The festival is preceded by a two-day workshop An archive of my own/ Performing History led by artist Shiva Anoushirvani with:

Tanja Andersson
Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole
Louise Blad
Luanda Carneiro Jacoel
Angelica Falkeling
Mariusz Mateusz Andrzejczyk & Gabriella Novak
Jakob Niedziela
Karolina Oxelväg (STYRELSEN)
Elena Victoria Pastor Suarez
Rebecka Pershagen
Sara Sheikhi

Nathalie Bikoro interviewed by Marcio Carvalho

1. For Fanon, struggles for decolonization are first and foremost about self-ownership. They are struggles to repossess, to take back, if necessary by force that which is ours unconditionally and, as such, belong to us. What strategies you use in your art practice that might defy forms of knowledge, remembering and forgetting?

I would have a different positioning on this, as this is not exactly what Fanon tries to transmit in his statement. Fanon's writings have only been very recently translated and read within the academy for purpose to forge a critical language to reflect on today's society. However the work of repossession and violence that has been declared is anchored from a translated eurocentric positioning which doesn't reflect fully on Fanon's ideas from creolised French, experiences and purpose. Each of his books are evolutions also from observations specifically on Algerian colonisation and psychological condition taped through the knowledge of a French mixed Black man, he himself criticised his own views at times in lesser known journals and throughout many decades, his views have been challenged and contested by feminists writers like Marie-Chantal Kalisa.

The need to re-possess is the need for violence and for erasure and exclusion of any others; taking back that which is lost, taking back that that were already constructed myths created for us; the only thing that can belong to us is not a country but our shared imaginations.

What I do in my practice is a form of tender militancy that breaks the knowledge of what we have been given. The practice reflects on forms of monument-ing experiences through ephemeral conditions, cannibalising languages/processes of transmissions through biomythography and critical reflections on cultural appropriations. It is no longer about making images but about being inside of them. Mythology is the simultaneous act of forgetting and remembering which provides for me a space no longer of performativity but of magic. To decolonise we also have to forget about what we know as live art and performance, we have to learn and unlearn our own myths and stories, our own contours and this means according to Marimba Ba, becoming Griot. A political tool for healing through its own form of transmission enabling to trigger poetry and abstraction.

2. Today there is a gap between image and essence. Images they can distort the essence of a people, a place, a culture, etc, making them distorted, unworthy. Does your work try to restitute both, for better understandings of what lies behind stereotypes and epistemic colonialities?

Images are symbols of distortions, constructions and ideologies based on one person's vision, they can be violent, but it doesn't mean that they are not true. They are true because they reflect the vision and psychology of the message the person wanted to transmit, they are false because they do not reflect the voices and sensory realities of what is happening in the picture. Both are epistemic reflections on Eurocentric positions. The picture assures the story told by the oppressor not necessary the oppressed.
I don't destroy this in my work but what I can do is reflect on these positions and create spaces of engagement where you can learn how to read what you do not see, therefore make you see who you are, and in many cases audiences have an inability of self-reflection, an amnesia of their own identity because they are forged in spaces of privileged violence. We perform our own values of resistance and democracy but it doesn't mean that that democracy includes all the communities we try to reflect on.
My work is about emotion, connection, healing and apology. Often it means I have to forge the same system of violence endured in this "image" of western ideology/fantasy that will activate a frustration and denial. What I do within this task of performing is exactly how to read the picture, what is going on behind the picture that you cannot see, to unlearn and learn processes of emotions and allow a different possibility of ourselves and capabilities. Some may call it African, some may call it violent, witchcraft, magic but I am simply a storyteller who has an archive of experiences on her shoulders which reflect on our condition today. It is difficult to let go of that which we were given, it is difficult to react without imposing violence upon the other who tells you your story.

