Lecture Performance by Grada Kilomba

In this lecture performance Kilomba explores forms of Decolonizing Knowledge using printed work, writing exercises, performative narrative, and visual art, as forms of alternative knowledge production. Kilomba raises questions concerning the concepts of knowledge, race and gender: “What is acknowledged as knowledge? Whose knowledge is this? Who is acknowledged to produce knowledge?”
 
According to the artist “This project exposes not only the violence of classic knowledge production, but also how this violence is performed in academic, cultural and artistic spaces, which determine both who can speak and what we can speak about. To touch this colonial wound, she creates a hybrid space where the boundaries between the academic and the artistic languages confine, transforming the configurations of knowledge and power. Using a collage of her literary and visual work, Grada Kilomba initiates a dialogue of multiple narratives who speak, interrupt, and appropriate the ‘normal’ and continuous coloniality in which we reside. The audience is invited to participate, and to re-imagine the concept of knowledge anew, by opening new spaces for decolonial thinking.”

Entrance: Free


Grada Kilomba is a Portuguese writer and interdisciplinary artist, with origins in São Tomé e Príncipe and Angola. Her work draws on memory, trauma, race, and gender, and has been translated into several languages and staged internationally. In 2011, she was awarded as one of the “Most Inspiring Black Women In Europe” by BWIE. Her work is best known for bringing texts into performance, using a variety of formats, from print publications to staged readings to video installations, creating a hybrid space between the academic and artistic languages. She is the author of Plantation Memories. Episodes of Everyday Racism (Unrast 2008). She has been lecturing at several international universities, and last was a Professor at the Humboldt University, Berlin. In her recent works she explores forms of decolonizing knowledge and alternative formats of knowledge production.
 
Her work has been presented in renowned international venues of exhibition, theater and academia, such as the Vienna Secession Museum, Brussels Bozar Museum, London Maritime Museum, Centro International de Artes José de Guimarães, Kampnagel, Oslo Literature House, Maxim Gorki Theater, Berliner Festspiel Haus, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Theater Münchner Kammerspiel, Mostra International de Teatro de São Paulo, International Theater Treffen Berlin, University of Stockholm, University of Amsterdam, University of London, University of Accra, Universidade do Rio de Janeiro, University of Lagos, Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, among others. In September 2016, her work will be shown at 32nd Bienal de São Paulo.
 
This lecture performance is part of a series by Grada Kilomba titled “Decolonizing Knowledge – Performing Knowledge“©, written and produced during her artist / writer residency in Berlin, 2015-17.