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

Mini-series curated by Veronica Lahitte and Antonio Gagliano

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 first instalment, researcher and curator Lucia Piedra Galarraga (b. Havana, 1972), teacher and researcher Karo Moret (b. Havana, 1974), and teacher and researcher Diego Falconi (b. Quito, 1979) talk about scavenger methodologies and the becoming-black of the world. They share stories 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.