I don't restitute the 'true' of the image because often even our own traditions and images have been constructed for the purpose to dominate, control and colonise our people against our own, this is where Negritude doesn't work for me, the claim to come back, return to our 'authentic origins', i think the only thing we can return to is our memory based on touch, emotion, words that enabled us to survive and these can be forged by truths based on myths, transformations as well as distortions to protect those who were oppressed. We must not forget that colonisation is plural, it is based on the dominance and extermination of a population that have different sets of values or simply based on the idea of forging dominant races for political and economic purpose. Colonisation today is everywhere, women against women, black against black, white against white, every country I have been the history of colonisation was forged a long time before Europeans 'discovered' the world.

3. Today it's impossible to talk about knowledge without tapping into education. It seems that our education systems they became quiet obsolete in their pedagogies and their forms of knowledge. We still study based on Eurocentric views about the world, which in turn deprive students from a better understanding about the past and consequently a lack of tools to deal with and imagine many presents and futures still to come. What is your opinion about how academy is dealing with knowledge? And If you could use art, or art systems to decolonize the university and make it more pluriversity, and to re-invent the classroom, what would you do?

The limitations and risks for artistic practice stands on the relationship to power and class hierarchies that divide us. My approaches to education, history and and spatial strategies of reconfiguration and memory were encouraged in Brazil, South Africa and Senegal for example but banned and dismissed by university in Gabon as a way of provocation and propaganda against a very right-winged regime government.
To decolonise the classroom there is no one method or strategy it is a process of constant reinvention, passion, dedication and knowing how to be with people as groups and individuals. Knowledge loses its worth if you do not know how to transmit and teach to others, this is the consequence of most international educational systems North to South. The inability for connection and transmission. Knowledge are positions, forms of beliefs held by one or few groups which doesn't mean that they are true to all. Knowledge must be based on biomythographies, based on spaces, voices, interaction, sharing and self-care. Knowledge to be transmittable must be based on a science not based on exploitation of others or common sense measurabilities but exactly on the things we have lost, we cannot see, we cannot comprehend but on the constant building of truth, myth, poetry and fact, a science of the "griot", the one that must perform.
My method for the Eurocentric sceptic on education would be to challenge them to do the hard work, there is no instruction book on decolonising the classroom, it is based on those who have forged a life of experiences that those want to negate or those who have no comprehension of it based on their social privileges. The same way that there is no "repatriation" to forgetting the history of violence, genocide and colonisation, there is no one "method" for the classroom to decolonise. The classroom is a system, a space enforcing individuals to propose equal status whilst in fact they come all from different systems of experiences and what decolonisation can do is provide a nutrition, a re-adaptation on finding your own voice, protection and terrain. It would be impossible to give an instruction book of decolonial methods, our tools of emancipation should not be used and abused by neighbouring oppressors who might be inclined to forge privatisations and capitalisation over material that is meant to heal and provide safe spaces. The space of the academy has seen no changes but popularisation of violence; they were able to include material not to teach or transmit them into active active knowledge but as tools to maximise capital profits and therefore change structures of education into public capitalistic spaces written and spoken by professors that often have no anchors in the experience of what it is to be Black for example.
The academy is not the space that will decolonise the classroom, but the movement and interaction between international students who bring new knowledges, memory and experiences have been the compound for pushing and deconstructing the systems of violence in education.
Part of the challenges of the academy is who is able to enter inside it and who can get appropriately paid. Often professors and old administrative systems will slow the process of change and will hijack knowledge of others without finding tools or purpose to critically transmit material to their students. Now in reflection to politics and based on the depending economy brought by international students into Northern countries, universities are obliged to act on "diversity", but as Sarah Ahmed mentions, this idea of diversity is based on uncritical and eurocentric position to serve the purpose of increased economy and not on the knowledge transferred in the classroom. Ahmed reflects how too often academy maintains systems of violence, racism and ignorance by not allowing any protection and safety to their students when faced with abuse, statistically highest against POC students. Hence her strategy for decolonisation is what she calls resignation. In my years teaching in the academy in England notably and elsewhere, abuse is re-occurrent and is not dealt with according to the law.
What has decolonised the classroom in recent years, were POC students' complaints to the academies that forced the universities having to let practitioners like myself enter the classroom. What the students demand will become important to forge futures of their own narratives and archives. As long as power relations exists in the classroom between students based on their privileges and the teachers it will never be integral to the methods of practical decolonial artistic processes.
For international practitioners my advice would be to transmit our knowledge through a strategy that Fanon would call a "virus", creating an anti-biotic culture through cannibalist dissonant archives. Fanon suggests that an anti-biotic culture is a revolt, makes a change of bodily processes necessary as a means of anti-dote against dissonant social structures. Therefore body in motions must create a virus as an antidote against cognitive dissonance, marginalisation, invisibility and epistemologies of exclusion. The cognitive processes in performance use existing archives to generate new mythologies based on unacknowledged histories and loss. In perform-ing that which we do not see or what we do not want to know, we activate relations between communities, we activate plural anthologies, we activate memories for means of visible language and an antibiotic social historical re-positioning.

