Our story
The project started in 2021 with the impulse of three groups: the association protagon e.V from Frankfurt (Germany) as coordinator, the cultural association of Ondadurto Teatro from Rome (Italy) and the Dorea Educational Institute Wtf from Limassol (Cyprus).
The project aims at creating a new approach in practices of learning and unlearning arts to intervene in the hegemonic knowledge in artistic production. It is developped in form of European partnership, with scholars, curators and artists, to contribute internationally in the process of inclusion of migrants from the global south in European societies and modes of artistic creation. We research about southern epistemology and how it is possible to create new forms of artistic knowledge in dialogue with the global south.
"How can we get closer to our own roots by entering in dialogue with other cultures? How to restructure thoughts, patterns and behaviors that are settled in our society? How to completely open up with the body, and accept changes?"
Notes of participants.
To understand the development of artistic practices and research in the expressive arts, it is important to analyse the context in which these expressions have emerged and formulated as a legitimated form of knowledge. Consequently, also in arts, the hegemonic form of knowledge was produced by western cultures and established the colonial relations between the various cultures and existing societies over the world. The ecology of knowledge is a notion created by the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos that deals with the question of creditability for nonscientific knowledges and presents an alternative for how to build a democratic process to have a democratic knowledge.
At the same time, this project promotes an experience of social integration for non-European participants and opens up the notion of the artistic work from a monopolized point of view to a constellation of methodologies and perspectives that entangles culture diversity in the artistic work.
Our aim is to create artistic dialogues to analyse the colonial relations of artistic practices and knowledge.
“As most of us in the group don't come from the global south, we actually have to look at this topic from the perspective of the privileged people. Which possibilities do we get from a skin color? Why are we not even aware that we get treated in a better way? (...)
All this behaviour is so deeply inside us and rooted in our bodies, that we should start to research with our bodies to confront ourselves physically with the topic of racism. On top if this, we have to look outside of us and go in the open space with the “glasses of white privilege” and look for places, that actually represent this discrimination, which sadly are not so difficult to find.”
Notes of participants.
