José María Durán
In the complex cultural landscape of Berlin, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) stands out as one of the institutions that has best managed to maintain coherence over the years. It has transformed into a space where its multifaceted program can be viewed from the perspective of "entangled histories" that aspire to decenter the hegemonic and national-chauvinist narratives characteristic of the art and history museums that proliferate in European capitals. Black Atlantic, Principio Potosí, the Wassermusik festivals… HKW has decisively contributed to calling into question the civilizing premise and universalism inherent to Eurocentrism.
Conceived as one of the most unique buildings of the International Architecture Exhibition Interbau (IBA 57), the institution reinvented itself as HKW, the House of World Cultures, in 1989—that is, at a time characterized by the cultural turn in the social sciences and the economic policies of the Washington Consensus, whose shock therapy, sponsored by the Bretton Woods institutions, not only played a fundamental role in the economic liberalization of what was then still called the Third World, but also in the neoliberal transformation of the former socialist space from the 1990s onward, setting in motion a new process of accumulation that propelled Germany's capitalist leadership in Europe. Thus, from its beginnings as a symbol of the German-American alliance key to Cold War cultural offensive strategies, HKW became a showcase for the non-Western world precisely at the end of the three-worlds era and when service to the American ally ceased to be profitable in terms of cultural policy. The Sylvia Wynter Foyer, the Miriam Makeba Auditorium, and the Marielle Franco Space today bear witness to this. The goal of provincializing Europe has been inscribed in the building itself. Although in this regard there is little to reproach the institution. The recent change in leadership has only deepened this aspect, and the exhibition O Quilombismo, held between June and September 2023, can be considered the beginning of a new era in the history of HKW, one that everything indicates will be characterized by its ambition to contribute to decolonial discourse. Although this does not prevent HKW from continuing to be part of the state's international diplomacy and cultural policy. Since its construction in 1957 as a congress hall, the institution has always been under the tutelage of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Not even its location is innocent. Situated very close to the Brandenburg Gate, during the Cold War it was practically facing Soviet troops; today it is in the middle of the district where the federal government is located.
HKW's program cannot be understood without the emphasis on two theoretical perspectives that gained relevance at the end of the three-worlds era: the approach of entangled history and postcolonial studies. But if both perspectives still maintained a certain debt to Western episteme, it has been the decolonial approach that in recent years has more radically aspired to break with the modern and enlightened spell. In this context, HKW's program connects perfectly with the idea of "colonial difference" developed by Walter Mignolo. Basically, the exhibition O Quilombismo dealt with that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tLle1qeNWk
Kunst und Film video on the occasion of O Quilombismo
O Quilombismo takes up the history of Zumbi dos Palmares, one of the main leaders of the slave uprising during the seventeenth century in the northeast of present-day Brazil. "There is no other figure who personifies the histories, philosophies, governance structures, resistances, and utopias of Quilombismo like Zumbi," writes recently appointed HKW director and chief curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung in his contribution to the O Quilombismo Reader. It is these utopias, histories, philosophies, governance structures… around which the O Quilombismo program revolved, which in some way sought to contribute to making the history of enslaved people's struggle for emancipation, the cultivation of a society based on egalitarian democratic principles, and a radical spirit of cultural emancipation, a story that is never ceasing to be told. In this history, the term quilombismo becomes the key concept that encapsulates, in the words of one of the most important figures of the Black movement in Brazil, Abdias do Nascimento, the alternative of a popular democratic Black political organization. Abdias do Nascimento's 1980 essay "Quilombismo: An Afro-Brazilian Political Alternative" is the key text around which the exhibition is articulated. Complex, the text moves halfway between academic essay, manifesto, and pamphlet.
Mrinalini Mukherjee Space. The braiding motifs in the floor design are by artist Nontsikelelo Mutiti. Kilombo: Piwuchen by Bernardo Oyarzún in the foreground and in the background the work Imagine by Ange Dakouo. ©Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), 2023. Photo: Laura Fiorio/HKW.