Interview with Gitte Sætre.

You often work with time-based art. Do have any thoughts about that, in comparison with, for example, art that is more object-based?

Since 2009 I have moved more or less away from object-based art due to political and practical reasons. I aim to be in a direct and acute dialogue with my surroundings. Time-based art makes the production period shorter and the budgets lower. This format challenges my daily presence and in many ways matches my temperament and interest/visions for art.

Are you working with any particular themes or issues in your practice at this time?
I explore the potential and possibilities for participatory creativity to help go beyond the crisis of the future within the projects: Green Hijab Movement, Magic of Seven and Soups&Stories.
In the projects Woman Cleaning and Mothers Dust, I explore the potential and possibilities to act on behalf of oneself.

In the other projects, I simply explore arts potential as a way of thinking out loud.

Can you share thoughts about your participation in History Will Be Kind to Me, for I Intend to Perform It -project? Did this project open up a new mode of investigation for you, or was it already part of your methodology? To be more specific, the project has a very concrete problematic, is this a new way of working for you?

The invitation to participate came only a few days after I started to work on a text very much relating to decolonization and the notion of demystifying knowledge production. So, I said yes in order to use the opportunity to speed up my thinking. I have for the last year been working on a project within this methodology, it is called Green Hijab Movement. My plan is to produce a new performance within the manifest of Green Hijab Movement. It feels safe and a bit unsafe at the same time. Something which I find to be a good starting point.
And I find it interesting to do it in a country like Sweden.

Interview with Gøril Wallin

You often work with time-based art. Do have any thoughts about that, in comparison with, for example, art that is more object-based?

Time based art is different from object based art, because it’s more connected with being alive. It is in movement, and in change over time. You experience with your physical body. Body in space, body in time. Your sensory apparatus is activated, simultaneously with your thoughts. What happens, happens here and now. The context is the «real» world, the public room, with all it includes. The meeting with the people is unpredictable, everything can happen. You are not in control. Risk is included, and you are vulnerable. You explore borders both in relation to yourself and in relation to the outside world. You also have the possibility to make things happen; influence, sympathise, protest, discuss, ask questions (directly or indirectly).

Are you working with any particular themes or issues in your practice at this time?

One of the issues I´m concerned with is the way we are separate and alienated from the nature as human beings.We are living more and more closer to the virtual world.

Can you share thoughts about your participation in History Will Be Kind to Me, for I Intend to Perform It -project? Did this project open up a new mode of investigation for you, or was it already part of your methodology? To be more specific, the project has a very concrete problematic, is this a new way of working for you?

Through my participation in the projectI have got an opportunity to explore a theme that I otherwise would not do. By having a common theme, that several people work with at the same time, there will be different approaches to the theme. What I also like, is that the project is crossing borders, and involve different countries during a long period of time. The project is unpredictable and in progress, and will take shape during the journey. The meeting the other participants will be very important, and can be a common inspiration for how the project will develop together.

