Decolonial Suites

Lecture given during the "Considering Monoculture" conference, deBuren, Brussels. February 28, 2020.

Revisiting ‘Decolonial Variations’, a short essay in the form of an interview with Joachim Ben Yacoub, published in May 2019, that pointed to strategies of absorption of Black bodies by Western art institutions, Olivier Marboeuf will share diverse feedback and interpretations, sometimes unexpected, concerning the piece. Readings of the text that sometimes expressed the confusion as well as the tensions that emerged in recent years around identity politics for those who hoped to invent a common culture, in which the racial foundations of capitalism would be forgotten in favour of a politics of surface reconciliation. If ‘Decolonial Variations’ pleads notably for an escape from identity as a market value and a distancing from the desire for recognition, it is with the objective of establishing minority bodies as sites of the particular and invisible history of the West and as matter(s) capable of disturbing, via their transformative power, the economy and ecology of cultural institutions.