ALTARS, SUGAR, AND ASHES #1
Anti-racism and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of people of African descent

In this podcast, Puerto Rican sociologist and activist Ramón Grosfoguel guides us through centuries of obscurantism in Europe: from Christopher Columbus’s meeting with Queen Isabella in Granada on 11 January 1492 to the debate between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepulveda that laid the groundwork for the biological and culturalist racism that persists to this day. In doing so, he dismantles the Doctrine of Discovery and the universalist and ahistorical assumptions of Eurocentrism and modernity that still abound in academia.

We talk to Karo Moret, Diego Falconí and Lucía Piedra Galarraga 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. 

Carlos Motta sees his research as a potential space of enunciation from which to act as a counterweight to the prevailing narratives—a positive gesture of recognition of social groups, identities and communities whose voices have been suppressed by the dominant colonial power. His radical multidisciplinary practice and his use of a range of media—from video to installation, sculpture, performance and drawing on paper—make him hard to pin down. He also focuses on interaction with others, in ensemble works involving orality, documentary, curating, and even organizing public programs and symposia. In this podcast, we talk to Carlos Motta about art, politics, the market, and working conditions.

In this podcast, cultural manger and mediator David Yubraham Sánchez expands on critical thoughts formulated in educational spaces, in constant conversation with others—an exercise in examining racist and colonial patterns in order to dismantle fictitious equivalences in the name of diversity. Thinking-by-doing—with collective work as his main methodology—gives rise to a profusion of tips, strategies and objectives to guide the work of anti-racist mediation, education, and cultural programming. This involves problematising the hollowing out of rights and cultural policies, identifying absences and erasures in democratic memory and national heritage, and implementing the political practice of listening.   

Through a practice that combines documentary, conceptual art, installation, and oral storytelling,  Bouchra Khalili explores questions of self-representation, political agency, and the resistance strategies of individuals and communities rendered invisible by the colonial, oppressive, and exclusionary dynamics of nation-states.  Who is a witness? Who tells the story? Who documents, archives, and transmits the accounts that reach us? These are the central questions that run through all of Khalili’s work. In this podcast, we talk to Bouchra Khalili about what it means to produce images and to approach film and documentary practice from new places and perspectives. 

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with the leader, activist mother and poet Yaneth Valencia that we were unable to include the first time around.

Yaneth Valencia is a leader, activist mother and poet. She is also community organizer of Lila Mujer, a political space for support, collective creation  and affirmation of the lives of black women with HIV, which was founded in 2003 in the working class neighbourhoods of Cali, Colombia. In this podcast, we talk with Yaneth Valencia about the overlapping vulnerabilities that affect black women with HIV in Colombia, linking racism to the lack of a public health system and analysing the relationship between the virus and patriarchal violence, which is exacerbated by war and the forced displacement of black and indigenous peoples from their lands.

Based in Dakar, Senegal, Raw Material Company is an independent, collaborative centre that aims to foster critical thinking through artistic practice. In this conversation, Marie Hélène Pereira and Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy—two key members of Raw Material Company—discuss a situated feminist and decolonial practice that focuses on doing rather than enunciating and categorizing. They share some of their experiences and talk about the strategies they use to create rich forms of dialogue and to negotiate the tensions and the ideological and economic constraints imposed through the still-colonial structures of the so-called global North.

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.

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. 

Mexican historian and 'violentologist' Daniel Inclán talks about coffee, Zapatismo, à la carte politics, hamburgers, long presents, tacos, biographical narcissism, authoritarianism in democracy, aesthetic whiteness, and the nixtamalisation of maize.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with John Mason that we were unable to include the first time around.

John Mason talks about the power of rituals and food as the impetus for resistance, identity, and memory, about the cultural transfers that take place in migratory movements, and about the history of the Yoruba people. In this podcast, Mason also defends the untold story of the role of women as inventors, and highlights the political, social and economic impact of certain spaces occupied by women, such as agriculture and education, as well pediatrics, geriatrics and affects.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Kendell Geers that we were unable to include the first time around.

South African artist Kendell Geers talks about structures of power, terrorism, linguistic violence, Africanness and socio-political tensions before and after apartheid.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Toni Serra/Abu Ali that we were unable to include the first time around.

Toni Serra/Abu Ali talks about trance, light, shadows, transitions, conditions of life and possibility, about seeing and concealing, about dreaming and unlearning. And about plants, of course.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Daniela Ortiz that we were unable to include the first time around.

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.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Clémentine Deliss that we were unable to include the first time around.

Fatima El-Tayeb talks about the need to reassess Europe’s internalist narrative and the discourse of integration. She evaluates the role of race in the construction of this account and argues for the creation and recovery of archives as a strategy for developing other types of narratives.

Clémentine Deliss, director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, talks about about the possibility of a post-ethnographic and post-colonial museum, and about the strategies that she has tested in recent years to counteract the ideology of conservation. These include the “remediation” of objects in the collection, fieldwork in the museum, and opening up spaces for work, production and research that go beyond storage and exhibition.