Her work has been shown internationally in exhibitions and festivals in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Spain, Cyprus, England, Mexico, Colombia and China. Her practice includes self-organized events as an effort to contextualize and expand views on Performance Art between Latin America and Finland. In 2017 she founded PROYECTO ANALCO as the platform to develop this path, supported by Kone Foundation (2016) and the Finnish Cultural Foundation (2018). Currently she lives and works in Finland and Mexico.

Diana Soria Hernandez interviewed by Leena Kela

You are an artist whose work also operates in the field of activism. How would you introduce your artistic work and approach? What is your relation to decolonial thinking and practices?

For me decolonial thinking is rebellious and resilient, therefore it is a persistent practice. It starts as a collective practice that happens locally, among those with who we share context and history, because there is not one decolonial way of thinking (or theory) that can comprehend the immense work decolonial practices require.

For me, decolonial thinking is like a process of deconstruction that needs us to slow down and from a bird perspective start questioning and dialoguing, who we have been, who we are and what we want to be. At times it might not seem polite or diplomatic, it might be uncomfortable, but that's how changes take place.

At the moment, I'm especially interested in following thinkers that talk from the Latin American perspective and it helps much to continue this dialogue by making questions together with family, friends and colleagues that are close to the same experience. In this way we can thinking collectively who we have been, who we are and what we want to be.
My performance practice is drawn into reaching for the intangible while remaining as open as possible. My focus on deconstruction is a way of exploring the capacity of renewing associations and thoughts, of opening new perspectives. In a way I'm interested in the impossible, therefore I have become more abstract and more far away from wanting to deliver a message. I see more potential in this, more possibilities to affect but I'm still far away from what I would like to reach in my practice.

I am interested in the potential of simple and maybe even minimal gestures, elements, actions and languages that can evoke and transform reality, even if it happens for a moment. Consciously working with my human scale in relation to audience, geographies and media, I seek for an art that can break the inertia of paralysis or maybe even apathy and boredom.
What I consider my work in the micro politics scale is to evoke the absent, the (in)visibility of bodies (not only human) and bring it in palpable form, not by creating illustrations but instead in echoing something similar to a memory, something that can be experienced.
I have been also very interested in the limitations and possibilities of representation when it comes to conflict events or violence, and I have questioned if it is possible to represent violence without reproducing it.

You are from Mexico, but you have been living in Finland now for many years. When I got to know you around four years ago, you were working with a project that dealt with the disappearance of over 40 students in Mexico. Could you tell shortly about that project and how did you work with the topic? Did the physical distance to the origin of the event bring another perspective to the project?

My thesis work for my MA in Live and Performance Art was motivated by urgency. It was a reaction to the enforced disappearance of 43 rural school teachers from Ayotzinapa, Mexico on September 2014. When the event happened, an international movement started demanding justice and clarification of the involvement of federal police and Mexican government, it was a movement that could not be contained and that exposed internationally the levels of corruption and impunity in the country. For us who mobilised it was an opportunity to make pressure and seek for a change.

My work was driven this urgency. In the beginning it was not the theme of my thesis work, because I didn't even consider it art as such, it was more an exploration of performance as a tool for demonstration, for visibilizing, for adding up something as citizen. It became my thesis subject by itself, because it took over, because I was unable to do anything else. As a human experience, the physical distance to the origin of the event was very frustrating. It felt like a historical moment were things were changing, and I wanted to be there, nevertheless the possibility of working for it from Finland brought other possibilities and also responsibilities. My position in Finland gave me the responsibility of visibilizing the event here.

In artistic terms, the distance between Mexico and Finland revealed that language was insufficient and narratives were simplified and dismissed quickly. I made many performances that "failed" in delivering a message and this made me rethink and explore in different layers. I had understood that while living in the translocation, I had to think about representation and symbolic language in a much more abstract ways, hoping that through action, body and presence, I could evoke the fragility of giving visibility to a matter that had already been hyper exploited, alienated and banalised by the media.

