11.09.2023 | 5 pm - 7.30 pm | CommUnity | *Community Tour | Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)

Dear Black Community,

in a walk through the exhibition O Quilombismo the HKW-Team, Curatorial Assistant and Researcher at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), shares her specific knowledge and opens up her perspectives on the works.

O Quilombismo is a research undertaking, an exhibition, workshops, and a series of performances that invite artists, activists, scholars, and people from other walks of life to imagine new forms of cultural and political resistance through diverse emancipation projects, past and present. The exhibition is narrated by many voices, starting from the quilombos (in Brazil), cumbes (in Venezuela), palenques (in Cuba and Colombia), cimarrones (in Mexico), maroon communities (in Jamaica and the United States), as well as other emancipatory spaces from around the world. Irrespective of the sizes of such spaces, the cultural, political, social, and economic tasks of liberation and affirmation have been imagined and put to work by artists, scholars, activists, storytellers, and other thinkers.

The project’s point of departure is the philosophy of quilombismo as developed by Brazilian artist, author, and politician Abdias Nascimento (1914–2011), who defined the quilombos—communities created by escaped and emancipated enslaved people—as societies of ‘fraternal and free reunion, or encounter; solidarity, living together, and existential communion’. The tradition of quilombist struggle and resistance has existed throughout the Americas, from the earliest decades of the 1500s, when African enslaved populations refused to submit to European colonization and oppression and founded new forms of statehood and organization. This exhibition uses quilombos as a metaphor, but also deliberates on the intellectual and political implications of a philosophy and ideology based on the quilombos, mapping the spaces that have made them possible—whether in historical times, in the imagination of many, or in our multiple contemporary worlds.

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*Community Tour Haus der Kulturen der Welt – Monday, 11.09.2023 from 5.30 pm – 7 pm. Please register via the Eventbrite-Link here:

We look forward to seeing you.
Yours EOTO x CommUnity x HKW

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Please note: Events marked with *asterisks are Community Event in the framework of the UN Decade for People of African Descent (PAD) and designed as a space for people of African descent. We ask that you respect this collective self designation and the spaces associated with it.