In another of the key texts of the O Quilombismo Reader: "O conceito de quilombo e a resistência cultural negra," published in 1985, Brazilian thinker and activist Beatriz Nascimento shows how with the end of the slave regime at the end of the nineteenth century, the quilombo transforms into an ideological construction. Its aura, Nascimento writes, feeds "national consciousness in its longing for freedom, precisely because of its legacy as a concrete and free institution that exists parallel to the dominant regime for three centuries"; hence the quilombo is remembered as a form of desire for utopia. Thus, the quilombo becomes fictionalized and becomes part of the imaginaries of resistance in both popular and academic narratives. These imaginaries are important and part of the current appeal of the quilombo is the result of an ideological construction that combines identity issues around Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism with universal ones relating to human equality and emancipation. Although quilombos never disappeared, they were rather made invisible, their populations stigmatized and, in general, they fell prey to the developmentalist and extractivist policies of the State in the hands of the same social class that had previously persecuted insurgent communities. An important step has been the recognition by the 1988 Federal Constitution of the legal existence of "remanescentes de quilombos" (remaining quilombo communities) to whom citizenship and property rights are granted. In this way, the quilombo is patrimonialized as part of the national identity of the modern plurinational bourgeois state. This formal recognition has largely been dead letter. Quilombola communities continue to be defenseless against abuses by the economic and political elite, which exercises violence with impunity. Nevertheless, the communities exist and their struggles, beyond identity issues, have never ceased to be associated with a fundamental issue: the land problem—that is, the problem of transforming self-sufficient peasantry into an agrarian proletariat or simply into dispossessed peasantry. As Sylvia Wynter, an author who has some presence in O Quilombismo, wrote, this devaluation that occurs in the economic sphere is dialectically related to the devaluation of their humanity. In capitalism, racism is organically inscribed in exploitation. This contradiction admits no reconciliation.
Although quilombos are linked to physical resistance, even alluding to guerrilla warfare, what the O Quilombismo exhibition has sought to institute is, rather, a space of cognitive resistance, a space for imagination. O Quilombismo seems to have sought in identity imaginaries the propitious argument for a political practice that barely inscribes itself in representation. And this is problematic. What it aspires to is to give space to a pluriversality of practices that, together with different spiritual systems and cosmologies, "de-universalize models of experiencing and preserving culture by discovering ways of repairing inequality and ways of engaging with culture as a living activity." This pluriversality is, of course, that of colonial difference. While Mignolo embraces the epistemic potential of thinking from colonial difference, institutions like HKW embrace the potential of representing it.
On her canvases, Namibian artist Tuli Mekondjo uses archival material from the colonial period with references to Aawambo women. As she incinerates, washes, embroiders, cuts, and patches the canvases, Mekondjo creates a sphere of healing and respect for an ancestrality fractured by colonial experience. Fertility dolls in the foreground. ©Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), 2023. Photo: Laura Fiorio/HKW.
It is instructive to look at similar proposals in other institutions cut from the same pattern. This has been the case of Anti-colonial Interventions at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne (October 8, 2022 – February 5, 2023) or Chosen Memories at MoMA New York (April 30 – September 9, 2023). In Cologne, four Latin American artists were invited to intervene in the museum's permanent collection in order to make visible histories of oppression, exclusion, and discrimination in which the museum has been complicit throughout its history, producing for this purpose an anti-colonial glossary that complemented the artists' in situ interventions. Chosen Memories brought together the work of 40 artists from Patricia Phelps de Cisneros's Latin American art collection with the purpose of "dismantling the persistent effects of the colonial gaze," critically addressing "colonial structures [that] continue to condition value systems around ancestral cultures, labor, and nature," as well as challenging "the implicit hierarchies… through works that recognize and revitalize cultural heritages devalued or forgotten by mainstream currents."
Where does such interest in embracing the post- or decolonial angle come from? Mignolo advances the program of this type of institution now engaged in the decolonial turn: "pluriversality as a universal project does not aim to change the world but to change beliefs and the way of understanding the world, which will lead us to modify (all) our praxis of life in the world." In this pluriversality, Western universality has the right to coexist alongside other cosmologies, as just one among many. But the emphasis on the different emotional and cognitive universes in which communities and cultures are situated had been, precisely, one of the premises of the cultural turn still in the three-worlds era and in line with the development policies promoted by the Washington Consensus, interested in issues relating to cultural exchange, cultural cooperation, the role of culture for development, etc. There is a classic liberal background in Mignolo's message, even if it comes from a different epistemic positioning. The siren songs of pluralism show a less kind side if we look at the authentic pluralism, which is that of commodities. How can we epistemically liberate or emancipate people who are subject to the chains of the law of value without first breaking those chains? In the liberal corpus, reason's struggles allow the free-thinker to comfortably overlook the material conditions that determine the existence of such struggles. Hence, representation or staging is an ideal place to think radicality without fearing the consequences. This distance has traditionally been the abode of bourgeois episteme, no matter how much decolonial thinkers like Mignolo might object. And the gaze that expresses this distance, so well represented in Caspar Friedrich's famous 1818 painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, is the gaze of capital that treats everything before it from the perspective of value production. Sekula and Burch replicate this disposition in The Forgotten Space. It is the iconic image of the container ship plowing the ocean. But what is shown to us facing the sublime image of the ocean is the disposition of "dead labor" that replicates the arrangement of bodies piled up on the slave ship—precisely what the fog that Friedrich's wanderer contemplates conceals.