So to finish answering the question, being in Finland back then, brought my only perspective on the event, it changed my language and made me question representation. I want to make an art that can recall a feeling, not that transmits a message.

What can performance art do? You have also been studying printmaking and worked as a visual artist. What made you to choose performance art as your main medium?

When I was studying printmaking I reached the point where someone recommended me to check performance art because my understanding of printmaking, even if it was experimental, had gone a bit too far. I didn't have the problem in defining if I was doing printmaking or not, but eventually I had to define it for others and so, I started new studies in Live Art and Performance Studies. Nevertheless the conceptuality of printmaking, remained. I insist even today that printmaking is much closer to performance than other traditional visual art disciplines.

Printmaking made me aware of reproduction/repetition, time, the mechanics of the body, the production of image, it gave me the sensation of making what nowadays I would call durational performances. These attributes of printmaking are still with me todays as I make mainly performance art, but with the clear distinction that performance art is action, is alive. Maybe this is the reason why I'm not so interested in making performance for camera, because after being a printmaker, creating images that can be captured and contained, is limiting. Printmaking, as other visual arts, are exhibited when finished and framed, and this was always bit frustrating to me.

The liveness of performance, its relation to time, context, space, audience, presence; blends into life, it has the potential of transformation. The apparent lack of a specific skill is also a gift for performance art, since it can surprise by creating layers and depth on the everyday life. I am interested and in need of immediate affection.

Performance art can create a utopian moment, a situation through affects and relationships. It is a language in itself that requires constant awareness and a fast mind. It interacts with the present, which is always unknown until its past. 
Because of this, for me performance can be art or a tool, as it was for me back in 2014, but it can come much closer to real life than any other art discipline. At the moment I'm interested in developing my performance art practice, and from there, I can address the micro politics.

Serge Olivier Fokoua (b. 1976, Cameroon) lives and works between Cameroon and Canada. He received his artistic training in Yaounde, through workshops. In 2011, he attended advanced training on cultural management in Institut für Kultur Konzept in Hamburg, Germany. He recently made a master of visual arts at Université Laval, in Québec. Working mainly in installation and performance, Serge Olivier Fokoua’s work has been presented in numerous art exhibitions, performance events, and projects in Cameroon, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, USA, Canada and Finland. Fokoua is a co-founding member of Les Palettes du Kamer collective and since 2008 he is the Artistic Director of the Biennale RAVY: Yaoundé Visual Art Encounters (www.ravyfestival.net). Since 2006 he has been a member of IC Zone, an international network of festivals and art centres and has invited over 40 artists and international curators to Cameroon. Currently, he is actively working on multiple platforms for artistic exchange between Cameroon and several countries.

Olivier Fokoua interviewed by Marcio Carvalho

1. For Fanon, struggles for decolonization are first and foremost about self-ownership. They are struggles to repossess, to take back, if necessary by force that which is ours unconditionally and, as such, belong to us. What strategies you use in your art practice that might defy forms of knowledge, remembering and forgetting?

For me, it is impossible to make art without a direct reference to life and the human being. I use art to bring change and fight against hurts. And this fight does not only concern a particular category of people. It is a fight for the cause of the human being against injustice. That is why the issue of decolonization is only one aspect of all the issues that affect humanity. it just constitute one of the different approaches in my art practice. I am not an afro-defender. Neither an anti western. I am simply a justice follower. My artistic acts are very often based on everything that is urgent. Because it's hard for me to conceive that art can be made just for art, because I think like Adorno, that art is above all a social construction.
Decolonizing the knowledge is an urgent issue, but very difficult to solve. This is what sometimes justifies the fact that my artistic orientation, after having searched for ways of exit in the concrete, then launched into utopia to deploy its upheaval and its disarray. To look helplessly at the escape of the world, towards cataclysmic horizons, without being able to do anything to stop the machine. This is the crux of the problem. But I refuse, to make myself a crime partner of the big global micmac, I refuse the politically correct, and I chose to shout on scandal. My role as an artist is to put finger on wound, to decry inconsistencies, or to leave, earlier than to compromise with the aberration. I then position myself in the non-alignment, out of any established system. I create works to resist. As to walk in the footsteps of the famous American resistance fighter Thomas Jefferson who said: "when injustice becomes law, resistance becomes a duty". The duty in this quote is embodied in such names as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Che Ernesto Guevara, Rosa Park, Angela Davis and many others who have become legends because of their insubordination to injustice.

