The DFG Research Training Group “Knowledge in the Arts” invites within the framework of the lecture series "Violence in the Arts" to:

Invisible knowledge – disrupting the colonial project with methodologies of the crossroads –  Workshop with Pêdra Costa 
(in English)

05.02.2019, 2pm - 5pm
Universität der Künste Berlin
Einsteinufer 43-53
Room 203
10823 Berlin

Limited number of participants.
Information about the registration will be announced.

How could something you do not know touch you? What effect(s) can knowledges evoke when they appear invisible to you? Where to start to transform failure into creative force(s), in connection with mixed and forgotten ancestries?

The workshop takes Pêdra Costa’s Southern Butthole Manifesto as point of departure to critically address how the colonial project promotes annihilation and extinction of knowledge. In the workshop, Pêdra Costa will elaborate on ‘Invisible Knowledge’ used in the performance on February 4, 2019, and comes back to artistic strategies including post-porn aesthetics, queer politics and the methodology of the crossroads, through hers own body. The aim is to both convey and confuse the usage of such strategies vis-à-vis the participants, while situating them in the context of Macumba, in back and forth motions from Pêdra Costa's day-to-day queer life experiences of decolonial resistances from Brazil to Western Europe.
The methodology of the crossroads, which informs hers practice will be shared to alleviate opposition, and to enable empowerment of marginalized communities. Pêdra Costa asks, how the colonial break-down could conjure non-westernized knowledge (i.e., the epistemicide). The workshop critically questions the base of western knowledge-making inherent in Eurocentric traditions. It also reflects on individual responsibility in holding on to such specific systems of knowledge production and circulation, which are partly responsible for the repetition and reproduction of violence. If the performance de_colon_isation part V is to reveal individual privileges and daily behaviours towards violence, the workshop shall equally be a possibility to create an in-depth and critical address about how knowledge is embodied on and via academic agendas – what are their prevalent structures? And what kind of expectations do normalized regimes of knowledge cause? Who can claim the recognition of knowledge as such? Whose voices are to be heard and listened to (and whose are not)? How to embody knowledges?
Furthermore, the artist will provide performative and discursive tools to ‘exorcise the individualistic self’ and to rethink identity politics in the lines of non-binary relations of radical caring. Showing some videos, Pêdra Costa will introduce hers decolonial strategies as pedagogical approach. She will share hers spiritual heritage of the Macumba, as potential creative force(s) of self-empowerment. Acknowledging that invisible knowledge consists of a process of remembering the forgotten and almost-destroyed knowledges, also in Europe, the artist presents this remembrance as a means to mobilize creative and reparative impulses to spin pain into powerful transformation. Along these lines, the workshop invites each and everyone to share and reflect on the creative power of their own knowledges.

Pêdra Costa about the de_colon_isation performance series:
https://vimeo.com/228207409

Pêdra Costa is a Brazilian Performance Artist and Anthropologist based between Vienna and Berlin and working with queer artists internationally. Hers work is informed by the aesthetics of post-porn and an investigation about anti-colonial concepts. Exhibitions include Multitud Marica: Activaciones de archivos sexo-disidentes en América Latina, Santiago de Chile 2017 (Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende); QUEER ENCOUNTERS_VIENNA TRANS LA, Los Angeles 2017 (CalArts School of Art); WELT KOMPAKT?, Vienna 2017 (frei_raum Q21, MuseumsQuartier); Millionaires Can Be Trans // You Are So Brave, Berlin 2015 (Schwules Museum); Oral Museum of the Revolution, Barcelona 2013 (MACBA); Caos e Efeito, São Paulo 2011 (Itaú Cultural).

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If you have any questions please contact:
Juana Awad
Graduiertenkolleg „Das Wissen der Künste”, UdK Berlin
Einsteinufer 43–53, Raum 214, 10587 Berlin
E-mail: j.awad@udk-berlin.de
www.udk-berlin.de/graduiertenkolleg
www.wissenderkuenste.de