Meet our Day 2 ‘Undoing’ panellists! Lucy Thurley
The gathering: decolonial practices in community performance
The presentation will outline how Black men participating in community performance groups in London claim spaces of knowledge production from an environment that is relentlessly hostile to them. Through collective, creative, theatre-based processes, participants in these groups draw on narratives to build potential/realties that are important to them, using an inductive approach that is grounded in a materialist analysis of lived reality. By bringing their performance practice and brother-to-brother work into conversation with the thought of Huey Newton and the creative practice of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, emerging research findings demonstrate how male practices of solidarity and care translate into community interventions. Working with The-Quiet-Room collective, Lucy Thurley is a mother, grandmother and community activist. She has worked as an artist/creator for 30 years alongside communitybased work and is involved in regular place-based political action and community organising. She is currently working with Black men as part of a research project.
Meet the Day 2 ‘Undoing’ panellists! Gitan Djeli @gitan_djeli
Reading from unrest in the nebulae (Duke University Press, 2026)
In unrest in the nebulae, Gitan Djeli wields prose poetry to archive five hundred years of exploitative colonization, ecocide, extinction, militarization and deportation, slavery, indenture, negotiated nationhood, postcolonial plantation structures, and apologist histories. Writing in a queer anticolonial poetics, and using lines of Kreol, Gitan Djeli mines the tension that emerges between colonialism and language, disarticulating the myth-making aesthetics of the colonial world. In a charge of resistance to the catastrophe of modernity, unrest in the nebulae takes seriously Sylvia Wynter’s invitation to engage “a new science of the word.”
Meet the Day 2 ‘Undoing’ panellists! Linda Schilling Cuellar @linda.schilling.cuellar
Environmental Witnessing
How can the embodied, place-based knowledge of sustenance-practice communities reshape environmental governance? In Chile’s Choapa Valley, communities engaged in small-scale farming, fishing, and pastoralism near the Los Pelambres copper mine produce forms of knowledge that challenge the epistemological foundations of conventional policymaking, particularly as exemplified by Environmental Impact Assessments. This dominant protocol privileges technocratic expertise, marginalizing situated and experiential ways of knowing that generate relational, more-than-human epistemologies grounded in ongoing engagement with specific ecologies.
In towns along a landscape forever altered by extractive operations, these practices function as epistemic resources that foreground sensory and intergenerational knowledge, complicating standardized notions of evidence and authority, which are themselves rooted in colonial and extractive logics of governance and nation-state building. Recognizing these knowledge systems as epistemically valid challenges these entrenched hierarchies of expertise to open space for more just and plural forms of environmental decision-making.
Meet the Day 2 ‘Undoing’ panellists! Flurina Thali @flurina.thali
(Re)Imagining the Menstrual Cycle in Academia – An Emerging Decolonising Epistemology
Menstrual stigma exerts an invisible power that shapes social and academic norms thereby excluding menstrual knowledge production and instead privileging abstract, disembodied ways of knowing. This session invites a radical menstrual imagination: a collective inquiry into what the cyclical body might become beyond colonial and patriarchal hegemonies. Drawing on Indigenous feminist scholarship by Cutcha Risling Baldy and the concept of sensuous knowledge by Minna Salami, I offer practices to recreate dominant frameworks. Through preliminary insights from my practice-based and movement-led PhD, I invite participants to radically sense the menstrual cycle as a site of knowledge, of creativity, and as a potentially decolonising epistemology.
Our full programme with schedule, abstracts and bios is now available! Scan the QR code and we’ll see you soon.
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Meet the Day 1 ‘Unlearning’ panellists! Ding Zhining @zhining0627
From “Spring Rolls” to “Chinternet”: The “Defocusing” and Reconstruction of Decolonial Discourse in Chinese Contemporary Art
Unlike postcolonial contexts defined by total subjugation, China’s uniqueness lies in its semi-colonial history and a formidable “socialist stratum” that replaced colonial structures as the dominant social foundation. I argue that decolonial debate in China is “pre-empted” by the state’s monopoly on anti-imperialist narratives, forcing contemporary art toward micro-dimensional knowledge production. Generational analysis reveals a shift from the “Western gaze” of early artists to Gen-Y “digital natives” using “Chinternet” logic to bypass identity politics. While embracing flat ontologies, these artists face a new “mediated coloniality” driven by algorithms, necessitating a re-evaluation of coloniality today.
Meet the Day 1 ‘Unlearning’ panellists! Georges Senga @georges_senga
‘Makuto Njo Dunia (Money Make the World), 2025’
The title of this project is inspired by the Dutch expression ‘Geld regeert de wereld’ and the Congolese Swahili expression ‘Makuta njo dunia’; with different nuances, the two expressions affirm that profit builds the world and the way societies live in and with it. Drawing on archival photos and descriptions of objects from collections such as the National Museum of World Cultures and the Rijksmuseum, Senga imagines the everyday use of these objects in conversation with artificial intelligence – creating models of the visually undocumented Dutch colonial presence in the Kingdom of Kongo between 1641 and 1648. Combining artificial intelligence and collage techniques with image processing software, Senga worked with painters from Dafen Village in Shenzhen, China – renowned for producing copies of masterworks – to render his digital models as a series of oil paintings. The result is a new identity that navigates between the existing aesthetics of Dutch ‘Golden Age’ painting, the errors of technology, and the appropriation of the works by human expertise.
📷 @lydiakatanga_
Meet the Day 1 ‘Unlearning’ panellists! Tania Gomez @tania.daniela.gp
From Land to Territory: Hugo Blanco and the Making of an Anticolonial Ecology in Peru
This paper traces the historical emergence of an anticolonial ecology through the political life of Peruvian peasant organiser Hugo Blanco Galdós (1934–2023). Against the tendency to treat indigenous and peasant territorial politics as either timeless ecological wisdom or a product of 1990s epistemological rupture, this thesis argues that territory emerged as a living concept-practice through a long, complex and unfinished learning process traceable across Blanco’s seven decades of organised struggle. The thesis proposes anticolonial ecology as a process of learning and reformulation rather than static tradition. Territory, understood archivally, is not rupture from land struggle but its sedimentation — political regeneration rooted in what endures when formulas stumble but life must still be cultivated.
Meet the Day 1 ‘Unlearning’ panellists! Luan Staphorst @luan.staphorst
Reading Beyond Decoloniality: A Speculative Critique of Decolonisation-as-Ontology in Relation to Literary Studies, Tricksterly Knowledge, and |xam Bushman Folklore
Although “decolonisation” is a signifier with a long and messy history that transcends both academic and popular domains of knowledge production, the decolonial turn of the past two decades is linked to a central tension between two ontological states. Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s (2007) discursive distinction between “coloniality” and “decoloniality” has become central reference points in thinking through the possibilities and limits of decolonisation as an incomplete project. That these two phenomena are grounded within an ontological conception is particularly clear from the full phraseology of Maldonado-Torres’s binary: the “(de)coloniality of being”.
In this paper I propose a speculative critique of this focus on decolonisation-as-ontology through turning towards literary studies broadly construed, and questions of reading which is traditionally the ambit of this discipline more specifically. I note “traditionally”, since questions of decolonisation in the field has, for the most part, shifted the focus away from how we read towards what is read. Decolonisation, in the context of literary studies, has largely meant the transformation of reading lists and a radical deconstruction of the “canon” – something to be welcomed.
Despite the importance of this intervention, I discuss a key text from the marginal, Southern, and indigenous African oral tradition of the |xam Bushman on ways of reading as basis for a novel conception of decolonisation-as-reading. I argue that the text, relayed by the 19th century |xam man ||kabbo, who was illiterate in the Western conception of the term, playfully deconstructs the Western notion of reading. His exploration of the |xam notion of !gwe could, I argue, serve as inspiration for a new way of regarding decolonisation as best pursued through playful, tricksterly reading that resists totalising ontological precepts.
As part of our ‘Reverberation from Afar’ film program (curated by Lee Kai Chung @ancient___soul & Katarzyna Lukasik @ka_luka_sik ) on Day 2, we will be screening a short film by Jane Jin Kaisen @kjanejin
Tales of One and Many Mountains, 2017
There is a sacred mountain that is divided between what is today North Korea and China. An invisible borderline cuts across its crater lake at the peak and splits the mountain in two. An active volcanic mountain, it is central to both Manchu and Korean cosmology. Following the rivers that emerge from it, Tale of One or Many Mountains is also a meditation on the vast and contested borderlands of Northeast Asia and enduring cross-border activities. Both encompassing and uncompromising, the mountain becomes a metaphor for the current state of affairs in the region.