2. Today there is a gap between image and essence. Images they can distort the essence of a people, a place, a culture, etc, making them distorted, unworthy. Does your work try to restitute both, for better understandings of what lies behind stereotypes and epistemic colonialities?

It's true, there is a big gap between what Africa is, and what is presented as Africa. There are many "clichés" and stereotypes that distort the image of Africa or tell lies about Africa. I remember a few years ago the German artist Rolf Bier who had for artistic concept the sentence: "This is not Africa", " ceci n'est pas l'Afrique". Like to answer to those who have a distorted image of Africa. I will not want to talk about Africa just because I am an African. But I speak of it first because i am a human being in search of justice and equity. Because I think that everyone can defend truth and justice, and it is not a matter of race or nationality. Colonization that has done a lot of harm to Africa is a fact, and everyone is supposed to be offended. Colonization is now part of the history of African peoples, but it is a heavy burden that has killed African cultures and has blunted the opportunities for growth and prosperity of an entire continent. As an artist, I can not redo the history. But I am fighting for the restoration of the truth. I encourage the awakening of consciences. I am deeply against any domination of man by man.

3. Today it's impossible to talk about knowledge without tapping into education. It seems that our education systems they became quiet obsolete in their pedagogies and their forms of knowledge. We still study based on Eurocentric views about the world, which in turn deprive students from a better understanding about the past and consequently a lack of tools to deal with and imagine many presents and futures still to come. What is your opinion about how academy is dealing with knowledge? And If you could use art, or art systems to decolonize the university and make it more pluriversity, and to re-invent the classroom, what would you do?

This is a very serious problem. We all know today that the West has been developed by destroying Africa. West managed to make Africa depend entirely on him. Unable to do anything without going the help of west. Which completely killed the genius of Africa, making african' children the zombies. Since they do not think anymore, but they just execute orders, and expect everything from the west. This inferiority complex has remained until today. And the West has done everything to maintain this domination and hegemony vis-à-vis Africa. The Cameroonian philosopher Hubert Mono Nzana once said, "Our intellectuals are hungry". This was absolutely true, and the consequences are extremely catastrophic. When in a society, the intellectuals are hungry (because they can not provide for themselves), one inevitably leads to what Alain Finkielkraut called "the defeat of thought". Because at this point, the high standards and the Cartesian principles of life governing the true, the right and the good, fall completely into disuse. That's when chao and anarchy set in. But this is not a coincidence, because hunger and poverty are potent tools of domination that the West wields masterfully to maintain its dominant status, as if it was a jungle. But that's it. Because Africa has been violated. He was robbed of his wealth. And that's what it's about in my performance project called "What's for dinner"; that I develop in the big cities of the developed countries. As to tell the West, "give us back what you stole from us". The project has already been developed in Germany, Poland, Canada, and will soon be in Finland.

Anthea Moys interviewed by Marcio Carvalho

Today there is a gap between image and essence. Images they can distort the essence of a people, a place, a culture, etc, making them distorted, unworthy. Does your work try to restitute both, for better understandings of what lies behind stereotypes and epistemic colonialities?

From the outset, I think it should be noted that in response to these specific questions, I am first and foremost an artist, not a theorist, not a historian. There is still so much I have to learn about colonization and decolonization. I have answered here from my experience as an artist.

Over the past decade, I have created a diverse body of performance works that adopt a playful approach in their desire to create art that is inclusive, participatory and inspires a sense of agency in the world. Growing up in post-apartheid South Africa one of the aims of my practice is to inspire a sense of empathetic human interconnectedness through play.

