The Lake Before the Sun Was Born: Abolition and Solidarity

The Lake Before the Sun Was Born: Abolition and Solidarity

Departing from the exhibition Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter and its underpinning by the Aymara nation’s abolitionist traditions and their inseparability from Black radical traditions, this event featured curator and educator Thiago De Paula Souza in conversation with anarcho-feminist collective Mujeres Creando and writer, DJ and cultural producer Sonia M. Garcia. The conversation expanded on solidarity among Indigenous and Black people and other groups who experience oppression under colonial legacies across the world, and abolition in relation to their respective practices as curators, researchers and activists.

Programmed by Ignota Books and Auto Italia in cooperation with NTS Radio and held 2-4 November 2021. This programme was made possible with the support of Goethe Institut London and Canada House. All profits from tickets were donated to Land In Our Names, a grassroots Black-led collective committed to reparations in Britain by connecting land and climate justice with racial justice.

Mujeres Creando is a social anarcho-feminist movement created in 1991 in La Paz, Bolivia. It is comprised of women of different cultural, social, and ethnic backgrounds as well as of different sexual orientations and explores creativity as an instrument of struggle for social change. Mujeres Creando does not consider the State as the ultimate target and focus of their political activity but instead proposes the reclamation of public space as the site of political action and transformation. In this sense, the group does not only struggle for women’s rights or issues that affect women but also against other problems that affect society. The ways of expression of Mujeres Creando are graffiti, public interventions (performances), ongoing public debates and other forms of public action, along with a constant presence in the streets to make their voice heard and thus propose and attempt to achieve permanent transformation. Since its beginnings, the group has been part of international gatherings, dialoguing with different feminist tendencies and thus building its ideological identity within autonomous feminism, in contrast, and connection with global struggles.

Sonia M. Garcia is a Quechua-descendant writer, DJ and cultural producer based in Milan. She is the co-founder of the club night SAYRI, aiming to deconstruct the term ‘latinidad’ and create a space for queer Latinx celebration and representation for the Black and Indigenous diaspora from Abya Yala in Italy. She is interested in contemporary Quechua-Aymaran sound practices, abolition and Quechua cosmogony and has previously written about Elysia Crampton’s work for Flash Art.

Thiago de Paula Souza lives and works in Taboão da Serra, district of São Paulo. He is a curator and educator interested in different configurations of knowledge and power that enable contradictions as well as in art and education’s ability to re-elaborate the past and produce new ethical codes that help us imagine a world where violence is no longer its foundation. De Paula Souza co-curated the 3rd edition of Frestas – Triennial of Arts (Sesc – SP), in Sorocaba, São Paulo. In 2018-2019 he participated in the Basis Voor Actuele Kunst (BAK) post-academic Fellowship Program and curated the exhibition, Tony Cokes: To Live as Equals. With curator Gabi Ngcobo, De Paula Souza created the platform I’ve seen your face before, as part of the project Echoes of South Atlantic for the Goethe Institut, and served on the curatorial team of the 10th Berlin Biennale, We don’t need another hero. Thiago de Paula Souza is a Ph.D. Candidate at HDK-Valand at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and a 58th Carnegie International advisor.

Programmed by Ignota Books and Auto Italia in cooperation with NTS Radio. The programme has been made possible with the support of Goethe Institut London and Canada House.

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