The Aníbal Quijano Chair

Roots, Time and Place

Primer mapamundi chino al estilo europeo. Matteo Ricci, Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (坤輿萬國全圖) [Un mapa de la miríada de países del mundo], 1602 — The first Chinese world map in a European style. Matteo Ricci, *Kunyu Wanguo Quantu* (坤輿萬國全圖) [A Map of the Myriad Countries in the World], 1602

Held on 19 Jun 2023

The Aníbal Quijano Chair is a space of thought which pays homage to the memory of the great Peruvian thinker, a critic of the coloniality of power, and seeks to open a channel of collective reflection-action to incorporate it into the multiple viewpoints that today discover modernity deprived of its primal pledges.

This fifth edition, on the relationship between coloniality, memory and space, constitutes an enquiry on friendship and roots, drawing from Aníbal Quijano’s life and human experience. In his world of situated friendship, with the specific Andean spatial temporality, he represents a unique way of being in the world, giving rise to modes and powers of decolonial thought. Eager to avoid dissociating human experience and politics, the edition looks to reflect on the relationship between people, spaces and affects as a place of critical formulation and resistance inside the current ecological and geopolitical context, and from encounters and stage practices which centre bodies and territories.

The programme gets under way with a lecture by Walter Mignolo — one of the great decolonial thinkers, and a friend and successor of Quijano’s thought — with respect to the myriad dimensions of coloniality within the context of Spain. It continues with an encounter with photographer Marcelo Brodsky on the twentieth century’s forgotten holocausts and the relationship between the image and the idea of south, and a conversation between Mignolo and Rita Segato in relation to the validity of Quijano’s thinking in the present day. Furthermore, in conjunction with World Refugee Day, the Teatro Sin Papeles company presents the performance El sueño es vida (A Dream Is Life). The Chair concludes with another master lecture, this time delivered by Segato as she discusses her latest research project concerning roots and their consequences.

Curator

Rita Segato

Organised by

Museo Reina Sofía and Museo Situado

Programme

The Aníbal Quijano Chair

Inside the framework of

TIZ 9. Relational Ecologies

Educational program developed with the sponsorship of

Participants

Marcelo Brodsky is an artist and human rights activist who lives and works in Buenos Aires. After the 1976 coup d’état in Argentina, Brodsky sought exile in Barcelona, where he studied Economy at the University of Barcelona and Photography in the International Centre of Photography, and was taught by Catalan photographer Manel Esclusa. Situated at the limit between installation, performance, photography, monument and memorials, his works combine text and image and are part of the collections of, among other centres, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Argentina and, recently, the Museo Reina Sofía.

Walter Mignolo is a semiotician and professor of Literature at Duke University. He worked alongside Aníbal Quijano and is one of the main successors of his thought. Over the past thirty years, he has devoted his research and work as a teacher to explaining and unmasking the historical pillars of what he defines as “modernity/coloniality”. In The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures, Decolonial Options (1995), he argues that coloniality has been constitutive and not derivative of modernity since its birth in 1500. Further, given that this cycle of coloniality is reaching its end, he focuses debate on the “postcolonial condition” with The Idea of Latin America (2005).

Teatro Sin Papeles is a company which was created in 2018, welcoming actresses and actors with migrant backgrounds to share their lives through theatre. Since it was founded, the company has activated different performances in cultural spaces linked to its surrounding reality, such as Teatro del Barrio (Lavapiés, Madrid) and Ateneu del Raval (Barcelona). Thimbo Sam is an actor and activist who reached Spain in a dugout canoe at sixteen years of age and faced a difficult life overcoming obstacles to reach one goal: to make his dream of becoming an actor a reality. He has participated in short films, documentaries, films and series.

Rita Segato is a professor of Anthropology and Bioethics in the UNESCO Chair at the University of Brasilia (Brazil). She was an expert witness on the trials of the Sepur Zarco case in Guatemala, where sexual violence was first tried and prosecuted, in the form of domestic and sexual slavery, as a war strategy used by the State. Her main fields of interest include new forms of violence against women and the contemporary consequences of the coloniality of power. Among her most important works are La Nación y sus Otros: raza, etnicidad y diversidad religiosa en tiempos de políticas de la identidad (Prometeo Libros, 2007) and La crítica de la colonialidad en ocho ensayos y una antropología por demanda (Prometeo Libros, 2013). She has directed the Aníbal Quijano Chair on decolonial thought in the Museo Reina Sofía since 2015.