Still from The Forgotten Space, a film essay by Allan Sekula and Noel Burch.
It is paradoxical that in the space of resistance and radical solidarity opened by O Quilombismo, with necessary allusions to body politics—for example, in the brilliant work of Rotimi Fani-Kayode, in the celebration of life and resistance with the Afro-Uruguayan collective Hermosa Intervención, or in community through the work of Bernardo Oyarzún, among others—more subtle, and necessarily superficial, allusions to Chinese imperialism, Jewish persecution, or the bipolar worldview characteristic of the Cold War slip in, which respond to the ideological requirements of the German political class. Not in vain, HKW is part of German cultural diplomacy as well as the aspiration to universalism that in Germany is so easily contrasted with both the particularism of identitarian right-wing politics and the nostalgia for real socialism. But if there has been one class in modern history that has appropriated the right to speak in a universal key, it has been the bourgeoisie, and it has done so basically through the market, its ideal of sociability. Once this universality—consisting of legally and politically guaranteeing the conditions for the limitless expansion of capital—is at risk due to threats looming from the Global South: wars, emigration, BRICS… it is then that they once again raise their voices and proclaim: let us decolonize, let us decolonize, give us, please, the spiritual sustenance we so badly need in the face of the dehumanization of the world, grant us the gift of pluriversality. And decolonial thought quickly puts its toolbox of theoretical instruments at their service. In "Quilombo, Global Peasants, and Worlding Otherwise," Quỳnh N. Phạm manages to avoid naming capitalism. For the University of San Francisco researcher, the agrarian question is a problem of conceptions: on one side, Western arrogance with its colonial-modern script that reduces the peasantry to underdevelopment through a series of conceptual-terminological alibis; on the other, the spiritual connection of the peasantry with the land and with the "web of life." But the use of words is never innocent, and "web of life" refers to a fortunate expression of Jason W. Moore in Capitalism in the Web of Life, an example of ecomodernism for which the question is not to transform the world but to think about it differently. The fact that in decolonial thought one does not want to change the world, only barely change thought or perception of the world—something, moreover, typical of old sensualist materialism—leads to a flagrant political inoperancy and produces an aestheticization of politics that recalls Benjamin's memorable conclusion about the aestheticism of politics that fascism advocates. However, what Abdias do Nascimento was proposing in the political philosophy of quilombismo was something quite different. O Quilombismo has overlooked the radical politics that can be read in the philosophy of quilombismo.
In the background, Oxunmaré Ascende by Abdias do Nascimento, 1972. ©Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), 2023. Photo: Laura Fiorio/HKW.
Nascimento writes that the "sciences" produced by the Euro-Brazilian, European, and North American intelligentsia that have assisted in the dehumanization of people of African origin in favor of the interests of Eurocentric oppressors cannot serve the needs and interests of Black people. Obviously, Nascimento is not alone in his claim, which is part of radical Black thought and which in the 1970s Wynter had already denounced as the secular ideology of the bourgeoisie. In the sense that it demands scientific knowledge rooted in the historical experience and cultural identity of oppressed peoples, Nascimento's claim could be understood as close to the decolonial rejection of Western episteme and the proposal of a thought from colonial difference. But the demands of decolonial thought are deceptive. Nascimento speaks of knowledge that allows for an adequate theoretical formulation of the experience of centuries of oppression, resistance, and creative struggle. In this way, what Nascimento is demanding is nothing other than historical materialism—that is, an understanding of historical reality based on material conditions, and this includes imaginaries and cosmologies. And although Nascimento clearly rejects any form of thought imported from Europe, which would in principle include Marxism, historical materialism is born from a very similar premise: that the conceptual tools inherited from the Enlightenment, its political economy and its abstract morality, constitute a biased thought that serves as an ideological tool for a class whose sole interest lies in prolonging ad infinitum the reality of capitalist exploitation. Therefore, it is not possible to formulate a theory of emancipation from these tools. Walter Rodney wrote that scientific socialism means the application of the scientific method to the study of any given situation. Not wanting to recognize the need for scientific thought is equivalent to wanting to keep Africa in a backward condition, which serves the interests of imperialism. In this regard, claiming the need for a scientific and non-ideological analysis of material reality and, based on this analysis, claiming the construction of an emancipatory thought is basically what Nascimento does. Cedric Robinson recognizes that without the theoretical intervention of Marx and Engels, the radical tradition in which Nascimento's analysis is situated would have lacked the conceptual weight that has proven so important for the peripheries of the world-system in their resistance against imperialism and colonialism. Likewise, the contribution of thought from the periphery has been fundamental, and the philosophy of quilombismo aims to be a contribution in this sense. Nascimento mentions the tradition of African communitarianism or communalism, or Ujamaa, which quilombismo makes use of as an economic system. This has not escaped O Quilombismo, which recognizes in Ujamaa one of the forms of political and economic egalitarianism reflected upon by the exhibition program. But when Nascimento outlines the economic system of quilombismo based on common ownership of the means of production, he is basically articulating a communist program, which is what Rodney recognizes in the Tanzanian experience of the Ujamaa peoples. To what extent this program was already fully articulated in the quilombo or, rather, it serves as a starting point in the struggle for its achievement, is subject to discussion. But to say that quilombismo is equivalent to communism or that it is communism of African roots is today anathema in any Western institution and, of course, in an institution with HKW's history. I wonder then who remains captive to Western episteme—or rather, bourgeois episteme. It is not so strange, then, the marginal presence of Rodney in O Quilombismo and the revision to which he is subjected once we are told that the spirit of revolution has been extinguished. Precisely Rodney, a thinker who witnessed one of the most important "quilombola" experiences in the recent history of African insurgency and emancipation: Ujamaa.
HKW bookstore with Walter Mignolo, Armando Boito, Walter Rodney, Achille Mbembe, C.L.R. James. Rodney wrote that "when the task of evaluating African social thought and practice is left in the hands of bourgeois theorists, they find it convenient to place all ideological strands into an amorphous mystifying whole." Photo: J. Ma Durán.
If the quilombo involved physical resistance and violence against slaveholders, this violence has been purged from O Quilombismo. Not even a challenge like the one Sartre outlined in "Orphée Noir," the 1948 essay that served as a preface to Leopold Senghor's anthology Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, has been considered.
"Here are black men standing, black men looking at us; and I want you to feel, as I do, the sensation of being seen. For three thousand years the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen."
This confrontation with the largely European and Western public has not taken place. O Quilombismo has lacked rage. In the space of representation, the public has been able to admire the shipwreck from the safe and privileged position of solid ground. Its remains are admired, but the blood does not splatter. Fanon objects to Sartre having forgotten that the Black person suffers in their body in a very different way from how the white person experiences it: "Mama, a Negro! ... A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a Black man—or at least like a Negro. I was longing for the world, and the world amputated my enthusiasm." Fanon thus confronts the mechanism of ideological recognition in the constitution of the subject as a natural evidence: yes, it is I, the Negro, who calls the subject subjected to existence. And Fanon replies: "The handsome Negro says to hell with you, madam! ... In one stroke I achieved two things: I identified my enemies and I caused a scandal." In his very Hegelian dialectic, Sartre forgets that the promise of reconciliation inscribed in negritude in the face of white supremacist affirmation is nothing if it ignores lived experience. In fact, in "Orphée Noir" Sartre comes to say that negritude is not constructed from experience and is the weak moment of the dialectical progression, to which Fanon replies: there you have it, so "it is not with my wretchedness as a bad Negro, my teeth as a bad Negro, my hunger as a bad Negro that I fashion a torch to set fire to this world, but rather the torch was already there, waiting for this historical occasion."
Paradigmatic for its allusion to Zumbi dos Palmares was Queimada, the 1969 feature film by Gillo Pontecorvo. The intellectual figure behind Queimada is, of course, Fanon. In the context of the long 1960s, Pontecorvo's film does not evade violence but affirms it: it is the necessary means for the dispossessed masses to achieve consciousness of being a historical collectivity.
It is noh mistri,
Wi mekkin histri,
It is noh mistri,
Wi winnin victri
So sang Linton Kwesi Johnson in 1984 following the uprisings that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s, mainly in London. In Queimada, insurgent leader José Dolores warns British agent William Walker: "Be careful. You may know how to sell sugar; but don't forget who cuts the cane."
Insurgent leader José Dolores on his way to execution. Still from Queimada by Gillo Pontecorvo.
It is no coincidence that the entire history of armed liberation from colonial power theorized by Fanon is very similar to what we know of Zumbi dos Palmares: first the war of liberation is fought and once achieved, the struggle continues with national construction. In fact, both Abdias do Nascimento and Beatriz Nascimento were aware that the struggle against colonial power had begun in Africa much earlier, and it has not yet ceased. How has it been possible to overlook this scenario?
