law like 26.160, which is the one that prohibits evictions, which also encourages all communities to participate in the registry and to acquire judicial personhood, which is what allows it to then go and act in these frames to fight for justice when the State is not respectful. And in addition, we have projects, some of them presented by Indigenous organizations like the Organización de Pueblos Indígenas del Noroeste Argentino (Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Northeastern Argentina, or OPINOA in its Spanish acronym) which with our support at the Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos (Permanent Assembly for Human Rights) in 2019 presented a project that is conceptualized by the communities themselves in alignment with the rights of the Mother Earth. Beyond whatever project might emerge, the Law of Indigenous Communal Property has not been debated and it is far from being enacted, in terms of what we can see in this situation as far as the state. And when I say this situation, I am referring to two issues: one is the pandemic which we know has changed the rhythm of everything and also the fact that it is an election year. Since it is an election year, it means that candidates and those who are in office today are watching their backs and strengthening their alliances in each one of the provincial territories with the hegemonic powers, because we know that these territories are besieged by the great hegemonic economic powers, besides everything involved in this racist, colonialist worldview.
K: Claudia, so let’s return to the topic of the textiles by the Thañí collective in La escucha y los vientos [Listening and the Winds]. We can conclude this podcast perhaps by talking about what these women weavers have shared about their relationship with the Río Pilcomayo and the technology and philosophy of their weavings. In the exhibit brochure, which is where their knowledge about the Ilicas is shared, there is a poem by Julio Pietrafaccia that says: “El río es un murmullo que habla sin callar. Una voz que repite una y otra vez su historia” / “The river is a murmur that speaks without falling silent. A voice that repeats its story over and over again.” What sentipensares (feeling-thoughts) are born for us out of this last poem?
C: One can think of it this way: in the same way the river repeats its own story over and over again, these textile pieces should not be simply objectified by a gaze that would conceive of them solely as parts of an exhibit or pieces in a museum. They are also narrating a story that is continually re-elaborated. This repetition also has to do with a continual re-elaboration of lived memory, which women carry with them always. But in this fabrication, which in addition is accompanied by a circular movement in which the hands are the actual instruments and the only technology used belongs to the body, clear messages are transmitted to us that should lead us to think beyond them in this space as we attempt to transit through our gatherings in the brushlands and where the Pilcomayo is life. It is water that runs and transits through these territories carrying with it the story of these peoples. I think that this is one of central questions, and the river is what allows for the renewal of life cycles, it appears to flow also in the continuous circular networks in the weaving and in the interlacing. The weave has to be recovered, this warp and the weft that goes beyond the pieces we are looking at. There is a sociocultural warp and weft that is possible, given the role assigned and preserved by the women in Wichí communities. And this is difficult for us because our perspectives are so colonized. And the feminine as a concept or category of analysis is also colonized in and of itself, and this is what we have to insist. To arrive to a perspective that is in relation to these objects that are much more than objects, in fact. They are carriers of messages and at the same time they invite us to think from an Other place.
K: Thank you, Claudia. Perhaps we can talk a bit more about what is unfortunately the problem of the water, because I wouldn’t want to end with an image that we are idealizing the river and the water, since you have shared many times with me about the struggles precisely for the water in these territories as well.
C: Of course, because this river has been objectified by a mode of hegemonic production and today, despite what is involved with the Pilcomayo in this situation, the possibility of access to safe drinking water is almost impossible for the majority of the communities because not only has the river been converted into a hydroway restricted by the market and capital, but also the territories are being invaded by a mode of production that pollutes the soil and the water. So this is really very problematic and we are talking about an inalienable right. Access to water is a basic human right for any community.
K: That is true. I think we could continue to have this conversation here, but we can say that in the context of this podcast the only thing we can do is to approach several of these topics respectfully.
C: Yes. I think that the public’s ability to visit an exhibition like La escucha y los vientos [Listening and the Winds] is giving us the chance to listen to a message—in their voices and in these objects made by women’s fabricating hands—that is necessary and urgent insofar as it can provide evidence of life stories and a cultural record that is built in daily life through a very strong, ancestral relationship with Mother Nature. But at the same time today it is a strategy of resistance and struggle, and the community radio project La Voz Indígena is telling this story about how over the last three decades these same women along with their brothers and children have been able to make some heroic achievements that are recognized in the recent history of my country, actions like their resistance to clearcutting, the pillaging of their territories, and the imposition of a way of being that they themselves want no part of.