An example of this is the Vs project: In response to being the inaugural winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art in South Africa, I created a project called “Anthea Moys vs the City of Grahamstown” (2013) that, through a series of contests where I single-handedly challenged several teams to their own games, attempted to collectively reimagine winning as the act of learning from and with instead of conquest over another.

In my work, sport is material that could symbolically refer to colonialism, war, hierarchies and systems that support various binaries such as successful/unsuccessful, strong/weak, hero/villain, and winner/loser. I use play to subvert and destabilize, to shake up and ‘mess with’ the current ‘order’ of things. In this way my practice allows me to explore the liberating qualities of play in relation to the rule-bound characteristics of sport through performance. Within the current political climate and as long as there are binaries of rich/poor, powerful/powerless and oppressors/oppressed, art that inspires curious and brave playful agency is critical for human development and transformation. I adopt a playful curious approach with my participants that inspire ‘changing the rules of game’ so as to invite another way to play and relate to the game and to one another. In so doing, the work attempts to destabilize hierarchies.

Perhaps it is playful decolonization?!

Is decolonize to

Reshuffle
Recreate
Dabble with
Mess with
Trifle with
Muck about with
Play differently with

history and remake it anew?!

In my work I have always made it a point to take the work OUTSIDE of the normal confines of the gallery or theatre. I prefer the work to happen in unusual places that are specific to the work at hand. So, depending on whom I am working with, for example a boxing ring downtown, a rooftop, the public streets, a soccer field. I think it is important and interesting to take the audience out of their comfort zones to the art and to take the art out into the public domain where it can be seen closer to everyday life.

For these upcoming festivals, I propose to leave South Africa to go and, if they will have me, learn more about Africa in these cities. I propose to work with African/Middle Eastern immigrants that have relocated and are now living in Stockholm/Bergen/Turku. I propose to develop something with them during the week prior to each festival date. At this point in time, we do not know what the performance/story is. This is scary, but good! We will mess with, disrupt, play with the story. It could be a song, a dance, a prayer, a war cry. This will then be showed probably outside of the festival venue. This is also scary, but GOOD! Very good. In this way the work will be developed in situ and the audience will be asked to take a step out of their comfort zones, the ‘known’ story and enter into a space of the largely unknown, the developing story. The story that will investigate, with curiosity, what playful decolonization could be... !

Today it's impossible to talk about knowledge without tapping into education. It seems that our education systems they became quiet obsolete in their pedagogies and their forms of knowledge. We still study based on Eurocentric views about the world, which in turn deprive students from a better understanding about the past and consequently a lack of tools to deal with and imagine many presents and futures still to come. What is your opinion about how academy is dealing with knowledge? And If you could use art, or art systems to decolonize the university and make it more pluriversity, and to re-invent the classroom, what would you do?

DECOLONIZING THE ACADEMY:
I would create spaces for the sharing of knowledge – each one, teach one – where learning from the other trumps beating them. You could come and share anything here: your mom’s best soup recipe, how to play a game your grew up with, safest routes to get around town. All the while the most important thing would be to really bear witness to this person who is sharing and teaching, to learn to be really curious about what they are sharing as well as curious about your response. To develop a practice of heightened curiosity, where we literally celebrate our differences through learning something new from that person.

And ALL kinds of DOING and NOT DOING are welcome in all kinds of ways – everything is up for questioning. New rules of play are engaged and designed with players at the outset of every session, until organically rules become accepted.

Some questions...

Why is a playful approach necessary especially for the youth? What are the alternatives? How do we create spaces for vulnerability to co-exist with courage and bravery? How are we creating re/creating history today? How are we retelling it? How am I doing this? Is it possible to engage and create without doing/saying? What about not doing, not saying? What about listening? Where are our senses? How do we make sense of the world? In history, in herstory, in play, in eye-contact, in passing, in fear, in love: Where is the body? What does playful embodied decolonization look like, taste like, sound like, feel like?

