coloniality

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.

In this conversation, we talk with Maya-Kaqchikel artist and activist Marilyn Boror Bor about languages, textiles, relationality, extractivism, and cement. She tells us about the slow violence of processes of assimilation, about the importance of the Mayan language and culture, and of how colonisation has demonised ancestral knowledge. She recounts what it means to live in a land perforated by a cement factory, where water scarcity becomes the norm and mountains are drilled until they lose their spirit. Hence the urgency of the connection to the land and indigenous struggles, which are not new, but have always existed: a millennial memory that still breathes.

Ebony G. Patterson is an expansive artist working across painting, tapestry, photography, video, sculpture, and installation. In this podcast, she reflects on the paradoxes that animate her practice and how she uses them to entice -and unsettle- the viewer. Drawing on pop culture, art history, and pageantry, Patterson confronts social and racial inequality and the persistent brutality embedded in postcolonial and working-class spaces. Her work blurs the boundaries between high art and bling, between adornment and the grotesque, and memorializes those rendered “un-visible.” She also revisits her early days at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica, her moving back and forth to the United States, and her ongoing negotiation with labels of Blackness and “Jamaican-ness,” as she follows her own guiding voices and embraces discomfort, grief, and the Trojan-horse possibilities of her work.