South to South: A Meeting on African and Afro-Diasporic Technologies
Pivô Art and Research
Salvador de bAHÍA, Brasil
2023
As part of the 99 Questions series held at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, art historian Sara Garzón has been invited to collaborate with Pivô in Brazil and Centre d’art Waza in Lubumbashi for the organization of this program. During the South-to-South meeting, scheduled contributors will offer talks, walks, and cooking sessions to delineate particular approaches to technological thinking and its
relationship to situated knowledge. The point of the meeting is to share knowledge across transnational borders, and to uplift and nourish perspectives of diverse practitioners from the global south.
The transdisciplinary research program rehearses Martinican artist René Louise’s “Manifiesto del Cimarronismo Moderno.” Published in 1991, this manifesto proposed to build a decolonial future based on the resistance against and disavowal of colonial and western modes of existence by
reclaiming ideas of technological thinking that underscore forms of coexistence and resilience. For Louise, one such idea was Maroonism, which not only constituted a practice of anti-colonial defiance, but also an aesthetic project benefiting both the “quotidian and the future.” In Louise’s thinking, maroonism as a modern technology could take the form of robotics, cybernetics, or biotechnology, in a way that would recuperate the “achievements and traditions of our ancestors.” With this provocation, the South-to-South program will focus on joining forces with fellow makers and institutions seeking to pluralize the definitions of the technological by acknowledging local systems of knowledge production.
In 2023, the group will be hosted by Pivô Art’s new residency in Bahia de Salvador. In 2024, the group will re-convene at Centre d’art Waza in Lubumbashi to give continuity to the technological provocations but this time with the historical and territorial context of the Democratic Republic of the
Congo in mind.