Edited by the Editorial Group for Writing Insurgent Genealogies
(Carolina Agredo, Sheri Avraham, Annalisa Cannito, Miltiadis Gerothanasis, Marina Gržinić, Marissa Lôbo and Ivana Marjanović)
This book is the outcome of the processes of studying, learning and de-learning, established over the last six years in the Post-Conceptual Art Practices (PCAP) class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
What’s at stake here is to reflect not only on historical colonialism but also on the ways in which capitalism frames the world we inhabit here and now. The notion of decoloniality has provided a radical option with which to rethink learning processes coming from positions that are not exclusively Western-orientated but are instead formed by other political-social contexts and perspectives. The concept of decoloniality offers an insurgent position in the history of colonialism and in all its contemporary forms of colonial subjugation, exploitation and discrimination.
It is important to analyse the continuities of colonialism, Nazism and fascism in contemporary neoliberal global capitalist democracies. With these continuities it is possible to define present racism, Islamophobia, anti-Romaism and anti-Semitism without, however, forming competing histories of oppression and persecution. Many questions could not be answered here and now, yet it was clear that we wanted to reflect upon memory politics as well as upon how to make alliances between present forms of anti-racist, anti-colonial, political, theoretical, critical and artistic works.