Spirals: Colour Unearthed on Friday, 25th of June


The Centre for Curating the Archive is pleased to announce the next session of the Spirals virtual seminar series, titled Colour Unearthed.
Circulating ideas about art, art practise and archival engagement between two lively, dynamic, yet different global north and global south settings, the series draws Berlin based art practitioners, curators and scholars into a conversation with scholars, students and practitioners based in Cape Town.
We are excited to host Dr. Luiza Prado De o. Martins. Dr Martins is an artist, writer, and researcher whose work examines themes around fertility, reproduction, coloniality, gender, and race. Her doctoral dissertation approaches the control over fertility and reproduction as a foundational biopolitical gesture for the establishment of the colonial/modern gender system, theorizing the emergence of ‘technoecologies of birth control’ as a framework for observing—and resisting, disrupting, troubling—colonial domination. Her ongoing artistic research project, “A Topography of Excesses,” looks into encounters between human and plant beings within the context of herbalist reproductive medicine, approaching these practices as expressions of radical care. Since 2019, she has been developing a body of work that offers a critique of the racist concept of ‘overpopulation’ in the context of the current climate crisis as part of her Vilém Flusser residency with the project The Councils of the Pluriversal: Affective Temporalities of Reproduction and the Climate Crisis. She is part of the curatorial board of transmediale 2021, is a lecturer at the Institute for Art in Context at the University of the Arts Berlin, and an assistant professor and vice-director of the Centre for Other Worlds at the Lusófona University in Lisbon. She is a founding member of Decolonising Design.
Her talk is titled On the Colonial Histories of Colour. In it Dr Martins reflects on the fascinating series of essays exploring the colonial histories that attach to a set of vegetal and mineral based colours she is currently writing for Futuress Magazine. Access her articles here.
Building on Dr Martins' ongoing series, the session explores what the unearthing of the problematic and enduring histories of extraction and exploitation that certain colours reference, and their continued deployment as shades and palettes in a variety of creative media, may mean for thinking about colour as archival trace, art histories as material histories in the broad sense and the potential of transdisciplinary aesthetic research today.
We are delighted to have Dr Alirio Karina, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow based at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, as our discussant for this session.
Please join us via Zoom on 25 June 2021 between 3- 4:30pm (SAST) by following the Spirals Zoom link (Meeting ID: 945 6722 5495; Passcode: 254822).