Decolinizing Aesthetic Materials in Times of Catastrophe

2024

Workshop 

Leuphana University, Germany

This workshop with academics and critics proposes to explore, from a multidisciplinary perspective, different critical strategies and decolonizing imagination to jointly develop new methods, approaches, ways of production and circulation of knowledge. We propose to open the discussion and critical study to the broad field of humanities and research in social and environmental sciences. 

Topics include: the sensitive and affective power of materials; the production, extraction and circulation of materials – from the colonial routes of “earth pigments” to the neo-extractivism of contemporary “rare earth elements”; the different histories and practices of aesthetic use of materials and their implications both in the histories of art and their technical, political and socio-environmental significances; the meanings and affects of materiality in times of ecological crisis and catastrophe; aesthetic approaches to bodily experience and non-human beings and matter.

Some of the main questions are: How are specific materials entangled with colonial ecologies and politics? What genealogies can be traced to expose the constitutive historicity of visual, sound and narrative materials from diverse geopolitical horizons? What new possibilities of thought and action can be deployed at the crossroads of the Eurocentric paradigm with the mediations, suspensions or interruptions produced from the so-called Global South?

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