The Earth of the Revolution is an extraordinary work in which artist Paloma Polo documents the Protracted People's War of the New People's Army, a Filipino armed organization classified as terrorist by the European Union and the United States. Obviously, the work has not been part of O Quilombismo. Polo links current armed struggle with the entire long process of anti-colonial struggle that began against the Spanish crown and continued against US power. We must not forget the key strategic role that the Philippines plays in the confrontation between China and the United States for hegemony in the Western Pacific Region. After the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, the balance has tilted toward the US side, whose army will have new military bases aimed at Taiwan and the South China Sea. All this at the expense of a people that has been decimated for centuries. It is the cycle of "The Silent War"... and, as in the case of Zumbi dos Palmares, the revolutionary struggle in the Philippines is also a struggle in which a community of equals is built in which all forms of sexual expression and orientation are welcome. Gender equality is non-negotiable.
"The work of the New People's Army… is based on three fundamental pillars: awareness-raising, organization, and mobilization of the people, which in the long run lead to the creation of self-government bodies ("base building"), the implementation of agrarian revolution (to varying degrees, depending on the region), and armed struggle. All this can only be achieved with an unwavering will to learn and the drive to change things.
But the backbone of the educational project is the psychological, emotional, social, and political maturation of each individual. This process is called 'remodeling' and consists of shedding bourgeois and capitalist forms of socialization.
Another essential issue is the maintenance of horizontal democracy within a sophisticated hierarchy of relationships and responsibilities. Rights, privileges, and freedoms are equal for all people... without exception and regardless of rank. Language has been remodeled, with brutally giving orders strictly forbidden, as well as insulting, ignoring, or shaming anyone. In short, resorting to violence in any form of communication or relationship is prohibited.
There are entire regions and provinces administered by the People's Government. Moreover, the transitory character that characterizes social structures in the midst of a prolonged struggle has safeguarded these communities from the kind of politics conceived by state powers and imposed a priori. The survival and advancement of the revolution require and at the same time provoke a transformation in the individuals who join it, as well as in their relationships with their environment and with society. Large swaths of remote rural regions have become a kind of life laboratory. The members of the New People's Army who appear in my film and in my research are not only part of the guerrilla: they actively participate in the construction of a different world born of cooperative work."
This lengthy reflection by Paloma Polo about her experience with the Filipino communist guerrilla is significant. It differs little from Zumbi dos Palmares. It is a Quilombo. The land problem is fundamental in a country like the Philippines, inhabited mostly by poor and dispossessed peasant and indigenous communities victimized by the geopolitics of imperialism. Fanon said that "in colonial countries only the peasantry is revolutionary. It has nothing to lose and everything to gain. The peasantry, the declassed, the hungry, is the exploited who discovers most quickly that only violence is worthwhile."
Still from The Earth of the Revolution by Paloma Polo.
Thus, the trigger for so many struggles across the Global South—from the New People's Army, through the Naxalite insurgency in India, to the struggle carried out by the MST in Brazil and Via Campesina—what the land question puts at risk is not only angering the military geopolitics of imperialism but also its agribusiness allies, whose economic power in Germany is by no means negligible. BASF, Bayer-Monsanto… what the agribusiness conglomerates know for certain is what the quilombo experience means for their profits. For these conglomerates, the problem is obvious: it is the right to land. Sylvia Wynter said that although the conquerors dreamed of capturing gold, the bait offered to them was land. And it continues to be the same for large agribusiness and extractive industry companies. That is, it is neither about cosmologies nor epistemes; the problem is a materialist problem: we categorically claim their right to land, wrote Mariátegui. The MST links its struggle for popular agrarian reform to the struggle against agrarian racism and environmental racism and understands its own "acampamento form" as heir to the revolutionary legacy of the "quilombo form." We could situate quilombos like the MST or the New People's Army—that is, the "quilombo form"—in the context of a long insurgent tradition: that of the commune, that is, the communero rebellions that have so much in common with the conquests of the quilombo. This would show that since the dawn of the slaveholding and capitalist regime, there has been a permanent insurgency that has been revolutionizing forms of life and culture for centuries. Bosteels criticizes Western Marxism and the Marx of the Communist Manifesto in light of the late Marx—that is, the Marx of the ethnographic notebooks—for its emphasis on the 1871 Paris Commune as the true origin of the commune. But the inaccuracies that Marx incurs regarding certain developments in the peripheries would be explained in the context of the evolution of his economic thought, which still shows some immaturity in texts like the Communist Manifesto, Katz has argued. Bosteels's examination of indigenous communes makes it possible to think of the origin of the "commune form" in a historical moment prior to the insurgent experiences in Europe. The quilombo, as well as the contribution of the philosophy of quilombismo, are located in this context. Well, it is these quilombos that O Quilombismo has rendered invisible. This invisibilization is a political decision. And I do not say this out of contempt for the works presented in the exhibition, which are in many respects brilliant. I say it in relation to a program that has disarmed the directly political interpellation and the violence that inevitably lies at the origin of the works on display.
