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One Day, Freedom Will Be

 

In conversation with Maddalena Fragnito and Marco Baravalle, decolonial feminist thinker Françoise Vergès charts the intersecting frameworks and rhetorics of art and its institutions, coloniality and the ongoing project of decolonization, and rapid climate breakdown. This is the first in a series of texts published in the publication Art for Radical Ecologies (Manifesto).

Les enfants, mettez le feu, mettez le feu!
Mettez le feu pour mettre de l’ordre
Mettez le feu, mettez le désordre
Mettez le désordre pour mettre de l’ordre

– Pebouchfini feminist group, 20181

1. Dis-Order

Palestine is a lens through which to examine decolonization processes within Western institutions. Despite ongoing discussions about art and the decolonization of cultural and artistic institutions, these entities often struggle to address the issue’s root causes. The challenge lies in confronting the foundations of liberal democracies, such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which present themselves as benevolent humanitarian regimes advocating for women’s and children’s rights, freedom, and equality. Therefore, the concept of democracy is entwined with genocidal violence, land theft and object looting to populate the prestigious collections of Western museums. On the one hand, democracy is portrayed as the pinnacle of global human rights protection, justifying further exploitation of energy, land and objects. On the other hand, it is an ongoing struggle for social, gender and racial justice against imperialism and racial and patriarchal capitalism. Cultural

and artistic institutions should start addressing this evident contradiction, which is intentionally avoided in the failed processes of decolonizing Western institutions.

Let’s be clear: the term ‘Western’ is frequently employed, but it requires clarification. In this context, it refers to the West constructed by colonial modernity, colonization and the establishment of racial hierarchies. This process necessitated the erasure of marginalized people, such as nomads and prisoners, along with their Indigenous communities and linguistic diversity, to build monolingual nation-states. I draw upon Cedric Robinson’s theory of Racial Capitalism to underscore the construction of racialization processes on Western soil. From this perspective, Palestine holds a crucial role as the Israeli nation-state epitomizes the systematic, murderous and brutal violence inherent in the concept of liberal-imperial democracy. This process results in a government that seizes everything: life, land, culture and memory.

Despite facing an unmistakable situation – an ongoing genocide – cultural and artistic institutions hesitate to denounce and address the core issue at hand. Instead, they adeptly conceal it due to their evident complicity with an idea of ‘democracy’ that avoids confronting its association with the colonial-racial regime. This same reason makes me doubt the feasibility of decolonizing Western cultural and artistic institutions. This scepticism does not negate ongoing struggles, such as demands for restitution, reparations, improved working conditions, an end to sexual and racial violence, and fair pay for often overlooked workers like cleaners, guards and technicians. However, I believe it is urgent and crucial to channel energy into envisioning new institutions. Nevertheless, this is no easy feat given the entrenched nature of traditional institutions over two centuries (the nineteenth and twentieth), with their profound impact, influence and power. Breaking free from the traditional institutional mindset poses a significant challenge. It is difficult to assert that these institutions are failures, especially considering the unprecedented number of people visiting museums and cultural institutions today. We cannot simply claim that these institutions ‘do not work’; they undeniably exert an attraction that merits analysis. Therefore, it becomes crucial to explore what makes them so appealing.

At the core of this fascination is the idea that these spaces represent freedom, beauty, harmony and universal dialogue more than other spaces like academia or unions. Cultural and artistic institutions are often regarded as primary arenas for freedom of thought and criticism. However, the belief that these spaces are the exclusive domains for natural critical thinking and imagination is illusory. In reality, spaces of freedom and critical thinking exist everywhere – in Indigenous struggles against land theft, among striking workers, in migrant struggles for water and within refugee camps. These spaces challenge existing norms and serve as platforms where new institutions are envisioned not as something entirely novel but as transformative processes that fundamentally reconsider the foundations of these institutions.

Therefore, while the decolonization framework has become pervasive in museums, integrated into seminars, exhibitions and meetings, activating

decolonizing processes that extend beyond aesthetics to structural changes faces hesitation, incomplete implementation, or outright censorship within institutions. There is a reluctance to challenge the foundational aspects of capitalism, particularly the capitalist structure of labour and the relationship between the worker and the extraction of their labour, including the extraction of ideas and forms. Consequently, the proliferation of debates and decolonial exhibitions that do not address the material conditions of the institutional production system can be seen as another façade for extracting the labour force. After all, the machinery of production must continue to generate commodities daily.

2. De-Constructing

Art is a realm where ‘beauty’, the Western construction of beauty, is often used to justify various actions. In this context, economic corruption associated with pursuing beauty does not tend to provoke scandal. In this confusing context, artists seeking representation in collections and exhibitions, such as advocating for 50 percent representation among displayed works, can sometimes clash with denunciations of extraction – when does representation become fair, and when does it become extraction? In other words, if the desire for representation does not fuel the denunciation of extraction, there may be a need to redirect this desire toward a more fundamental desire for transformative change. Accordingly, this distinction needs clarification, which can sometimes be blurry. In fact, there is a prevailing notion that art should exist above and outside the market, but this clashes with the increasingly prevalent extraction occurring in the art world. The financialization of art warrants more vigorous denunciation or acknowledgement of what it truly is: pure financial speculation. Once again, the art market thrives on the perception of being exceptional and different from other markets, for instance, the market for commodities such as cobalt. Consequently, it does not provoke scandal as speculative activities and extractivism in the cobalt market might be. Demonstrating the extraction of ideas and artworks is not as straightforward as showcasing the extraction of resources.

Moreover, the collaboration with these institutions often stems from the precarious conditions in which artists find themselves and the illusion that museums represent a unique community. Nevertheless, despite the precarious nature of the art sector, artists harbour a strong desire to be accepted and integrated into these institutions. Consequently, a significant movement for the decolonization of cultural and artistic institutions in western Europe, extending beyond calls for increased representation, has to materialize. From this perspective, a crucial practice is exemplified by Decolonize This Place, which involves occupying museums to expose their complicity with colonial history, the arms industry, or the occupation of Palestine. This approach distinguishes itself from efforts merely seeking representation. Instead, it sheds light on the foundational aspects of museum institutions. The act of occupying museums, as

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