LECTURE-PERFORMANCE: “DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE”

LECTURE-PERFORMANCE: "DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE"

“(…) an illuminating, spiritual and radical insight (that allows) the audience to engage with this profound vocabulary of decoloniality.” – Warrior Poets, Brussels, 2016.

“Evocative and provocative, Kilomba’s performed writing voices a painful history of experiences with a thoughtful and gentle urgency. (Her) words open up a space for rethinking the politics of knowledge with a haunting precision.” – reboot fm, Berlin 2016

“How Grada Kilomba is refreshing the cultural scene around the world with her piece ‘Decolonizing Knowledge’, from Berlin to London, from São Paulo to Accra.”, taz.newspaper 2016

In this lecture performance Grada Kilomba raises questions concerning the concepts of knowledge, race and gender: “What is acknowledged as knowledge? Whose knowledge is this? And who is acknowledged to produce knowledge?” This project exposes not only the violence of classic knowledge production, but also how this violence is performed in academic, cultural and artistic spaces, which determine both who can speak and what we can speak about.
To touch this colonial wound, Grada Kilomba creates a hybrid space where the boundaries between the academic and the artistic languages confine, transforming the configurations of power and knowledge. “It is my intention to create this hybridity, to explore forms of Decolonizing Knowledge.” she says in a newspaper interview (der Freitag, 2016).
Using a collage of her written and visual work as well as performative narrative, she initiates a dialogue of multiple narratives who speak, interrupt, and appropriate the ‘normal’ and continuous coloniality in which we reside. The audience is invited to re-imagine the concept of knowledge by opening new spaces for decolonial thinking.

Copyright©Grada Kilomba | 2015-2016 | All rights reserved
Photos by Ana Freitas

DATES:
Amsterdam, at the University of Amsterdam, 26 March 2015
Stockholm and Linköping, University of Linköping, 27 April 2015
Hamburg, University of Hamburg, 18 May 2015
Dresden, University of Dresden, 21 May 2015
Vienna, The Vienna Secession Museum, 9 June 2015
Hamburg, Theater Kampnagel, 1 October 2015
Munich, Theater Münchener Kammerspiele, 18 October 2015
Antwerpen, Antwerpen Art Museum, 22 October 2015
Vienna, University of Vienna, 19 November 2015
Guimarães, Museu Internacional de Artes, 10 December 2015
London, University of London, 21 Januar 2016
Brussels, Brussels Bozar Museum, 30 Januar 2016
São Paulo, Mostra Internacional de Teatro de São Paulo, 06 March 2016
Cologne, Akademie der Künste der Welt, 24 March 2016
Accra, University of Legon, 11 April 2016
Lagos, University of Lagos, 13 April 2016
Barcelona, Goethe Institut Barcelona, 25 Mai 2016
Johannesburg, Wits Theatre, 26 August 2016