ALTARES, AZÚCAR Y CENIZAS #3
Anti-racism and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of people of African descent
Bringing together knowledge from ancestral practices, cosmopolitics, affect theory, and queer theory,the Study Group on Afro/Black Ideas, Practices, and Activisms looks at the framework for current discussion around race and racism, and how “blackness” became the backbone of the founding of the modern state. The objectives of the group, which operates from the Spanish context, include dismantling the essentialist view of race, producing knowledge through embodied experience, and planning forms of political intervention in the surrounding neighbourhood and the city.
Using the study group’s work as a springboard, this miniseries unfolds in three chapters, exploring ideas around anti-coloniality and anti-racism from the perspective of people of African descent. In this third instalment, Karo Moret (b. Havana, 1974), Diego Falconi (b. Quito, 1979), and Lucia Piedra Galarraga (b. Havana, 1972) talk about interculturality, multiculturality, and migrant sit-ins. They share ideas on cosmopolitics, the Hispanic world, atavisms, and Afrofuturism; on El Cid’s beard, the Royal Spanish Academy, and taking academia to the street. They examine the ways in which a transvestite theory of childhood challenges the imaginaries embodied in literature and explore the legal loopholes and the counter-routes of knowledge that could allow us, collectively, to come together in the south.
A mini-series produced by Veronica Lahitte and Antonio Gagliano
Anti-racism and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of people of African descent
We talk with Lucía Piedra Galarraga, Diego Falconí Travez and Karo Moret from the Study Group on Afro/Black Ideas, Practices, and Activisms about altars, ekekos, nefandos, Saint Barbara, and Valdivia's Siamese twins. They turn their attention to the politics of hair, talk about sugar as the star product plying the Caribbean routes, and acknowledge the usefulness of ashes in proving the extermination of the ancient Andean sodomite communities.
Anti-racism and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of people of African descent
We talk to Diego Falconí Travez, Lucía Piedra Galarraga and Karo Moret about slavery and love, the Caribbeanization of identities, and violence as a potential resource. They discuss affects, phobias, autophagies, and unsettling objects. And they examine the Latino world in relation to the mask of gay culture, coming out of the closet as a liberal promise, and resent(i)ment as a circular form that prevents memory from disappearing.
Daniela Ortiz
Daniela Ortiz and Xose Quiroga carry out artistic research and actions at points where colonial narratives collide with migration control systems and with the consensus that underpins the nation state. In Fons #34, Daniela talks about the duo’s working processes, about different ways of spreading hidden knowledge, and about the nomenclature of the colonial monuments that populate the city.
Oyèrónké Oyèwùmi
Professor Oyèrónké Oyèwùmi examines the ways in which universalism in academia distorts our understanding of African cultures, especially in relation to race and gender. In this podcast, Professor Oyèwùmi talks about age, seniority, and respect, about unscrupulousness and academia, dispossession and spirituality. She considers the oxymoron of the notion of “single mother” from the point of view of Yoruba culture, and she also notes how observance of community practices from non-Western cultures may be a necessary step as we face the planetary challenges to come.
Walter Mignolo
The Argentine semiotician Walter Mignolo talks about the relation between the construction of history and the perspective of power, as imposed by the West.