From Restitution to Repair
All Media
Keynote held within the framework of the conference From Restitution to Repair on September 10, 2022 at Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg, Berlin. The keynote is followed by a Q&A with Kader Attia.
The notion of the contemporary has been complicit with cultural practices that consume Earth and deny the relational worlds of others across the colonial divide. How can it be decolonized? Can contemporary art become a place of decolonial healing and foster concrete practices of repair? Rolando Vázquez calls for the need to overcome the contemporary with its embrace of novelty and separation from Earth. In this keynote speech, he addresses access to ways of transmission and understanding rather than access to objects, by engaging with forms of aesthetic and epistemic restitution and reemergence. How can restitution become a movement for the emergence of relational and aesthetic practices? How can epistemologies and aesthetics shift from forms of individual personhood to practices grounded in relations, practices of communalhood and earthhood?