Lecture "Traces of Violence. The German Empire in South West Africa" by Marcelo Brodsky at MNCARS
June 17, 2023
The Aníbal Quijano Chair is a space of thought which pays homage to the memory of the great Peruvian thinker, a critic of the coloniality of power, and seeks to open a channel of collective reflection-action to incorporate it into the multiple viewpoints that today discover modernity deprived of its primal pledges.
The programme gets under way with a lecture by Walter Mignolo — one of the great decolonial thinkers, and a friend and successor of Quijano’s thought — with respect to the myriad dimensions of coloniality within the context of Spain. It continues with an encounter with photographer Marcelo Brodsky on the twentieth century’s forgotten holocausts and the relationship between the image and the idea of south, and a conversation between Mignolo and Rita Segato in relation to the validity of Quijano’s thinking in the present day. Furthermore, in conjunction with World Refugee Day, the Teatro Sin Papeles company presents the performance El sueño es vida (A Dream Is Life). The Chair concludes with another master lecture, this time delivered by curator Rita Segato as she discusses her latest research project concerning roots and their consequences.
The twentieth century’s first genocide was committed by the German empire between 1904 and 1908 in South-West Africa — Namibia today. This genocide targeted Nama and Herero ethnic groups, Indigenous peoples from the region, within a context of European powers dividing Africa at the Berlin Conference (1884–1885). As in his previous works, Brodsky focuses on the way in which this crime against humanity is remembered and comprehended from specific research work and the recreation of photographic archives.
Source: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia