Coloniality.
Voices and Perceptions

In this workshop, conducted by photographers and artists Akinbode Akinbiyi and Vasco Araújo, we will try to discover ways to engage with the ones around us, while reflecting upon ourselves using both the gaze and the voice as instruments. Through this 3-day collaboration between students, artists, neighbours and ourselves, we will learn how to use our observation skills as and we will discover our inner voices in order to interact with each another, to express ourselves and to practice ways of demystifying our understanding of the “other”.

In a moment when materialism seems to be an undeniable part of our lives, becomes compelling to urgently perceive that our lives and the ones of the people around us are more than what we may notice at first glance. While getting into this particular holiday spirit in which consumerism forces its way through our minds, we engage in ways to look at each other with a capacity that overthrows the external look.

A collaboration between SAVVY Contemporary's long–term project COLONIAL NEIGHBOURS and the FCSH-Nova University of Lisbon, this workshop takes place in Berlin as part of a continuing project developed with schools from Lisbon, Berlin and Bordeaux. The focus of this project is to try to bring students of different ages and backgrounds to think about what is to be European, and how Europe and Africa relate to each other.  

“African-European Narratives” is an invitation to re-imagine Europe and to rethink its post-colonial cartography. One that transcends the circle of national narratives, disrupts imaginary homogeneity and disturbs the politics of identity and otherness. It is also an invitation to engage with different media practices, to experiment with forms of activism and to test the possibilities of cultural analytics. An invitation to collectively produce and reappropriate archives, to navigate diversity and visualize new configurations, to empower individual voices as well as trans-individual and transnational processes.