12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

Moses März lives and works in Berlin, DE

My interest in mapmaking developed out of the collective editorial work of the Chimurenga Chronic—a Pan-African literary magazine based in Cape Town, South Africa—and an engagement with Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of relation. Translating texts into lines, images, and quotations allows me to combine elements of storytelling with an undisciplined research practice and inclusionary mode of sharing knowledge. In a series of Chimurenga projects, such as On Circulations and the African Imagination of a Borderless World (2018) and Imagi-Nation Nwar (2021), we used this method to trace individual and collective movements of the Black radical tradition which are committed to alternative forms of community outside a Euroliberal paradigm. In terms of method, this kind of mapping seeks to replace a modern segregational worldview marked by the establishment of impermeable categories, genres, and borders with a relational perspective inspired by non-Western ontologies that consider entities as constituted by the relations that bind them to one another. For Glissant, the relational imagination is politically marked by a sensibility for “all the differences in the world” and a commitment to the protection of this radical diversity. My maps build on this proposition by asking in what ways this kind of relationality might serve as a theoretical common ground for decolonial struggles against racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and environmental destruction.

The series of maps shown at the 12th Berlin Biennale focus on the intersecting histories of these movements in and around the city of Berlin. They chart the continuities and changes shaping the German variant of what decolonial scholars call the “coloniality of power” and the diverse alliance of forces resisting it.

Moses März

Exhibitions

Elsa M’bala + Moses März: im*possible bodies, 2019, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt/Main (DE)

Imagining a Politics of Relation: Glissant’s Border Thought and the German Border, 2019, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 56, University of Pretoria, Pretoria (ZA)

On Circulations and the African Imagination of a Borderless World, 2018, Cartography Editor, special issue of the Chimurenga Chronic, Manifesta 12: The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Coexistence, Manifesta – The European Nomadic Biennial, Palermo (IT)

Berlin-Kapstadt, 2018, Editor, inaugural issue of Mittel und Zweck, published as outreach project of the RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms, Berlin (DE)

Who Killed Kabila I, 2017, Cartography Editor, exhibition catalogue as part of Cosmopolis #1 by Le centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou, Paris (FR)