SAVVY Contemporary: UNLEARNING THE GIVEN | Exercises in Demodernity and Decoloniality of Ideas and Knowledge

Lectures and Performances

SAVVY Contemporary invites you to the challenge of ‘unlearning the given’ and of deconstructing the ideologies and connotations which are eminent to what frames our societies today. The proposal is unlearning as an inherent part of learning or a process of carving out space for more ideas.

With a series of performative interventions, lectures and artistic contributions, we aim at articulating exercises of disobedience and indiscipline as an attempt and a means of decolonising the singularity of “knowledge”, challenging not only the level of the individual but also the systemic problems, and giving space to the possibility of a plurality of epistemologies.  We also aim at putting a spotlight on corpoliteracy as a form of learning, i.e. bodily knowledge, experientiality and performativity as means of unlearning, but also acquiring, enacting and disseminating knowledge. Along the very well known and resonating words and researches of Gayatri Spivak, we will focus on the fundamental process of “Unlearning one’s privileges as one’s loss”. Our privileges, whatever they may be in terms of race, class, nationality, or gender may prevent us from gaining a certain kind of Other knowledge: not simply information that we have not yet received, but the knowledge that we are not equipped to understand by reason of our social positions. To “unlearn” one's privilege is a vital step that marks the beginning of an ethical relation to the Other. On this journey, SAVVY Contemporary engages in what Paget Henry would call the poetic power of artistic practice to un-name and re-name, de-institute and re-institute selves, lower the volume of imposed voices and un-silence suppressed voices in an effort to resolve crisis of entrapment.

With lectures, performances and more by Ana Alenso, Bili Bidjoka, Nathalie Mba Bikoro, Blessed Love Sound, Nikhil Chopra, Camalo Gaskin, Natasha Ginwala, Barbad Golshiri, Natasha Kelly, Angela Melitopolous, Ida Momennejad, Marina Naprushkina / Office for Anti-Propaganda, Simon Njami,  Gabriel Rossell Santillán, Lerato Shadi, Margarita Tsomou, and many more.

Curated by Elena Agudio and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

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