B5381 - Seminar (1) (LM)

Learning outcomes

Students acquire the main skills to intervene in both academic research and public debates on the most urgent contemporary issues related to arts and cultural heritage. Accordingly, students also learn about the relevance of arts and heritage for wider political and public debates. The seminar may involve various formats (lectures, conferences, study days, curatorial projects, installations etc.) and ensures the integration of theories with practices.

Course contents

SEMINAR: "DECOLONIZE THIS SPACE"!

 

This seminar aims at engaging students with colonial traces in urban landscapes and heritage, and with reflections and practices around the coloniality of power in present times. More widely, the seminar offers a space to reflect and learn on the persistence of the coloniality of power in and beyond art spaces, and on issues of resistance, transformation, restitution and reparation.

Through the seminar we hope to contribute to creating spaces of debate around public issues such as colonial pasts and ongoing legacies and their subversion. We will also focus on discourses and aesthetic representations which normalise racial hierarchies and racism. We will reflect on what resistance (or dissensus) can look like in political art and public and spatial interventions such as urban interruptions and resignification, aesthetic disruptions, artistic/aesthetic protests, public discourses around reparation and restitution (Rhodes Must Fall Movement, Slavery Inquiries, Artifacts restitution etc).

Renown scholars, architects, anthropologists and artists will be contributing to the seminar with guest lectures. (TBC)

The overarching conceptual framework of the seminar stems from Jacques Ranciere’s insights on the relation between aesthetics and politics in the production of consensus and dissensus. Notably, dissensus must cut across and destabilise consensus -that is assigned hierarchies and normative forms of belonging, genres and discourses - by introducing new subjects and objects into the field of perception. By focusing on the aesthetic dimension of politics and the political dimension of art, students will be encouraged to think of ways to challenge dominant representations (consensus) and bring about dissensus. Our explorations of these issues will draw from different contexts and historical experiences across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The seminar will also include a collective reading of F. Vergès's text A programme of absolute disorder: Decolonizing the museum (M. Thackway, Trans.). Pluto Press. 2024

Our seminar will be articulated through a combination of lectures and guest lectures, class discussions, presentations, walks.

Teaching methods

Lectures, Guest Lectures, Walks, Workshop in Biennale Sessions, Conversations, Discussions

Assessment methods

The seminar is exam free. It gives students a pass or non pass (idoneita').

Office hours

See the website of Ruba Salih