Descolonizando o Conhecimento: uma Palestra-Performance de Grada Kilomba

06/March, from 4 to 6PM | Location: CCSP – Centro Cultural São Paulo (São Paulo Cultural Center)

In this lecture performance Grada 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?” 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, 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.

Grada Kilomba is a portuguese writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist. Her work draws on gender, race, trauma and memory, and has been translated into several languages and published in international anthologies, magazines, and journals as well as staged internationally. Her work is best known for using a variety of formats, from print publications to staged readings and performance, combining both academic and lyrical narrative creating a new literary style.

In 2011, she was awarded as one of the “Most Inspiring Black Women in Europe” by BWIE, due to her writings and performative readings. She is the co-editor of “Mythen, Masken and Subjekte” (2005), an anthology on Critical Whiteness; and the author of “Plantation Memories”, a compilation of episodes of everyday racism written in the form of short psychoanalytical stories, first released at the International Literature Festival (2008), at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele and adapted into a staged reading at the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Berlin (2013).

Kilomba has been lecturing at several international universities and last was a Guest Professor for Gender Studies at the Humboldt University, Berlin. Currently she is a Writer/ Artist in Residence in Berlin where she is developing a series of projects on “Decolonizing Knowledge – Performing Knowledge” (2015 -2017), using writing, performative narrative, and visual art, as forms of alternative knowledge production.

Visit: http://gradakilomba.com