Impossible Stories. A Symposium Organized by the UM, the Royal Academy of the Arts The Hague and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy
On Friday 20 May 2022 the Symposium “Impossible Stories: Linking Colonial Collections and Climate Change through Critical Fabulation” took place at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. It was organized by students of the MA Arts & Culture, specialization Arts and Heritage (cohort 2021-2022) in collaboration with Christian Ernsten (MACCH), Dirk-Jan Visser (Royal Academy of the Arts, The Hague) and Erik Wong (Rietveld Academy).
This symposium was organized in response to the online exhibition project Day Zero / Ground Zero Cape Town/ A Decolonial Walk hosted by Maastricht University Library. The making of this exhibition raised a number of key questions, for example: How do we re-use items from colonial collections without reproducing its silences? Or, who are we to tell these stories? And, which forms help to tell new stories?
The students – Myrthe Bleize, Milton Guerreiro Raimundo and Helene Huynh – designed a program with two rounds of 5 videos followed by a Decolonial Café discussion. As panellists they invited the following artists to join the discussion: Ola Hassanain, Georgie Brinkman, Paula Hernandez Mollison, Sophie Allerding, Natalia Sliwinska, Shana de Villier, Alexander Cromer, Michelle Piergoelam and Angela Jerardi, as well as curator Odin Essers and archaeologist Nick Shepherd. Hosted by Erik Wong, these panellists had an intimate exchange with the audience in the auditorium after showing their work. Questions they dealt with were, amongst others: How can we use colonial collections differently? How do we move away from Eurocentric way of world knowing? How does that impact our understanding of the climate crisis? What kind of forms or genres do we have available for to tell these stories? What is critical fabulation in this context? Finally, Rolando Vasquez responded by a reflection on the conversation at De Nieuwe Instituut.
For a recording of the symposium, please click here.