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The three sessions will encourage a critical reading of photography today for the shaping of a future way of seeing, understanding and interpreting photography. Shifting away from a predominant photographer’s agency, we will lean our attention towards the receiving end of the medium: the subjects and, most importantly, the viewers.

The objective of this seminar is to problematize the regimes of representation, narratives and imaginaries on which the images of the Global South are built within contemporary photography. What is the role of the image in the socialization of colonial imaginaries? What role do South-South dialogues play in dismantling regimes of colonial representation through contemporary photography?

We will explore contested ideas of citizenship (the experience of the second-class citizen) and responsibility in relation to the act of spectatorship through photography. The discussions will allow to open up and activate a dialogue and give tools to understand the colonial gaze and the politics of representation today.

Monday, June 14th | 6pm – 8pm

Visual Citizenship and Emotional Responsibility
Photography has embedded itself as a process of humanising and dehumanising, and plays a fundamental role in shaping visual cultures and systems of knowledge from ethnography, identification photography, and photojournalism. Drawing from the work of photography scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, this session, we will explore what does the concept of citizenship means in relation to spectatorship, gaze and perceptions, translating the idea of photography as an act of emotional and political responsibility.

Tuesday, June 15th | 6pm – 8pm

Fictionalize the Narrative: Dismantling Colonial Spaces of Representation
From the field of the image, every event is a narrative, an ideologically constructed narrative in a space of representation. The central question of this session is what role the privilege of the Western-cantered gaze has played in constructing a colonial narrative of space, and the body of indigenous peoples in the experience of the Global South. How the colonial representation of racialized bodies has essentialized the narrative of disaster, the narrative of calamity and the humanitarian crisis as something naturally insurmountable. What are the contemporary ideological guidelines that continue to feed a narrative of Latin America and the Caribbean, and many spaces in the Global South, through the interdependence between the ethnographic image, the tourist postcard, and the image of the humanitarian crisis?

Wednesday, June 16th | 6pm – 8pm

Our Future Narrative/Language: Post-discussions + portfolio reviews
This final session will be a space to reflect together on the previous two sessions and offer a space to collectively imagine and articulate ways forward, identifying current practices and utopias around representation and black-image making by the Global South. We will do so as we also discuss, review and draw parallels with the participants artistic and curatorial practices and their agency in the current and future discourse about the image.

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, 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 epistemologies, decolonial narratives and peripheral aesthetics of the Global South. Born in Mexico City, Villegas currently resides in the Dominican Republic.

Cindy Sissokho

Cindy Sissokho (b. Montreuil/France) is a cultural producer, curator and writer with a specific interest in intellectual, political and artistic aspects of decoloniality within the arts, and culture. Her work is nurtured by the urgency to broadening and disseminating epistemologies and new cultural production from the Global South.

Her curatorial work is a practice of disobedience contrary to hegemonic discourses and neoliberal institutional politics by implementing disorder. She does so by working through collaborative practices, accessible writing and everyday pedagogical tools and exchanges, amongst others.

She currently works as a Curator and Special Projects Producer at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham (UK).