Silvia Franceschini discusses epistemic disobedience, through a review of decolonial thinkers, and connects with her curatorial research and experience. She focuses on the role of curatorial practices, ecologies of knowledge function, and what the practice of epistemic disobedience can irrupt.

From the Archive re-surfaces pieces that have previously been published as part of Urgent Pedagogies Issues.

Pavel Althamer, The Draftsmen’s Tent of Ghosts, part of The School of Kyiv— Kyiv Biennial 2015. Courtesy The School of Kyiv— Kyiv Biennial 2015.

Translating lifeworlds: curatorial practice and epistemic justice

Silvia Franceschini

“The curatorial as a regime of the management of aesthetics between the institutional and the artistic field is where the idea of epistemic disobedience might be fostered.”

It seems the time has come when it has become urgent to put curatorial practice on new conceptual grounds that interrogate and challenge the ethics of production, representations and dissemination of knowledge. Understanding the institution and the exhibition as places where, both historically and in the present, cognition and aesthetics have partaken and enacted frontiers and borders across different epistemological registers[1], poses challenging questions to the activity of cultural workers in the European environment. How can we foster new institutional paradigms and new alliances that respond to increasingly diasporic public spheres? How to challenge the raciality that hierarchizes knowledge and ways of producing knowledge in the majority of our institutions? How, as Dipesh Chackrabarty asks, can a cultural worker operating in highly antagonistic neocolonial arenas of struggle, be someone able to translate diverse and enchanted ways of world-making[2], embracing translation as a labor of mutual affection, unsettling universal claims and authoritarian positions? In the following text I try to recompose the legacy of a certain critical thinking that might help to envision the practice of curating as responsibility towards others. I have directed my attention to the work of artists, designers, theorists and curators who have critically challenged the hegemony of dominant disciplinary systems through a process of “epistemic disobedience”, a refusal of oppressive epistemic structures in order to envision social life, knowledge and institutions differently. The curatorial process can be a space to pose enabling questions for dealing with a world driven towards cultural conflicts created by the failure to recognize the different ways of knowing and relating by which people across the globe run their lives and provide meaning to their existence.


Epistemic Disobedience & Ecologies of Knowledge

The American Bengalese philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, drawing from Foucault’s theories of knowledge, defines “epistemic violence” as a means for building knowledge as a tool of power, together with the support and legitimization of dominance (Spivak 1988). The concept was further elaborated by the Argentinian semiotician Walter Mignolo in his well-known 2011 article “The Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing,” where he speaks of “epistemic disobedience” as a strategy of civil disobedience within processes of construction of knowledge (Mignolo 2011). In the same article, Mignolo develops the idea of “border thinking,” an epistemic framework to describe theories that sit at the very borders (if not outside) of the colonial matrix of power. The epistemic question in connection to the history of colonialism was raised for the first time in 1990 by Aníbal Quijano’s formulation of the concept of “coloniality” as the perpetuation of colonial institutions, forms and structures that are necessary to sustain modernity in the peripheries.

For Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, and other intellectuals and scholars from the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality group,[3] contestations over the exact sciences in the name of indigenous knowledge or alternative knowledge can be read as part of a broader challenge to the limitations of modernist thought, entangled as it is with capital. Decoloniality is a political and epistemic project that seeks to produce a radical and different knowledge, a “knowledge otherwise” (Mignolo 2000; Escobar 2007). The decolonial theorist de Sousa Santos speaks along these lines about an “epistemicide” that Europe committed in the colonies, and makes a plea for epistemic justice condemning the universalization of hegemonic knowledge. In his text “Beyond Abyssal Thinking” (2007) he proposes a type of knowledge that is against the homogenization and universalism of modern culture and in favor of plurality. An ecology of knowledges can only be based on the fact that all knowledge is always inter-knowledge, or knowledge based on the relational antagonism of ideas: “The ecology of knowledges is the principle of consistency underlying constellations of knowledges.”[4] According to de Sousa Santos, the transition toward a pluralism of knowledges will lead to the formulation of a counter-epistemology turnover that will challenge the idea of knowledge-as-regulation:

Knowledge-as-regulation knows through a trajectory that goes from ignorance, regarded as disorder, to knowledge, described as order, while knowledge-as-emancipation knows through a trajectory that leads from ignorance, conceived of as colonialism, to knowledge conceived as of solidarity. It is in the nature of the ecology of knowledges to establish itself through constant questioning and incomplete answers.[5]