K: That is true. In the exhibit there is a soundscape that is just a taste of some of the sounds in these territories. In addition, the community radio project La Voz Indígena has made a selection of some of their programs related to the memory workshops that were organized by these women on the radio station you are referring to.
C: Yes. I have listened to it carefully. I think these are very clear and forceful voices of resistance. At one point, we hear this idea of the brushlands as life, the river is life. It really is not a cliché. These are political, cosmogonic, and epistemic positions that are very much internalized in these voices. They really are teaching us other things that we do not usually find in books.
K: That is true, Claudia. Thank you so much for being here. We will see each other and talk more soon.
C: I hope so, it is always a pleasure to be able to be in dialogue with you and simultaneously to be able to transmit these reflections and these sentipensares (feeling-thoughts) that move us and which are actually an invitation to decolonize ourselves. Because we are all doing the same work, no one has ended that process, it is a huge challenge. Isn’t that right?
K: That is right, Claudia, we’ll say goodbye then for now.
Curated by Contemporary And’s editors Julia Grosse and Yvette Mutumba, the Center of Unfinished Business is a reading room open to the gallery’s visitors. It features a selection of books that are connected in various ways to the subject of colonial legacies, highlighting the implications and multiple realities of the contemporary era.
Kathy-Ann Tan: Decolonial Aesthetics in “The Kissing Mask” Some Reflections on Performance, Affect and Perception
The emphasis on perception, encounter and affect has underpinned a growing body of contemporary trans-Atlantic visual and performance art that critically engages with colonial histories [i] while challenging the deeply entrenched neo-colonial structures of the present. In this short reflection, I want to ask how these artworks’ use of a decolonial aesthetics of encounter (Palermo 2010, Mignolo and Lockward 2011) opens up a space for a rethinking of the social, while encouraging what Walter Mignolo has termed an “epistemic delinking” from the colonial matrix of power (2011, 54). As part of my larger current project on the aesthetics of decoloniality [ii], these are the key questions with which I engage: • How (much) does race, ethnicity and cultural background factor into the equation/experience, particularly with regard to artworks that embrace an aesthetics of decolonization? • How does the transmission of bodily affect take place from performance/ performer to viewer and vice versa? • How do explorations of moments of discomfort, un-ease, irritation or disconnect during the performance mark the limits of empathy and identification? • How do these limits demand perhaps a counter-intuitive response, a queering, a reading against the grain, an “unlearning” (Spivak 1993, 24) of intuitive interpretations, habitual correlations and assumptions that are revealed to be shaped by neo-colonial and heteropatriarchal metanarratives? • How does this encounter/experience open a space for a less “paranoid” and more “reparative” reading (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity”) that urges a negotiation, interaction and a rethinking of the social? I want to address some of these questions by turning to the work of Wura-Natasha Ogunji, that I first encountered at the opening of the “Disguise: Masks and Global African Art” [iii] exhibition at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in the Fall of 2015. The temporary exhibition featured new works by twelve contemporary artists from Africa or of African descent whose work is “informed by a multiplicity of influences, from historical African masquerade traditions to contemporary global culture and digital media”. While the concept behind the curating of the exhibition was interesting – the curators centrally addressed the act of masking, camouflage, disguise as a transformative process that involves both artist/performer/artwork and viewer/audience – it was the spatial setting of the exhibition in an ethnographic museum that housed “real-life” cultural and religious artifacts from Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas, that most vividly illustrated, for me, what decolonial aesthetics is, and does, in practice. A central issue that the exhibition raised, for example, was that of Anglo- European complicity in deracinating cultural artifacts from their places of origin and bringing them to another continent for display and visual consumption by a largely white audience. The dominant white gaze on, for instance, African art and its various manifestations of awe, curiosity and fascination in response to cultural “difference” and “otherness” [iv] were playfully interrupted and even reversed to a certain extent by the artwork/performance artist, who looked back at the viewer (or not). By inserting themselves into the permanent collections at the Fowler, and thus intervening in that space, the paintings, masks, performances and installations that were part of the Disguise exhibition interrogated the work of curating “ethnic” cultural artifacts. They also playfully and ironically pushed at the boundaries of museum and art gallery etiquette, that includes not getting too close to/keeping a distance away from, the artwork. Thus, the artists in the Disguise exhibition self-reflexively questioned the conventions of the museum in their artwork/ performance pieces, broaching questions about authenticity and identity within the framework of a decolonial artistic practice. The performance piece I experienced by Wura-Natasha Ogunji at the opening of the Disguise exhibition at the Fowler was The Kissing Mask, a piece based on fellow artist and collaborator Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze’s drawing, “that low hanging kind of sun, the one that lingers two feet above your head, (never dying) house plants in exchange for your freedom … orchids in exchange for your love, who are you kissing, when you kiss a mask?” (2015). In the performance of The Kissing Mask, Ogunji sits on a plinth wearing a Yoruba Egungun [v]-like mask that she describes as “a riff off of Amanze’s drawing”. A small instructional note on a stand in the corner of the performance space instructs the audience that they can kiss the mask if they would like to. Ogunji has commented on her performance piece as follows: The Kissing Mask reconnects the “artifact” to the present moment by proposing an intimate act between artist, mask and viewer. As such, this performance complicates and dismantles the mask as sacred object or historical relic by making use of it on a living, female body (that of the artist/performer). The performance also becomes a vehicle to speak about what constitutes intimacy, touch, and connection. What do we share with and show to our family, friends and strangers? Does a mask offer a space to negotiate that intimacy outside of society’s rules? Does the mask come alive only through the audience? Or simply the artist? Or, is it always charged? Do the intentions of the wearer and/or viewer affect the power and pull of the object? (artist’s blog on her website) With these questions in mind (I had read them in advance of the performance) when I crossed the threshold from audience/viewer to participant in the sight of other viewers, my act of kissing the mask was pregnant with expectation. What I had not anticipated, however, was the absolute stillness, silence and lack of response of the mask/performer to this intimate act that I had initiated because I had gone up to kiss the mask. It was comparable to what German philosopher Martin Heidegger called the “nothingness” of an “indifferent” world in his inaugural 1929 lecture “What is Metaphysics?”! Upon reflection, the act of stepping up to kiss the mask, the replica of the cultural artifact that stands for the sacred – yet is clearly only a duplication of the ‘real’ cultural artifact (that are worn by Egungun masqueraders at ceremonies) – plays with the notion of transgression, of crossing a line that destabilizes and complicates the rules of decorum and respect for the museum artifact, but also the cultural practice out of which it stemmed (for instance, people are not allowed to touch male Egungun performers or get too close; they are beaten away with sticks carried by men who accompany the performers). [vi] By wearing the mask, the female artist was also embodying the trickster figure who playfully reverses the gaze and inherent cultural expectations of the museum visitor. The mask does not belong to the viewer, nor to the museum’s permanent collection; it resists appropriation (in the form of museum labels and other signage that accompany the artwork/object on exhibition and display). Nothing happens when the mask is kissed because it is not ‘our’ property; it cannot be appropriated and it demands engagement on its own terms, and not on ours. Ogunji’s The Kissing Mask thus makes the viewer/participant deeply aware of the affective significance of the gesture of touch (or attempted touch), a natural impulse that accompanies the experience of encountering the materiality of the cultural artifact. The mask that separates two living bodies in the act of intimate encounter becomes, in the artist’s own words, “an opening, a way to claim physical, social or liminal space”. Nevertheless, this claiming is one fraught with postcolonial histories of disembodiment, deracination and racial violence. My attempt to initiate intimacy, touch, and connection was a response to, and an effort to engage with, these histories. Yet, not being able to see the artist/performer’s eyes (due to silver paper being used in the eye sockets of the mask, which reflected my own image) and expression also contributed to some uncertainty and discomfort on my part. The motionlessness of the mask forced me to read the experience counter-intuitively, to ask why there was a “lack” of response and what that might mean. [vii] Did the performer/mask not react because, although I am person of color, I am not part of the black histories and/or African culture that the performance piece referenced? [viii] What significance does race, gender and sexuality play in this interactive piece, and was the “pure”, unmediated experience [ix]that I was seeking possible at all? Was I unconsciously assuming an unmarked spectator position or, worse, guilty of a “postcolonial relativism” by collapsing my racial and cultural background with that of the performer/performance? Although these questions plagued me in the immediate aftermath of my encounter with the artwork, in retrospect, the affective intensity of The Kissing Mask lay precisely in that fleeting moment of non-reciprocated, yet deeply personal and intimate, encounter, which was the clou of the performance. The transmission of affect from the performer/mask to the viewer/audience participant through the act of kissing occurs because the gesture is not reciprocated, because of the stillness of the mask, its refusal to respond. Ogunji’s performance piece thus raised questions about how to re-negotiate and re-think forms of intimacy and encounter with sameness and “otherness”/“difference” (and the colonial ideologies and legacies that have shaped these discourses) within the framework of the ethnographic museum as an affective space. In conclusion, as a site-specific intervention within the spaces of the ethnographic museum and art gallery, Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s The Kissing Mask and her other works on display make the viewer very much aware of how, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o has put it in “Globalectics Theory and the Politics of Knowing”, the organization of space becomes a means to regulate forms of knowledge and ways of knowing (2012, 33). As artistic counter-narratives that seek to challenge and re-inscribe neo-colonial histories and ways of shaping the social, these installations and performances are thus part of a larger contemporary archive of art and literature that partakes in the crucial and enduringly relevant project of “decolonizing the mind” (Thiong’o, 1986).
[i] See also the works of, among others, Anguezomo Nathalie Mba Bikoro, Brendan Fernandes, Richard Fung, Pedro Lasch, Teresa María Díaz Nerio, Patricia Kaersenhout and Charl Landvreugd. [ii] “The Aesthetics of Decoloniality: Performance, Affect and Visual Perception” is my ongoing research project that brings together the fields of literary/cultural studies and visual studies/performance art. In this endeavor, I am certainly not alone, and I emphatically welcome collaborative exchange and conversation with other scholars and artists working on this topic. Do feel free to reach out if you feel addressed. [iii] “Disguise: Masks and Global African Art” was curated by Pamela McClusky, Curator of African and Oceanic Art for the Seattle Art Museum, and Erika Dalya Massaquoi, Consultant Curator. [iv] This, of course, refers to white European Modernism’s fascination with “Primitive” art, as the works of Paul Gauguin, Henri Rousseau and Pablo Picasso illustrate. [v] The Egungun is a Yoruba masqueraded (male) performer who is regarded as a manifestation of a dead ancestor. Women are still excluded from taking part in Egungun procession/dance rituals. [vi] Kissing a playfully created Egungun-like mask thus also encourages the viewer to transgress the taboo of not touching or interacting with ancestors from the spirit world that the Egungun masquerader represents, hence suggesting another, perhaps less heteropatriarchal, way in which to rethink established traditions and forms of the social. [vii] This absolute stillness and lack of physical movement contrasted with another of Ogunji’s site-specific performance pieces, “And Fight “(2015), in which she and Black British writer Mary Okon Ononokpono, wearing the same masks, staged acts of fighting and loving against the particular urban backdrop and architecture of Golborne Road (the “Little Morocco” of London’s Notting Hill district and home to a large ethnic minority and migrant community). See https://writinginrelation.wordpress.com/2015/07/25/and-fight-wura-natasha-ogunji-mary-okon-ononokpono/. [viii] Ogunji’s “The Kissing Mask” also references another artwork, South African artist Tracey Rose’s “The Kiss” (2001), which addresses issues of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality. [ix] Cf. American pragmatist William James’ 1904 essay “A World of Pure Experience”. References James, William. “A World of Pure Experience”. In Essays in Radical Empiricism. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1904. 19 – 36. Mignolo, Walter and Alanna Lockward, et. al. “Decolonial Aesthetics I”. 2011. https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Palermo, Zulma, ed. Arte y estética en la encrucijada descolonial. Buenos Aires, Ediciones del Signo, 2010. Spivak, Gayatri. “An Interview”. With Sara Danius and Stefan Jonsson. boundary 2 20.2 (Summer 1993): 24 – 50. Thiong’o, Ngugi wa. Globalectics Theory and the Politics of Knowing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. —. Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers,1986.
Chaos world? Édouard Glissant and the question of universality
Essay by Markus Messling.
1989 is an event of worldwide importance. The end of the system struggle between East and West seemed to usher in the “end of history” for many, a world situation in which there was no longer an intellectual alternative to Western universalism. Freedom, equality and fraternity for all. But who still hears it, the triumph call of the self-conscious awareness of liberty? It has long been silenced by history. The limitation of European memory to liberation from totalitarianism could no longer be sustained. The literatures already drew a more complex picture of the present, in which they not only showed a world of the simultaneity of the different, but also impressively expressed the structural and psychological afterlife of colonialism in the centers of imperial power.
