Decolonial Spatial Strategies

We are a collective of students and alumni of the Raumstrategien (Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin). Over the past 3 years, this department has become home to artists, researchers, cultural practitioners from all over the world whose practices are focusing on different decolonial discourses. With the guidance of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Agudio, Nasan Tur, Paz Guevara, Lerato Shadi, and many others, we have been tackling different decolonial and anti-imperialist struggles through the lens of arts for two+ years. The time has come now for our ever-flowing rivers to be merging into one as they reach the body of our ocean. Many of us produced publications (along with performative elements) throughout, and at the end of our studies. These belong to the categories of artistic research, poetry, and they experiment with unconventional formats. The work on some publications are finished already, some of them are still in the making. Nonetheless, we have at least eight titles that we would like to apply with: books and journals that we want to present at Missread. And we expect 2-3 more by September. These are all self-published books that need opportunities like Missread to be able to reach a wider audience, because the privilege of a larger scale book distribution is not available to us as of yet. Our desire with the participation is to share decolonial knowledge and practices and find a like-minded community of emerging and politically active writers and publishers.

Manuela García Aldana, Rite of Passage, A Crossroad Where We Come Together, self-published, 2023 © Manuela García Aldana

A study of the sonic archive and the memory of ancestors. This is a part of her master's thesis in Raumstrategien in Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin.

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Lili Somogyi, In Search of Our Mothering. Towards peri-familial relationalities, self-published, 2023 © Lili Somogyi

This book is a long lingering research project that is revolving around different counter-hegemonic mothering practices and alternative networks of caretaking that can be found all over our world. I summon my childhood experiences and memories as a starting point, and sprouting from there, I extend and expand our understanding of the making of ourselves and our identities within gestational relationships.

By weaving together different voices and invoking practices from different localities and temporalities, I intend to challenge the dominant Western notion of the role and identity of what we call “mother”, so as to highlight different frameworks for motherhood and care work within our socio-political milieu, as well as to observe and enact already existing practices of structuring society(-ies), allowing ourselves to envision new ones.”

The text is accompanied by a sonic piece that is a weaving together of childhood aural memories and interview segments, poems and speeches by bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Maggie Nelson, Duke Ellington, and many more along with other sonic research material.

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Attentive Curiosity of notUnderstandingness

This is an eleven-chapter book in which Denis explores the current sociopolitical landscape through global phenomena such as images of the future, the apparatus of perspective, memory, images of the Other, consumerism, and others. His observations lead to the discovery of cracks in these phenomena, filled with obscurity, which produces hope for change. He calls it a glitch. The way Esakov constructs a dialogue between his text and the texts of other thinkers creates a space of togetherness. And, in my opinion, one of the important things about this book is the language. Denis writes poetically but also works with philosophical contexts and concepts. Between chapters, he inserts his poetry. He uses language itself as a glitch, as an opportunity to move beyond the limitations of that medium. His critical perspective on language, knowledge, power and social processes contributes to deepening this discourse.

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