{"id":62943,"date":"2020-12-06T17:47:18","date_gmt":"2020-12-06T20:47:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rioonwatch.org\/?p=62943"},"modified":"2023-08-23T12:20:04","modified_gmt":"2023-08-23T15:20:04","slug":"interdisciplinary-artist-grada-kilomba-speaks-of-the-urgency-of-disobedience-at-rios-flup-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=62943","title":{"rendered":"Interdisciplinary Artist Grada Kilomba Speaks of the Urgency of Disobedience at Rio\u2019s FLUP"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas<\/a><\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is part of coverage of\u00a0Brazilian Black Awareness Month<\/a>, celebrated every November around\u00a0Black Consciousness Day on\u00a0<\/a>November 20<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Grada Kilomba, the Portuguese interdisciplinary artist<\/a> and writer whose work probes legacies of colonialism and racism, drawing on elements of performance, installation, and psychology, encouraged a younger generation of creators to similarly disregard boundaries at an online discussion as part of this year\u2019s Rio\u2019s Urban Peripheries Literary Festival (FLUP<\/a>). The festival\u00a0has taken place since 2012 across the city\u2019s favelas and public spaces.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need this multiplicity,\u201d she said. \u201cWe all have our own questions, and need to find our own answers as well… I think this is what decolonial work is. I cannot obey one discipline that has placed me as the other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kilomba spoke of her work as part of a global antiracist project, which aims to address how black people \u201cwere fragmented from our history and separated.\u201d She said she has grown to believe that empowerment does not necessarily come from \u201cbeing the best,\u201d but rather \u201cto be yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kilomba\u2019s inclusion in the digital lineup of this year\u2019s FLUP came after she spoke last year at a partner event between FLUP and the International Literary Festival of Paraty (FLIP<\/a>) at the Rio Museum of Art, drawing a packed crowd. Afterward, she signed hundreds of copies of her book Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism<\/em>, which was the highest-selling volume at FLIP that year. \u201cWe ended the night with the unstoppable desire, if not to prolong it, to repeat it,\u201d said FLUP\u2019s Daniele Bernardino, introducing this year’s event.<\/p>\n

Writers from around the world were included in the lineup<\/a> of this year\u2019s FLUP festival in part because one of the two writers the festival is celebrating is L\u00e9lia Gonzalez<\/a>, \u201cwho already created relationships with the global diaspora in the 1980s,\u201d the festival organizers wrote. \u201cWe took care to hear black women from the most diverse realities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The event with Kilomba occurred in partnership with the Toronto International Festival of Authors<\/a>, and she discussed her work alongside Canadian journalist Desmond Cole, whose book The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power<\/em>, chronicles the year 2017 through stories of racism and the demonization of black resistance across Canada in sectors such as policing, education, and the immigration system.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

Cole and Kilomba discussed the role of black writers in a global context and their philosophies behind their books. Plantation Memories<\/em> explores subtle, everyday forms of racism as a restaging of colonial violence and trauma that continues to inform the present. Her book was written eleven years ago, but was only successfully translated to Portuguese last year\u2014<\/span>it was originally published in Germany, where she lives<\/a>, in English. Cole and Kilomba spoke of how both of their books chronicle realities that have a timeless element, and of the importance of bearing witness. Cole\u2019s coverage of racism in policing over the years brought him to Ferguson, Missouri<\/a> after the 2014 police murder of Michael Brown, and the book chronicles the Ottowa police\u2019s killing of Somali-Canadian Abdirahman Abdi<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When asked what the two authors did to keep themselves safe in the writing process, Kilomba responded, \u201cfor me it was never a question of safety but a question of urgency… I wanted to have my questions answered, I wanted to understand who I am,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Cole said that much of his work constitutes \u201cfinding myself in spaces and looking at experiences and stories that actually show how we are not safe and how this world is not offering us this idea of safety<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The work of a black liberation struggle, he said, includes dreaming big about \u201cwhat safety would be in the present circumstances… We do not have to compromise with a state that refuses to see our humanity, we have to dream bigger than what they think is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

While activists push for big, systemic changes, he says that the connections possible through writing are extremely powerful.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a sense that we are being seen and heard by telling stories,\u201d he said, \u201cthat experiences we have are being made real.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kilomba told<\/a> El Pa\u00eds Brasil<\/em> in a 2019 interview that one method of decolonization is \u201cpoetic disobedience\u201d\u2014<\/span>the name of her 2019 exhibition at S\u00e3o Paulo<\/a>\u2019s Pinacoteca museum<\/a>, in which African oral storytellers recounted Greco-Roman myths.<\/p>\n