Rotimi Fani-Kayode understood photography as a weapon in militant resistance as a Black and gay person in the context of a tremendously racist and fascist United Kingdom. Fanon's presence in the work of the Nigerian artist is fundamental.
O Quilombismo, photo: J. Ma Durán.
In line with what is being addressed, it is worth pausing to reflect on what Daniel Bell said about critical thought in the 1960s: that in its cultural radicalism it had left politics aside. One consequence of this divorce, Denning points out, is that for much of the three-worlds era, between the 1940s and 1980s, it seemed that culture and labor had no relationship whatsoever: in short, there was no "cultural front" or, in other terms, no real political solidarity between working classes and intellectual classes. The New Left in the West had eagerly joined the condemnation of the "metaphysics of labor" enunciated by C. Wright Mills in 1960. This has amounted to making labor invisible. Bell's vision is tremendously biased, but it serves to reflect on what is happening with the decolonial turn of European cultural institutions. Was Marx then right when he wrote that history repeats itself, but the second time as farce? In this regard, it is worth setting side by side two exhibitions that took place at HKW just over ten years apart but that in many respects are diametrically opposed: Principio Potosí and O Quilombismo. What has happened in those ten years has been, precisely, the decolonial turn.
What most interests me about Principio Potosí is its dialectical articulation. Something that seems to me of great importance. Dialectical in the sense of a mode of presentation that works its limits. Limits because Principio Potosí made use of elements foreign to traditional exhibition mounting to make its thesis visible—let us say, to make its infrastructure or framework visible. From poetic allusions such as the thread that refers to quipus that intertwine all the exhibition content, making the exhibition visible as a totality of relationships, through the use of a socio-pedagogical visual language, to works of art that are tendentiously employed to give meaning to the exhibition thesis. All this contributed to configuring an exhibition that appeared to the public as a complex totality without a dominant. It is not surprising, then, that emphasis was placed on the baroque density of Principio Potosí and that it was related to the Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities. The baroque character of the exhibition is crucial, although it has less to do with the cabinet of curiosities and more with dialectical montage. We cannot forget what the cabinet of curiosities meant as an instrument of accumulation of natural and cultural capital in the form of objects deployed to feed the needs and desires of colonial expansion of European monarchies. Principio Potosí's relationship with the Latin American baroque is decisive, in the sense of the baroque ethos that Bolívar Echeverría spoke of, which only reluctantly allows itself to be made by establishing a contradictory relationship between the "natural form" and the "valorization of value." The dialectical form of the baroque ethos would be a theme to explore, but one I will not go into now. In any case, if original accumulation has its correlate in the baroque cabinet of curiosities, although it disguises it through its erudite display, Principio Potosí deploys a cabinet of curiosities turned upside down, it turns the baroque montage around and exposes it as artifice, revealing its functioning and creating a counter-history that demolishes the encyclopedic pretensions of the Wunderkammer; hence the idea that the entire montage of Principio Potosí is a dialectical montage. In its character as a thesis, Principio Potosí has been an exhibition subject to continuous revisions and, more importantly, has revealed the urgent need for a social museum.
O Quilombismo has been a missed opportunity. It has wanted to be what it could not be. In its interest in letting the works speak for themselves, O Quilombismo has shown itself to be a trap exhibition. Its interpellation has hijacked the proposals—that is, their undeniable commitment to reality—into an illusion of transformative praxis that is not such. As a decolonial exhibition, it has represented a mirage of agency and a reality of acquiescence.
Celia Vasquez Yui with Diana Ruiz Vasquez, The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals and Bastin Santan Diggekar, untitled. ©Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), 2023. Photo: Laura Fiorio/HKW.
Artist Daniela Ortiz said the following about her intervention at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne:
"It is important to bear in mind that currently within what are the cultural industries of contemporary art, a second plundering is taking place, or a continuation of the cultural colonial plunder that has occurred in the context of the Global South. Seeing how many artists from the South who would like to develop their work in their territories, in their countries, cannot do so because there are no economic resources to do so there, so that their own people can see their own work. On the other hand, we see how, for example, many of the collections of European countries, of the great European museums, are acquiring works, archives of artists from the Global South and, again, let's say, taking the cultural production, the cultural making of artists from the South to those museums... Therefore, I believe it is very necessary and important to also open the conversation to the complexity of what it means to work with that type of museum and how there is a machinery within the cultural industries of contemporary art that continues the plunder and colonial exploitation on the cultural level.
I think it is very important to consider a specific issue: that these public spaces in the European context, these public museums, these institutions, are sustained in many cases with public resources that come not only from the work of the white European working class but also from the work and exploitation of migrant workers, who also have an absolute right to take over those places. It is also important to consider that many of those cultural spaces, many of those cities, many of those public spaces have been built with the exploitation of the Global South and with the exploitation of labor from the Souths. Therefore, occupying them must not only be an act of resistance but also an act of vindication, of recovering what belongs to the Global South."
