Talk – Anticolonial Cartographies: Reimagine the Visual Narrative
Date: February 26th, 6pm to 8pm
© Dawit L. Petros, Untitled, Prologue II , 2015
Cindy Sissokho (France) and Fabián Villegas (Mexico) will be in conversation about their respective practices and share common reflections that interrogate efforts of anti-colonial aesthetics within curatorial and artistic practices, specifically within the realm of visual culture and contemporary photography. One of the aims of this talk is to activate a south to south dialogue that can reflect on the role that a Western-centric gaze has played in constructing a colonial narrative of space, temporality, regimes of representation about the Global South, diasporic itineraries, migration processes and racialized bodies. How can photography and visual cultures be a possibility for pedagogical and political encounters for radical imagination and metaphors of the future?
Fabian Villegas
Writer, journalist, spoken word artist, scholar and researcher in South epistemologies, decolonial thoughts and racial studies. Since 2007 to date, Fabian Villegas has been invited to give multiple conferences, seminars, lectures and workshops in various universities and academic centers, renowned art biennials and community cultural centers across the globe (México, Dominican Republic, France, Spain, Puerto Rico, Brasil, Uruguay, Argentina, Guatemala, Dubai, Morocco, Costa Rica, U.S, Venezuela, Belice. He is also the co-founder of Contranarrativas, a collaborative project that seeks to create horizontal knowledge production spaces to stimulate the visibility, dissemination, and production of decolonial epistemologies, narratives and peripheral aesthetics of the Global South. Born in Mexico City, Villegas currently resides in the Dominican Republic.
Fabián Cevallos Vivar is a Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Lisbon, Faculty of Fine-Arts and PhD in Post-Colonialisms and Global citizenship, University of Coimbra. He is a Researcher and Professor in Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO)/Center for Social Studies (CES) and Researcher at the University of Lisbon, Center for Research and Studies in Fine Arts (CIEBA).
Cindy Sissokho
Cindy Sissokho (France) is a curator, cultural producer and writer with a specific interest in intellectual, political and artistic aspects of decoloniality within the arts, and culture. Her curatorial practice is nurtured by the urgency to broaden and disseminate epistemologies and cultural production from racialized and systemically marginalized perspectives.
Recent exhibition projects include this is a love poem, (2021) curated at EXILE Gallery, Vienna for the international contemporary arts festival Curatedby (Austria) and Breaking Translation(s) (2021) an online exhibition for HANGAR, Lisbon (Portugal). Upcoming exhibition projects will be the curation of Black Tales, a multimedia sound installation by artists Mónica De Miranda and Xullaji for Refuge, the 4th edition of the Lagos Biennale 2023 (Nigeria).
Her practice is also informed through multiple formats of engagement such as talks and pedagogical workshops. Most recent activities were How to Articulate (A) Collective Gaze(s)? in collaboration with Fabián Villegas in 2020 for both Les Rencontres d’Arles (France) and HANGAR, Lisbon (Portugal).
She articulates and brings curatorial and theoretical reflections through writings including art reviews and interviews for Ocula, Terremoto, The Sole Adventurer, The Kitchen, NYC and Nka: The Contemporary African Art Journal, and publication commissions.
She also has a great interest in artist development and artistic consultancy that translate into frequent mentoring roles and portfolio reviews. The most recent being with the PhMuseum, Bologna (Italy) and the annual FORMAT Photography Festival, Derby (UK).
She currently works as a Curator and Special Projects Producer at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham (UK).