It is no coincidence that precisely in the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall a standard work of post-colonial theory appeared, which brought this dynamic to the point in the title: The Empire Writes Back (London 1989). Today, the memory of the fact that Western modernism has made its ideals implausible by the own claims of domination, is still a stark reminder: the world loses its borders in the wildfires of violence. The same borders imperial powers have imposed within the Congo Conference in Berlin (1884/85) or by the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916).
Whether the West wants this to be true or not, its universal claim to validity is significantly delegitimized by the dialectics of modernity, especially the crimes of colonialism and the exploitation of man and nature. Today, we are living in the world of prospering relativistic conceptions of culture, which contrast with the ideals of modernity since these are regarded as corrupted concepts of Western hegemony. In many societies of the West itself, the notion of the universality of man is now questioned again, freedom is again the freedom to superiority and (national) isolation. Yet, despite all protectionist rhetoric, the factual, that is, human, procedural, material, and medial connections are increasing in our developing world society. Thus, the interactions of the societies conflict with allegations of “own”, national or ethnically understood identities, which are directed against the universal claim of modernity.
In order to organize and legitimize global justice and to shape societies on a human scale at local levels with specific needs, there is hardly anything more urgent than the genesis of a new world consciousness that makes ethical and institutional standards justifiable for the world society. But how can a new consciousness of universality be understood that is not based solely on European universalism?
One of the most important theoretical labs that recognized this problem at an early stage is the Caribbean network of Créolité philosophers, created around Aimé and Suzanne Césaire and their remarks of the Négritude movement. Its most important representative was writer, literary theorist and philosopher Édouard Glissant who both lived in Martinique and Paris, and who had proposed a Poetic of Diversity (Introduction à une poétique du divers, 1996) for a life in a world of chaos.
For Glissant, societies develop in the form of narratives that shape the self-understanding and the rules of coexistence. Therefore Glissant interprets the great reference texts of cultural collectives as an expression of a world consciousness: in them the world is presented in a specific form, which can be strengthened into social reality. Here, Glissant explicitly takes up Hegel’s aesthetic: for him the great epic texts Hegel’ s “Grundbücher”- on which the European culture is based – the Old Testament, Ilias and Odyssey, the Aeneis or the Divina Commedia – are stories of community formation and thus the establishment of Eurocentric order.
For Glissant, the results of this are great narratives of the world, world poetics, which aim at reducing complexity, unification and totalization. The most powerful expression of this systematic thought was, in the nineteenth century, at the height of the European conquest and approximation of the world, Hegel’s philosophy of history itself. Glissant reads it as a great narrative of the rise of European reason. Interesting in his point of view is that he interprets these great narrations not as a triumphant gesture by Europe but as an expression of anxiety on the other, which has produced obsessive longing for rootedness, purity, monolingualism and supremacy which repeatedly in history lead to hierarchization and exclusion, even to violence and genocide.
Glissant calls this world consciousness a “continental”, because it functions through self-reference and demarcation. In contrast, he formulates what he calls an “archipelagic thinking”. This is a thinking of the manifold and permanent reference, which does not systematically delimit, divide and differentiate cultural differences but rather to see sees it as a constant exchange and mixing process. Everything is related to everything and must always be thought of in this diversity – just as the boat lines of the Caribbean archipelago create a network of exchanges. Here one understands how Glissant sees culture and reality connected in narration, how European and Caribbean experiences interweave in Glissant’s thought.
In his Philosophy of Relation (Philosophie de la Relation, 2009), Édouard Glissant describes the challenge of such a world understanding, which must acknowledge that it can never fully grasp the “all-world” in its multifaceted totality. An “archipelagic culture” thus tries to cope with unpredictability, incompatibility, and non-simultaneity, without intentionally directing the world according to a model, and physically shaping it. Just as an archipelago is an island world only in the totality of all the island’s belongings, everything exists simultaneously and must be considered equally (at the same time). But since the multiplicity of the phenomena can no longer be systematized, for example, under the vicious criterion of modernity (modern/not-modern), we live in “fragmented worlds”, in a time of permanent chocs and conflicts, of dislikes and attractions, of secret agreements and opposites alike briefly, in a “chaos world”. If the reaction to this is not to be demarcation and violence, Glissant advises that the tensions should be withstand, and an awareness of the possibility and openness for the unpredictable should be developed. The new universal consciousness is thus expressed in a complex narrative of relations (Poétique de la relation, 1999).
