What is the political potentiality of artistic research? What are the discerning differences in the currency of care in artistic practices and in collaborative strategies of sharing when artistic research is reoriented from the perspectives of colonial histories and from the global south? What are the measures of dare in the relationship between praxis and poiesis? Could propositions from decolonial theories offer a revitalisation of artistic research that attends to epistemologies that have been neglected or repressed in western art practices.
In this presentation I describe the connections between artistic research and decolonial strategies by proposing methods that facilitate epistemic disobedience, experimentation and counter-institutionalised artistic forms. As a film practitioner and researcher, I am interested in making visible elided histories and exposing marginal or oppressed experiences. Working with archives is one of the tactical moves in a decolonial strategy – a political praxis-poesis to reclaim certain images and positions that would otherwise not be visible.
I will ground these propositions in my recent project developed as a trilogy on race, gender and sexuality; sourced from a single institutional archive to reflect processes of negotiating what Walter Mignolo describes as aesthesis – in a movement between representation and enunciation.