Workshop Series
Workshop »The Laboratory of Restitution, Reinventing the Locus of the Return«
24 June 2022 10 am – 6 pm
Curated by: Felwine Sarr
Closed workshop with max. 15 participants
The showcase neutralizes the magic object, how to reinvent a new life to the objects returned on the continent? This reinvention is not fixed in the object but continues in the living, the development of the space "receptacle" of the returned objects ... This workshop proposes to share and imagine with the participants a new vision of restitution, as reinvention.
Workshop and Performance »Building Refuges and Sanctuaries: A Decolonial Feminist Antiracist Practice«
12 August 2022 10.30 – 6.30 pm (workshop)
13 August 2022 (public performance)
Curated by: Francoise Vergès
Closed workshop with max. 20 participants
In recent years, we have observed the multiplication of “zones of nonbeing” in Europe and on its borders, these sites that Frantz Fanon described as created by means of violence and overt dispossession and where people are dehumanized, considered below the line of the human as non-humans/sub-humans.
Thousands of refugees live in zones of non being in Italy, Greece, France, Hungary—hunted and attacked by the police, the army, the racists and fascists and the far right, forced to support freezing temperatures and mud, seeing their tents being destroyed, their demands rejected. What happened in November 2021 on the Belarus/Poland border when thousands of refugees sought to enter the European space, was widely reported as a conflict between a dictator ( Belarus Alexander Lukashenko) and a European country (Poland) defending ist space. Poland used the term “hybrid war” to describe the refuges’s presence. What was created was a zone of non being.
States are using the economy of exhaustion, endemic to racial capitalism —psychic, mental and bodily depletion—to dispossess and exploit Black and brown people. The economy of exhaustion, which showed its naked brutality during the pandemic, has a long history in the modern world: it started with colonial slavery, mining human energy to death and has continued to this day. European bourgeoisie’s comfortable life still rests on the exhaustion of racialized bodies, still rests on mining to exhaustion the bodies and minds of migrants and people of color. To counter the murderous anti-refugees European politics, antiracist and antifascist movements have created sanctuaries and refuges and roads of solidarity.
Drawing on the theories of political antiracism and decolonial feminism, participants in the Berlin Biennale workshop „Building Refuges and Sanctuaries. A Decolonial Feminist Antiracist Practice“ will imagine and create, collectively, a public performance that address the necessity and urgency of multiplying refuges and sanctuaries.