Glissant’s aesthetic, his understanding of a self-narrating world-multiplicity, is thus the attempt of a philosophy of history, which in the “chaos-world” wants to grasp a new consciousness and turn it to itself. It is like Hegel’s project, which at the same time, it tries to turn it upside down. Against the postulated unity of the reason, Glissant represents an awareness of all beings. Each form of life develops its own narrative of itself, and is related to the other narratives of community, but without being completely transparent, that is, to be completely comprehensible to the others. The goal of history is thus a consciousness of absolute openness, in which everything occurs, everything is conceivable, everything is alive. To create such a world-consciousness is for Glissant the task of contemporary literature. It can create models for social narratives in a broader sense, which can unfold an infinite complexity in a multilingual manner without hierarchically arranging the complexities of references, attitudes and life models.
Is it, however, in such a consciousness of the world possible, that one does not acknowledge the other, subjugates one society to the other, as Western modernity has done with practically the entire world? Glissant himself saw the fundamental problem of such a philosophy of history. What about “narratives” of the offensive isolation and violence? What prevents them from becoming dominating? In what name can their brutality be rejected? How should we act when collectives take their form of life as the sole or universal measure of politics, subjugate other people, and disregard diversity?
The answer that Glissant gives to this is that of self-modesty, arising from a changed world-consciousness. The only possibility of global co-operation now lies in the awareness of the individual of its own, particular position in an “all-world”. Everyone has to internalize the indifference of the world, that is, the fact that no one has a measure of judgment. In the sense of a poetics of multiplicity, all must adhere to the rules of permanent reference in order to maintain their own way of life. The problems of such non-normative ethics are obvious. What if someone does not stick to it? We are confronted with the problem which Albrecht Koschorke, a narrative theorist, firmly pointed out: “Like thinking and speaking in general, the narrative does not have a sufficient intrinsic sign of truth.” In concrete terms, the multiplicity of narrations as a principle cannot be a universal horizon, which can possibly regulate the interplay of diverse human narratives.
Glissant’s idea of an “archipelagic global thought” was an important and essential contribution in a time when a “fight of cultures” has been declared the new leading maxim. It insists on the right and the possibility of the plurality of forms of life. It shows that a world that grows together and remains different is also an impertinence, which we can no longer encounter with an outdated obsession with concepts such as center and periphery, order and chaos. Opposing lifestyles reside door to door.
After the Second World War, especially in the German Federal Republican society the impression was made that one lives outside the chaos world. Now that war-driven violence, which is essentially the result of the structures of imperial modernism, is approaching the Europeans, as the stories of fugitives massively testify, this narrative is definitely absurd. However, the freedom of military violence is not only claimable to Europe, it also accounts beyond the own concerns. In order to sanction martial violence and to organize justice on a global scale, a planetary horizon after European universalism must be conceived, which makes action possible and asserts the same rights globally. Such a universality can no longer be postulated by a center, as the European universalism, subsumed by Hegel, did, but must emerge from concrete contexts and be embodied in these, whose right of existence and complexity Glissant justly emphasized. How this new universality, which no longer abstracts from diversity, can be conceived is still to be told. The French philosopher Étienne Balibar has proposed the concept of “multiverse”. In any case, the “we” in a world society must be more than the sum of our different lifestyles if we do not want to accept the cynical position of the spectator.
Markus Messling (Centre Marc Bloch Berlin)
Markus Messling has been Deputy Director of the Center Marc Bloch since June 2015. PhD in Romance Philology at Freie Universität Berlin 2007; Habilitation at the University of Potsdam 20 15 (Venia legendi for Romanische Philologie und Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft). He was project manager for science and research at the ZEIT Foundation Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius in Hamburg (2007/2008) and DAAD / MSH postdoctoral student at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) Paris (2008/2009). From 2009 to 2014 he was head of the Emmy Noether junior research group “Philology and Racism in the 19th Century” at the University of Potsdam (German Research Association). Since 2011, he has also been the spokesman (in collaboration with the Collège International de Philosophie Paris), the international research group “Transmed! Thinking of Méditerranée and European Consciousness” (DFJW). His work has been awarded the Tiburtius Prize of the Berlin Universities for outstanding dissertations as well as the Brandenburg Science Prize for Young Scientists. Markus Messling is a member of the Quorum of “Future Philology, Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship”, the founder of Philological Encounters (Leiden, Boston: Brill) and editor of the magazine for the history of ideas (Munich: CH Beck) . He was a Fellow of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London (2014), Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge and Wolfson College (2014), as well as guest professor at EHESS Paris (2011, 2015) and Kobe University in Japan (2016).
