LOST LOVER is a video program curated by South-African Lara Koseff, which features works by emerging and established African artists, exploring an allegory of desire for a new reality, romantic, political or social. In addition to the original program is a dedicated video installation by Grada Kilomba, titled Illusions Vol. II, Oedipus (2018), which revisits Greek mythology using the African oral and performative tradition of storytelling.

In this talk, which gathers spokenword artist and postcolonial scholar Raquel Lima and lecturer and art scholar Luciana Lima, we wish to address the discursive and artistic potentiality of desire to decolonize representation politics, denaturalize hegemonic narratives and power structures that perpetuate colonial and patriarchal violence.

PROGRAM

17:00 Opening

17:15 Raquel Lima (spokenword performance and talk): Orature and Performance of bodies-archive and narrative-bodies in contexts of African diaspora.

17:45 Luciana Lima (talk): From the obstructions of the past to the deconstructions of colonized memory through Grada Kilomba's work Illusions Vol. II Oedipus

18:15 Roudtable discussion moderated by Alexandra Balona

19:00 Closing remarks

RAQUEL LIMA: Orature and Performance of bodies-archive and narrative-bodies in African diaspora contexts.

Considering orature as a body of knowledge generated in the context of epistemic struggle - the struggle for the preservation of identities and memory facing the hegemony of European languages, the genocide of bodies and the epistemicide of languages and knowledge - and starting from history as a performance - made up of transformations of lived experience into narratives and therefore a universal and everyday human phenomenon - I propose alternative representations that challenge or make visible the colonial legacies, namely, the racial, ethnic, gender and class abyssalities that persist in the world today. I formulate the concepts of 'archive-bodies' and 'narrative-bodies' to suggest that observing everyday rituals, memorialistic manifestations, and the dynamization of 'spaces of orature and performance' - street art, rap, poetry slam, spokenword, etc. - are essential for understanding historical seeds of resistance in different communities and countries, with special emphasis on African diaspora contexts.

Raquel Lima is a poet, spoken word artist and art educator. She has a degree in Arts Studies, with a specialization in Performative Arts, and she is a PhD Student in Postcolonialisms and Global Citizenship at the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra. Her research is centered on orature, slavery and afrodiasporic movements. She is a member of the research project Feminisms and Sexual and Gender Dissidence in the Global South of the University of Lisbon.

LUCIANA LIMA From the obstructions of the past to the deconstructions of colonized memory through Grada Kilomba's work Illusions Vol. II Oedipus

For the first time in Porto, the multidisciplinary artist Grada Kilomba exhibits her most recent work Illusions Vol.II Oedipus. I wish to propose a reading of this work in the context of postcolonialism, focusing on the importance of rewriting history and the deconstruction of the interpretive repertoires that stigmatize peoples and cultures. I will conduct this reading, also supported by the results of the research I have conducted with African university students in Brazil and Portugal, for which I will present some examples of their narratives on discrimination in the "Land of the Other." Finally, I will reflect on the day-to-day violence and oppression inherent in twenty-first century colonialism, and how Kilomba's work reflects on these issues.

Luciana Lima was born in Brazil, and she has been based in Portugal since 2014. Trained in different areas: pedagogy, psychology, psychoanalysis and, recently, history and art criticism, she has been an university teacher since 2004. With a doctoral thesis on Psychology entitled "To Study and Circulate between (in) surmountable borders: mobility of Cape Verdean women who study engineering in Portugal" (2018), she is assistant professor and researcher at the Escola Superior de Media Artes e Design, Vila do Conde. Her main research interests are migrations from Africans to Global North, lusophony, gender and history, and design criticism.

Curator and moderator:

Alexandra Balona