Monday, 19 June 2023 Sabatini Building, Auditorium and online platform

Southern Europe on the Colonial Horizon of Western Modernity

— By Walter Mignolo

Spain’s position in the modern/colonial global order is unique and entails a discussion around multiple “souths” and “norths”. Although Spain was a key agent in the construction of colonial power in the sixteenth century, at the end of the eighteenth century it lost the pomp of modernity and was relegated to Southern Europe — the first transformation in the colonial pattern of power, subsequently managed by France, England and Germany. At that juncture, the invention of Southern Europe coincided, temporally and conceptually, with Orientalism. Mignolo looks to untangle the specific paradigm of Iberian and Spanish space in these constellations and what this mixed-race and Creole place, at once colonising and colonised, tells us about the colonial pattern of power.

Online platform
Tuesday, 20 June 2023 Sabatini Building, Auditorium and online platform

Traces of Violence. The German Empire in South-West Africa

— By Marcelo Brodsky

The twentieth century’s first genocide was committed by the German empire between 1904 and 1908 in South-West Africa — Namibia today. This genocide targeted Nama and Herero ethnic groups, Indigenous peoples from the region, within a context of European powers dividing Africa at the Berlin Conference (1884–1885). As in his previous works, Brodsky focuses on the way in which this crime against humanity is remembered and comprehended from specific research work and the recreation of photographic archives.

Online platform
Tuesday, 20 June 2023 Sabatini, Auditorium and online platform

Time and Friendship. A Conversation on Aníbal Quijano

— By Rita Segato and Walter Mignolo

A conversation on the life and thought of Aníbal Quijano, with whom both worked, and, more specifically, on his theory and practice of friendship. Quijano believed friendship holds a central place as a mode of doing in an intrinsic union between experience and thought. Setting out from this evocation, it is possible to examine other contemporary questions linked to the inheritance and validity of decolonial thought. In facing today’s geopolitical transformations, for instance the emergence of possible de-racialised capital as a result of China’s current economic dominance or before the climate crisis and global energy emergencies, there is a need to question the generativity of the emancipatory potential of Quijano’s decolonial project.

Online platform
Tuesday, 20 June 2023 Sabatini Building, Auditorium

A Dream Is Life

— A performance by the Teatro Sin Papeles company

El sueño es vida (A Dream Is Life) is a monologue by Thimbo Samb, produced by Teatro Sin Papeles and written and directed by Moisés Mato López. In the work, Samb touches on his migrant life path — dreams are life because they move feet and hands along the way and in tasks deemed necessary. The piece prompts us to read his experience in relation to La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), a baroque drama by Calderón de la Barca, thereby setting up a dialogue with the opposition and duality between free will and predestination, and between reality and dreams. Together with this performance, in conjunction with World Refugee Day (20 June), different awareness-raising activities against border violence will be held and implemented by Red Solidaria de Acogida (The Refuge Solidarity Network) and the Museo Situado assembly, spotlighting the southern border (Ceuta and Melilla) where tragic events such those in Tarajal on 6 February 2014 and in Melilla on 24 June 2022 set in motion a campaign against neglecting justice and repair.
Wednesday, 21 June 2023 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200 and online platform

Geography of Roots. An Epistemology of the Individual

— By Rita Segato

In this lecture, Rita Segato proposes an understanding of roots as the last space of resistance before the commodification and privatisation of space and territory, characteristic of neoliberalism. If the anthropological base of community is its affective, imaginary, symbolic, aesthetic and sensitive connection to a specific space and irreplaceable in its uniqueness, then the denomination of these links makes territory sacred and constitutes powerful and invisible lines of resistance to capital’s needs. Opposite the imperial logics of urban planning and rural colonisation, based on the de-characterisation and continuous mobilisation of spaces, and before the major migratory and ecological crises that are commonplace in the current context, Segato defends the geographies of the soul of Indigenous peoples, their micro-toponomy and non-replicability, as a trench and a bridge with the past which survives in community.

Online platform