Ortiz's reflection goes beyond the question of the staging of works on display and introduces a critique of the political-ideological-economic framework in which the institution is located as part of the artist's political position, of her commitment to "her people." Western institutions try to be immune to this critique, more concerned with the singularity of the work whose richness of relationships they ignore. For the Western institution, the social relations in which the work is inscribed are something external to its singularity, barely an impulse from which the creative act is born, toward which they direct all their paraphernalia. However, as Mijail Mitrovic points out in his recent study of the political context of Peruvian art in the final decades of the twentieth century, we must understand works as "cuts of the concrete," for it is "the richness of social relations frozen in the appearance of a finished product" that is of interest for the analysis, study, and presentation of artistic proposals, which thus become a reflection of a reality they allude to and interpellate. From the perspective of dialectical montage, the use of quipus in Principio Potosí has much to do with the creation of a thread that makes visible or reflects the totality of relations in which it is possible to inscribe the works. This richness of relations Wynter called sociopoetics and the Soviet linguist Voloshinov called sociological poetics. That this authentically radical perspective in making visible material contexts with all their violences—thus, materialist—has been dismissed in O Quilombismo shows to what extent O Quilombismo and HKW depend on the Western episteme that they so criticize. An episteme that, put crudely, pays the salaries. As I said before, O Quilombismo has wanted to be what it could not be.
Attributions:
[1] S. Leeb, "Entangled – But How?", in Ch. Behnke, C. Kastelan, V. Knoll and U. Wuggenig, eds., Art in the Periphery of the Centre (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 211–218.
[2] Between 1955 and 1960, the IBA 57 international architecture exhibition created in the devastated Hansaviertel in the heart of the German capital a paradigm of architecture and urbanism guided by the International Style, with Hugh Stubbins's design for HKW—who was Walter Gropius's assistant in the United States—as one of its most paradigmatic buildings. Later came IBA Berlin in 1979 with its postmodern pretensions of "critical reconstruction" associated with the figure of Berlin architect Josef Paul Kleihues. This has served as the basis for urban development after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the invitation for aggressive urban policies by private capital from the 1990s onward, and even more so during its expansion in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
[3] N. Klein, The Shock Doctrine (London: Penguin, 2008); B. Fine, "Neither the Washington nor the post-Washington consensus: An introduction", in B. Fine, C. Lapavitsas and J. Pincus, eds., Development Policy in the Twenty-First Century. Beyond the post-Washington Consensus (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–27.
[4] HKW architect Stubbins acknowledged that it was a propaganda building aimed at the Soviets, a "lighthouse of freedom illuminating the East"; and this long before the erection of the famous Palast der Republik in the eastern zone. On the vicissitudes of the Palast, cf. J. Ma Durán, Iconoclasia, historia del arte y lucha de clases (Madrid: Trama, 2009).
[5] M. Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004).
[6] D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
[7] Leeb, "Entangled – But How?"
[8] W. D. Mignolo, "The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference", in M. Moraña, E. Dussel and C. A. Jáuregui, eds., Coloniality at Large (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 225–258.
[9] Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, "O Quilombismo. Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies", in O Quilombismo Reader (Berlin: HKW, 2023), 15.
[10] Ndikung, 16.
[11] B. Nascimento, "The Concept of Quilombo and Black Cultural Resistance", in O Quilombismo Reader, 53.
[12] C. Costinaș and P. Guevara, "A Walk Through the O Quilombismo Exhibition", O Quilombismo Album (Berlin: HKW, 2023), 66.
[13] https://www.museum-ludwig.de/en/exhibitions/archive/2023/here-and-now-at-museum-ludwig-anti-colonial-interventions.html.
[14] https://press.moma.org/exhibition/chosen-memories-cisneros/.
[15] Mignolo, "Foreword. On Pluriversality and Multiporality" in B. Reiter, ed., Pluriverse. The Geopolitics of Knowledge (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), x.
[16] The entangled history of the cultural turn with the economic policies of the Washington Consensus is yet to be written. Cf. B. Benjamin, Invested Interests. Capital, Culture, and the World Bank (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
[17] F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 42; Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 114–124.
[18] Quỳnh N. Phạm, "Quilombo, Global Peasants, and Worlding Otherwise", in O Quilombismo Reader, 151–159.
[19] A. do Nascimento, "Quilombismo. An Afro-Brazilian Political Perspective", Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 11 No. 2 (December, 1980), 159.
[20] Nascimento, 160.
