Decolonial Aesthetics refers to ongoing artistic practices responding and delinking from the darker side of modernity and imperial globalization: coloniality. This concept emerged from the work of the collective modernity/coloniality. It has its first manifestations in a volume edited by Zulma Palermo (1), in Argentina, with the participation of Colombian intellectual, artist and activist, Adolfo Albán-Achinte who used the term around 2003.
It was revived in the Summer of 2009 in the seminars of the Ph. D. in Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, in Quito. Pedro Pablo Gómez, director of the magazine Calle 14, was the main instigator of the conceptualization of Decolonial Aesthetics. He then requested an article from Walter Mignolo in this regard who theorized on it for the first time (2). Based on the article by Mignolo, both him and Gómez curated the first exhibition under that title with the collaboration of Elvira Ardila, director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, in November 2010. It was accompanied by a workshop where the concept created a public and hotly debate. The sequel, also in the format of a workshop and exhibition, took place at Duke University, in May 2011, and was curated by Mignolo and co-curated by Marina Grzinic, Guo-Juin Hong and myself. The organizers where artist Hong-An Throng, historian Aimee Kwon, Cinema scholar and video artist Guo-Juin Hong and Colombian critic, artist and curator, Miguel Rojas-Sotelo.
As the Decolonial Aesthetics Manifesto states: “…(this concept) seeks to recognize and open options for liberating the senses. This is the terrain where artists around the world are contesting the legacies of modernity and its re-incarnations in post-modern and altermodern aesthetics.”(3)
The Decolonial Option questions the very notion of “universality” and “civilization”, or rather “the universality of civilization”. This rhetoric of modernity and “progress” always carries a secret weapon which is articulated through dispossession, exploitation and ultimately, genocide: coloniality. By exposing this notion of inseparability between modernity and coloniality, decolonial thinking states that there is no such thing as an “autonomous European Sonderweg” of modernity. The colonial and its exploited, dispossessed, enslaved and exterminated subjects have always played a crucial role in creating, defining and literally “feeding” modernity.
1. Palermo, Zulma (Ed.) 2009. Arte y estética en la encrucijada descolonial. Prefacio de Walter Mignolo. Buenos Aires: Editorial del Signo.
2. Mignolo, Walter. Aiesthesis Decolonial. Calle 14, No. 4, Marzo 2010.
3. Decolonial Aesthetics Manifesto
http://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/
