The people of Brandfort were Mam’ Winnie’s contemporaries who shared generational time, and some were co-contemporaries who lived through this temporal moment across different generations. They witnessed how she transformed a small town by creating a mobile clinic in her garage, a feeding scheme through Operation Hunger, a crèche for children, Brandfort’s very first high school and, crucially, how she converted a small shelf in her house into a public library. We learn about how she connects Brandfort with her resourceful friends. Social work is a political project not simply a vocation. These moments of radical activity are made possible by many hands, and women in particular who conscript themselves voluntarily into carrying the burden of Mam’ Winnie’s banishment. Kabomo Mota tells us that there were constant raids, threats of imprisonment and complete destruction of lives for those who worked and lived in close community with her. These conditions of terror deter some members of the community but there are people who chose to walk through the fire with her. Mam’ Winnie is never truly alone as official photographs tend to show us

In the sense that my maps mostly emerge out of shared interests and an exchange of research material, they are not primarily an expression of my personal preoccupations, but rather a combination or collage of the collective concerns, stories, and visions shaping the ‘community of ethical views’ of which I am part. The practice of writing about this kind of work for an academic journal, as I do here, is a deliberate decision to mediate between the artistic modes of research developed by this community, on the one hand, and established forms of disciplinary knowledge production, on the other one, in the hope of fostering more fruitful collaborations between them. 

at the onset of my research, I was less interested in engaging with the aesthetic innovations brought about by surrealist art than in the commitment to break with the idea of an autonomous social sphere of ‘art’ and to turn art into an everyday living practice instead (Emmanuely 2017: 30). It was this socio-politically committed perception of the artist or the poet that, in my view, had turned the term ‘surrealist’ into a rallying term that allowed for artists and activists to work together on specific issues, such as the exhibition La vérité sur les colonies (The Truth about the Colonies), which countered the Paris Colonial Exhibition of 1931 (Egger 2023). In my readings, the project was variably attributed to surrealist (Egger 2023) or Black diasporic activists in Paris (Edwards 2003: 373). The surrealist sensibility to the invisible, such as dreams or spiritual forces, and its resistance to fascism and colonialism provided a common ground for its adherents to connect to artists and political activists across national, linguistic, and continental boundaries. In that sense, it struck me as reminiscent of the role played by the term ‘decolonial’ in the early 21^st century. Similar to ‘decolonial’ initiatives, it seems to me less productive to discuss the virtue of ‘surrealism’ in abstract conceptual terms than to consider the concretepractices, interventions, and collaborations to which it gave rise. The term ‘surrealist’ seems to have offered a shared language to develop a critique of the European imperial project as well as a strategy to create alternative communities of resistance.

This diagrammatic drawing is a proposal for a way in which the colonial

entanglements of the Swiss town of Fribourg may be visualized from a decolonial

perspective. The red circular spots on the base layer of the city map of Fribourg

indicate stops of a guided tour organized by Conseye Pheidairale in 2021.

The red lines moving up from these spots refer to the names of concrete

contemporary and historic sites and buildings in Fribourg. Connected to these

locations, the drawing traces historical movements, initiatives and figures that are

directly and indirectly related to the history of slavery and (neo)colonialism in black

crayon. Expanding the view from local to national history, the grey pencil lines

indicate representative actors of Swiss colonial entanglements. The unnamed lines

branching off the main vertical lines in this section of the map, emphasize the

incomplete, tentative and exemplary nature of the overall constellation.The straightlined,

overarching structure at the top of the map stands for the connection between

the main actors contributing to the stability of the overall colonial infrastructure.The

two big black arrows on the top left and right and indicate additional dimensions of

this architecture, namely the internal dynamic of producing racialized permanent

minorities within the Swiss nation-state, and the external dynamic of a Pan-European

colonial alliance, in which Switzerland played the role of a ‘secret’ or ‘secondary

empire’ according to critical studies.

A main intention behind this drawing is to connect and place information on

the same page, that tends to be kept apart by administrative boundaries and

boundaries of disciplinary knowledge production: local and national, missionary and

economic history, official and unofficial colonial entanglements. By privileging a

relational perspective in each case, the map seeks to work against an irrelational way

of thinking and being in the world, as is it expressed in the prevalent opinion that

Switzerland had nothing to do with slavery and colonialism.

“It began as a bond based on all those things we hoped to protect in the other, in the face of all that would inevitably take aim at us. Taking cover, taking shelter to create something in concert, as a promise towards a betrayal of faith in the conventions of authenticity and singularity of the solo artist. It was then that we ‘consented not to be a single being’, as Fred Moten later writes, to help each other flourish and with that, our skills, our gifts, our unskilled selves, our failings or fears of failing, our gifted or ungifted selves were combined into something other than those categorical parts. It began with the clarity that the unimaginable was going to happen, and we had better have registers and antennae of premonition and prediction together, as apart we might just collapse."

- The Department of Xenogenesis, Anjalika Sagar, 2023

FESTVAL BELLUARD

CHIMURENGA

HKW 

DIFFICULT COLLABORATION

EXC TEMP FU

DIFFICULT COLLABORATION

The idea that all beings and things in the universe, visible and invisible, are connected, is a core theme in African literature from the pharaonic period to the end of the feudal period. African culture is not alone in positing connections between the cosmic, divine, human and natural aspects of reality. But it gives the concept of connectedness a distinctive stamp by translating these multivalent ties into close family bonds. 

- Eloquence of the Scribes 

Culture is a process, not an event. The promotion of culture requires a regular process, not a haphazard scattering of spastic shows. The development of culture depends on a steady, sustained series of supportive activities whose primary quality is not a spectacular extravagance but a calm continuity. 

In that sense culture has much in common with all of life: human life, the life of beasts, the life of forrest and field plants. For most of the vital, life-sustaining processes are steady, constant, 

unspectacular. Sometimes, they’re so unspectacular the careless vision may miss them altogether. Consider the steady flow of your own thought waves. Consider breathing. Consider the heart’s beating. These are life happenings of incalculable importance, but their style is so quiet, so cool, that a lot of the time we may not really be aware of them. In fact, when they force themselves spectacularly upon our attention, that is a sign of danger, an indication that the chain of life is snapping. 

That’s why asthmatic breathing is a spectacular sound show: healthy breathing is like nothing happening at all. The heart requires a flashy rhythm only when it’s on the verge of failure; the healthy heart call no attention to itself. It simply does its steady, lifelong work. 

 - The Festival Syndrome

Each thing that goes away returns and nothing in the end is lost. The great friend throws all things apart and brings all things together again. That is the way everything goes and turns round. That is how all living things come back after long absences, and in the whole great world all things are living things.

– Fragments