Images of Struggle / Decoloniality (2011)

Following the thoughts of Dalida Benfield (USA), Nadia Granados (Colombia), Marina Grzinic (Slovenia), Fabiano Kueva (Ecuador), Walter Mignolo (Argentina, USA), José Alejandro Restrepo (Colombia), Fabian Esteban Alvarez Rojas (Colombia), Javier Romero (Bolivia), Alex Schlenker (Ecuador) and Camilo Vargas (Colombia) the video-film Images of struggle/Decoloniality refers to explicit and implicit antagonisms and differences in global capitalism. “Underdevelopment,” which is today the main matrix of coloniality, receives harsh criticism. “Underdevelopment” indicates the colonial policy for undermining new paradigms of transforming the social and political space. What we call democracy is actually a state of emergency. We can achieve a utopia today but it is called globalization, it is called late capitalism. Therefore it is a kind of failure all around us and less thoughts of resistance or a critical action based on utopia! In the work it is a lot of confrontations and parallels in between Latin America and former Eastern Europe. At the core of the video film is the point of the instrumentalization of life and resistance, with questioning struggle and solutions to the neoliberal global capitalist exploitations. Also in the work each of listed names take a clear performative position, they talk to the audience that is coming to listen to them, they provoke the audience and also they talk about a possible political situation to be identified.

The video-film is in the last instance a very concrete document how to perform a political thinking; this performing is connected with a complex lesson (literally, we gave lectures/lessons, as mostly of those listed up were invited to talk in a symposium on decoloniality and art at the University of Bogota, Columbia). The participants (we) reflect at the same time on our own positions in relation to those who “are left and / or forced to die.” This is due to the global world that constantly talks about a global situation without borders, but all around we see: poverty, control, misery, war, instrumentalization. The world is global but at the same time, as Europe itself, without memory, history! The clear point in the video is given when one of the speakers provoked (intentionally) by Marina Grzinic with the question of a today situation that witnesses a passage from a nation-State to war-State, as imperial formation in the global world, answers in such a way: “The very idea of an solution is a conceptual, epistemological and language based error.” This is a key point as it is with this point that we question the im/possibility on one side and visibility and power, on the other. The video film is a visibility of the im/possibility; so we find ourselves at the crossroads of a terrible situation that is at once that of “the speed of light (technology)” AND “the illegal products of capitalism. ” The products are we, you, me, us and the world.

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