The Coming South

This world order is made manifest not just in global geopolitics but also in the micro-environments of urban spaces, defining formal and informal relationships that range from those between nation states to those between local communities. Generations of political militants, intellectuals and activists have engaged with these issues - issues that are only exacerbated today, during the pandemic, and in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 which has demonstrated and worsened a number of other crises as the status quo of globalisation.

Questions are asked about the value of "western epistemologies" to the struggles of the subaltern, but what actually counts as a western epistemology, and what does this adjective - "western" - perhaps hide from view? What and who is "the South" today? Is there just one, or are there in fact a number of Souths that organise the hierarchy of the global division of labour and the struggles that are tied to it? And finally, what is solidarity in this context - is it a mere declaration of intent, or can it be sustained as a long-term sharing of transformative social objectives that resist the current state of affairs? The conference brings together a range of experiences and reflections to address these questions.

Video documentation

Struggles: Frameworks for Theory & Practice
Thursday 17 December 2020

Art Against Imperialism, Yesterday and Today
by Tings Chak

From Havana to Jakarta, this presentation looks at how art and culture have been central to the struggles for national liberation. As the Third World project came into being, cultural organisations such as Cuba’s OSPAAAL and Indonesia’s Lekra emerged to bring expressions to the people’s aspirations. They sought to build an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial culture that was at the same time internationalist. Sharing experiences from the Anti-Imperialist Poster Exhibitions – co-curated by the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research during times of CoronaShock – we find threads of history in the struggles of the present that help guide us into the future.

The End of Radicalism: African Socialism and the Struggle for Anti-Imperialist Sovereignty
by Kevin Ochieng Okoth

With this paper Kevin Ochieng Okoth examines how African socialism descended into a re-articulation of a subservient capitalism. Drawing on the histories of left opposition to its vision of a harmonious social equilibrium based on African traditions, and its focus on export-oriented national development, it examines the role that ‘the end of radicalism’ played in enabling the transition to the neo-colonial state. The paper concludes by interrogating the ways in which an African Marxist tradition can help us better understand the ‘states without nations’ that emerged after independence, and their implications for our theorisation of sovereignty in the context of imperialism today.

Reparation Architecture
by Paulo Tavares

In this talk I want to explore recent architectural and curatorial projects to speculate on the potential concept of “reparation architecture.” Architecture that seeks to redress structural injustices is generally labelled “social architecture.” Arguably the invention of this concept of the social, within which architectural knowledge has been instrumental, is the product of modern-colonial frameworks defined along class-based and racialized categories that objectify subalternized communities as sites of study and intervention – the “underdeveloped,” the “backward,” the “uncivilized,” the “primitive.” Dwelling on the concept of reparation may open new visions for spatial practices outside the managerial, disciplinary, positivist frame that still hunts architecture, a field of knowledge historically grounded on the ideology that its practice is inherently “good,” working for beautification, betterment, improvement, civilization, progress, development. Towards a concept of “reparation architecture” can enable spatial practices to be conceived as redressing and redrawing social, historic and political bounds beyond charity, help, state patronage, philanthropy and humanitarianism.

De/Exoticisations: Tourists, Refugees, Capital
Friday 18 December 2020

Geographies of Freedom + Q&A
by Miguel Peres dos Santos

The Geographies of Freedom research project along the research meetings, public presentations, an installation by Jabu Arnell and several publications, consists also of an artistic research video essay that goes by the same name. Combining archival footage with contemporary imagery shot in Curaçao and The Netherlands, the film leads us throe colonial narratives of dutch petrochemical imperialism and its relation to notions of freedom. By realigning temporal perceptions, the film proposes reflections on the systems of petrocolonial imperialism and its relation with notions of colonialism. Navigating throe archival footage of cultural, socio-economical and political repression, the film proposes reflections on political, environmental and sociological issues. This Artistic Research video essay was funded by the Mondriaan Fund, and made possible with the kind support of Het Nieuwe Instituut.

The Artworld. A Tourist Guide
by Yaiza Hernández Velázquez

Yaiza Hernández Velázquez's paper starts by offering an overview of the ubiquitous but differently inflected claims that since 1989, have been made on the basis of an "artworld" understood as a global entity. While some of the initial euphoria has been blunted by history, the interconnectedness of the biennial circuit and art market transactions continues to offer what for some is merely a mirage of the unfulfilled promise of a "borderless" capitalist world and for others a network that offers at least the potential for transnational solidarities. By taking some of this literature more seriously than it might have been intended, I will try to argue that we find in the tourist resort a better figure through which to understand the way in which the "artworld" has negotiated its global relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A Lagoon of Paradoxes and Struggles
by Marco Baravalle

Venice is a city of paradoxes, a Southern European wonder governed by the Northern League party. Once gateway to the East, now chief town of a region where a certain Austro-Hungarian nostalgia is still perceptible. Venice emptied twice, first of its residents by over-tourism, now of tourists by the pandemic. The lagoon is the strange background where mammoth dams against the high tide intersect a mammoth corruption scandal and the threat of climate change. Venice and its crises, Venice and its struggles: against big ships, for housing rights, for the right to the city.

Situated Knowledges of Worldmaking in the Ghostly Present Tense
by Athena Athanasiou

At the heart of this inquiry lies a critical engagement with the present that might work to performatively instate another possibility for the question of the South (or, the South as question) at a moment marked by the corporatization and the securitization of public space through migrant disposability and the necropolitical distribution of capital, resources, and bodies. Affirming the embodied situatedness of critical epistemologies, I ask how criticality maps out trails of historical and political response-ability through which alternative imaginaries are potentially put forward. Involving ex-centric temporalities of unending crises and dispossessed political subjectivities of resisting (in) the present, criticality has thoroughgoing implications for transfiguring the present’s no longer and yet-to-come.

Revolutions: Prospects in Counter-Revolutionary Times
Saturday 19 December 2020

Many-Worlds Rising
by Jonas Staal

The Global South stands not only as a terrain of brutal extraction, but also as a site of resistance where the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) declared its struggle for a “world of many worlds.” The EZLN’s definition of a “Fourth World War” against neoliberalism (after WWI and II, and the Cold War), established a planetary front against a system that The Red Nation has described as fundamentally “anti-life.” From the EZLN to the Kurdish revolution in Rojava, the worldings of the South embody a non-proprietary relation to our many-worlds that have become just as important to guide popular movements in the Global North. Facing the increasing power of the trillion-dollar company and the nationalist international, how are these struggles shaping the progressive internationals, planetary commonisms and transnational terrestrial alliances we so desperately need? And what is the role of art and cultural work in helping to shape collective imaginaries to agitate and mobilize for our many-worlds to overcome?

What Does it Mean to Produce Knowledge From Below?
by Vijay Prashad

"At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research we work with a method to amplify the voices of our movements, to elaborate theory out of the theory and praxis of our movements. The general method is derived from the Marxist tradition of building theory from struggle."

Expected Futures. The Right to Imagine
by Françoise Vergès 

The Coming South, or the coming transformation which is the very idea of the future, the right to imagine a path for a good life and reviving the idea of the human. Rien n’est écrit d’avance, (Nothing is written in advance) must be the principle for action. Reviving the idea of the human challenges the normalized authority to deploy total violence upon indigenous peoples, women, workers and peasants, sex workers, queer and trans peoples; it challenges an idea of the future captured by technology, the rhetoric of catastrophism and of green capitalism. It means smashing the patriarchy, holding together the struggles of depatriarchalization and decolonization, antiracism, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism.