Panel within the framework of the conference Imperial Ecologies as part of the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art on June 23, 2022 at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum der Gegenwart – Berlin.
Whose dream are we dreaming? Whose living images are we? How do we deal with the legacies of colonialism and imperialism when they operate below the threshold of the unconscious? At the intersection of political science, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, anthropology, and photography, artist Etinosa Yvonne, sociologist Joseph Tonda, and anthropologist Stéfania Pandolfo will discuss the continuing colonial hold on the imaginary—and by proxy on the material and immaterial lives of contemporary subjects—while addressing possible strategies for decolonizing and regaining autonomy. We can only construct our world if we are first able to reappropriate our ability to produce thought from our dreams of that world. And yet its sovereignty is undermined by the impossibility of dreaming, generated first by colonialism and today by the automated performativity produced by 24/7 capitalist computer systems.