Valeria Montti Colque interviewed by Denis Romanovski

Valeria Montti Colque. Boat Trip Cloud. Photo collage. Photographers: Valeria Montti Colque, Juan Castillo, Ulrica Zwenger.

What is the background of the stories,  characters and costumes in your works?

It is a place for dreams and ambiguous imaginative stories. I get inspiration from everyday life, nature, different religions and cultures, myths, tales, music and movies that I blend together into a sort of a 'creative soup'. Subjects like love, fear, longing, dreams, rootlessness, as well as power structures and pain are central to my work. I tell my stories through using costumes and characters, such as Mountain, Jokerita, Rainbow, Cloud, Black Wild Cloud or El Cocinero.

My earlier works were mostly about rootlessness but now it has become more important to stop feeling rootless and get rooted instead.

Each individual is a universe. Each body is a planet.

You often perform these created identities as appearances, processions, rituals, etc. What does it mean for you to embody these characters? How is it connected to your own life?

It is a way to embrace, understand and nurture feelings that are very dear and meaningful to me. But at the same time I want to convey something important to the others and change things: by shaping these feelings and experiences into characters. Only then one can touch them and look them in the eyes. In return, they can walk their own path in order to find a change or an end, for example.  

I am a mixture of many different cultures, some of which are unknown to me. Yet I make them mine, in my own way, through my imagination, reading about them or things that come simply from my heart.

The concepts of processions and rituals originate in my mother's faith, but I have given them my own interpretations. Rituals have always been part of our lives. Also, my grandfather was Aymara, although I have never met him.

What is your driving force in work?

I love to create as it is a place where all dreams are free.

Since 1997, Christian Etongo has focused primarily on performance art. He has created about twenty performances and participated in several group and solo exhibitions in South Africa, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Niger, Nigeria, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Zimbabwe and Sweden. As a nonconformist expression, the works of Christian Etongo have journey between the ephemeral and the eternal, the finite and the infinite. The artist dissects the memory of mobility and its influence on societies.

Christian Etongo interviewed by Marcio Carvalho

 1. For Fanon, struggles for decolonization are first and foremost about self-ownership. They are struggles to repossess, to take back, if necessary by force that which is ours unconditionally and, as such, belong to us. What strategies you use in your art practice that might defy forms of knowledge, remembering and forgetting?

My artistic approach is based today on the Memory.
Individual memory: that which allows the human being that I am to advance in the community, in the society in which I live.
The collective memory: that of the people or the community of which I am a part.
About colonization, my duty is to know the History and to start the process of decolonization, to leave the chains of the memory of this history

2. Today there is a gap between image and essence. Images they can distort the essence of a people, a place, a culture, etc, making them distorted, unworthy. Does your work try to restitute both, for better understandings of what lies behind stereotypes and epistemic colonialities?

I try first to return the truth, to say what happened, the aftermath is important, as an artist, I have to carry the message, for the rehabilitation of the values ​​of our peoples, these lost values for the benefit of the oppressor. It is important to redefine our culture in order to move forward in this global world.

3. Today it's impossible to talk about knowledge without tapping into education. It seems that our education systems they became quiet obsolete in their pedagogies and their forms of knowledge. We still study based on Eurocentric views about the world, which in turn deprive students from a better understanding about the past and consequently a lack of tools to deal with and imagine many presents and futures still to come. What is your opinion about how academy is dealing with knowledge? And If you could use art, or art systems to decolonize the university and make it more pluriversity, and to re-invent the classroom, what would you do?

The Academy as the System, manage today to manipulate education, we live in a consumer society, a society of lies and interests, it is imperative to redo the education system, because the academy teaches what suits him and who defends the interests of the System, that's why we artists have often had problems at the university where everything is well framed.
During my interventions at the university, students are faced with the reality of the field, not that of books, my strategy is to let the student discover his own abilities by encouraging him to do research on himself , the presence of the teacher is just a support to guide him to find his way and his own experience.