[21] This claim does not exhaust Nascimento's proposal, which also includes a celebration of the African origins of civilization, something I will not discuss. The Black nationalism professed by Nascimento places him close to thinkers like Marcus Garvey, and his position close to a reformist socialism when, for example, he considers the possibility of transforming relations of production using non-violent and democratic means distances him from the Marxist radicalism of authors like Rodney. Cf. W. Rodney, "African History and Culture", in The Groundings with My Brothers (London: Verso, 2019), 33–51 and "African History in the Service of Black Revolution", in ibid., 53–62.
[22] C. J. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 123.
[23] Nascimento, "Quilombismo. An Afro-Brazilian Political Perspective", 161.
[24] Ndikung, "O Quilombismo. Of Resisting and Insisting", 42. In this regard, it is interesting to return to Rodney's discussion of the nuances of Ujamaa as African socialism. Rodney, "Tanzanian Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism", Decolonial Marxism. Essays from the Pan-African Revolution (London: Verso, 2022), 223–245.
[25] Nascimento, "Quilombismo. An Afro-Brazilian Political Perspective", 161, 168–169.
[26] Rodney, "Tanzanian Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism".
[27] See R. Ibbott, Ujamaa. The hidden story of Tanzania's socialist villages (London: Crossroads Books, 2014).
[28] J.-P. Sartre, "Orphée Noir", in L. S. Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris: PUF, 1948), ix.
[29] Blumenberg has thematized the metaphor of shipwreck in Western thought, although as is usual in the brilliant prose of the German thinker, he does not draw political consequences from it. H. Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). But collapse does not treat everyone the same way, and at the moment of shipwreck one must look at who are the people thrown overboard—which is literally happening today at the borders of the European Union. Malcom Ferdinand resorts to Turner's image of the slave ship (The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon coming on), 1840) in his recent Decolonial Ecology. Thinking from the Caribbean World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022) in what constitutes a brilliant contrast to Blumenberg's narrative, although he does so from the framework of decolonial thought, which is not shared here.
[30] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 114.
[31] See M. Pêcheux, "El mecanismo del reconocimiento ideológico", in S. Žižek, comp., Ideología. Un mapa de la cuestión (Buenos Aires: FCE, 2003), 157–167.
[32] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 127.
[33] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 56.
[34] L. K. Johnson, "Making History", in Making History (UK: Island Records, 1984).
[35] G. Pontecorvo, Queimada, 1969; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgigM8nlWjM.
[36] Rodney, "The Historical Roots of African Underdevelopment", in Decolonial Marxism, 91–127; How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Verso, 2018).
[37] http://palomapolo.com/2020/04/15/el-barro-de-la-revolucion-the-earth-of-the-revolution/.
[38] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 36.
[39] A. Roy, Walking with the Comrades (London: Penguin, 2011).
[40] M. Arboleda, Planetary Mine. Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2020).
[41] J. C. Mariátegui, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1975), 33.
[42] https://mst.org.br/2020/11/11/a-luta-pela-terra-como-forma-de-combate-ao-racismo-agrario/.
[43] B. Bosteels, La comuna mexicana (Ciudad de México: Akal, 2021). By contrast, Mignolo wants nothing to do with the communero tradition, which he considers a left-wing fabrication, and opts for "the communal" as a decolonial project. Cited in Bosteels, 52.
[44] C. Katz, Dependency Theory After Fifty Years. The Continuing Relevance of Latin American Critical Thought (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023).
[45] W. I. Bourland, Bloodflowers. Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Photography, and the 1980s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
[46] Cited in Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 5.
[47] Denning, 228.
[48] D. Geary, "The 'Union of the Power and the Intellect': C. Wright Mills and the Labor Movement", Labor History, Vol. 42, No. 4 (2001): 327–345.
[49] On the "tendency" of the artist, see Benjamin's "The Author as Producer."
[50] B. M. Scherer in the prologue to Principio Potosí. ¿Cómo podemos cantar el canto del Señor en tierra ajena?, ed. A. Creischer, M. J. Hinderer and A. Siekmann (Madrid: MNCARS, 2010), 3–5.
[51] B. Echeverría, La modernidad de lo barroco (Ciudad de México: Era, 1998).
[52] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSEvad3Uafs.
[53] M. Mitrovic, Al servicio del pueblo. Arte, política y revolución en el Perú (1977-1992) (Lima: La Balanza, 2023).
[54] Mitrovic, 18.
[55] Sociopoetics is Wynter's response to the false ethno-poetics that is how academia characterizes non-Western poetics. S. Wynter, "Ethno or Sociopoetics", in We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Decolonising Essays, 1967-1984 (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2022), 421–444; V. N. Voloshinov, "Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art (Concerning Sociological Poetics)", in Freudianism. A Critical Sketch (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 93–116.