New nationalisms, toxic patriotisms and systems of exclusion have been on the rise for the last decade, reinforced by technology and rooted in colonialism, slavery and class oppression. Our time offers a unique twist on these age-old structures: rhetorics of decolonization are now weaponized by autocratic regimes, just as they are normalized in the phantasmagoria of cultural practices.
Neue Nationalismen, toxische Patriotismen und Ausgrenzungssysteme sind auf dem Vormarsch, verstärkt durch Technologien und verwurzelt in Kolonialismus, Sklaverei und Klassismus. Unsere Gegenwart stellt eine einzigartige Verdrehung dieser uralten Strukturen dar. Die Rhetorik der Dekolonisierung wird heute von autokratischen Regimen missbraucht und durch immer gespenstischere kulturelle Praktiken normalisiert.
Changes in Direction – a Journal provides multivocal and transnational African-European statements to current decoloniality debates from different perspectives. The Finnish-German artist Laura Horelli engages with the traumatic and complex histories of colonialism and international solidarity between East Germany, Finland and Namibia, staging micro-historical interventions in public spaces.
An archive of film and studio material in Bissau. On the verge of complete ruin, the footage testifies to the birth of Guinean cinema as part of the decolonising vision of AmĂlcar Cabral, the liberation leader who was assassinated in 1973. In collaboration with the Guinean filmmakers Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes, as well as many allies, Filipa CĂ©sar imagines a journey where in this fragile matter from the past operates as a visionary prism of shrapnel, with which to look through. Digitised in Berlin and screened at various locations – in what would come to resemble a transnational itinerant cinema – the archive convokes debates, storytelling and forecasts. From their screening in isolated villages in Guinea-Bissau to European capitals, the silent reels are now a place from which people might search for antidotes to a world in crisis.
Sowing Somankidi Coura. A Generative Archive is a long-term research endeavor initiated by Raphaël Grisey in collaboration with Bouba Touré. The project revolves around the permacultures and archives of Somankidi Coura, a self-organized cooperative along the Senegal river. The cooperative was founded in 1977 by a group of former African migrant workers and activists in France after the Sahel drought of 1973.
Sowing Somankidi Coura. A Generative Archive is a long-term research endeavor initiated by Raphaël Grisey in collaboration with Bouba Touré. The project revolves around the permacultures and archives of Somankidi Coura, a self-organized cooperative along the Senegal river. The cooperative was founded in 1977 by a group of former African migrant workers and activists in France after the Sahel drought of 1973.