colonialism

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.

In this podcast, Javier García Fernández uses the three dimensions of coloniality – the coloniality of knowledge, of power, and of being – to think about what it might mean to decolonise Spain and Europe from its margins. He has coined the concept of pensar jondo – a kind of thinking that draws on flamenco cante jondo or ‘deep song’, on the social struggles of rural Andalusia and the anarchism of day labourers, and on the diasporas to Catalonia and Europe – to interpret Andalusia as a laboratory of the internal coloniality of the Spanish state: a land marked by dispossession, forced migration and fascist violence, but also by radical forms of community, cooperation and resistance. From that point, he considers how to develop political alliances that can tackle the rise of fascism today.