“Decolonialità e arti”. Lectio magistralis del prof. Walter D. Mignolo

Lectio Magistralis del Prof. Walter D. Mignolo, tra i più importanti teorici del pensiero decoloniale latinoamericano, professore emerito presso la Duke University di Durham (Carolina del Nord) dove dirige il Centro di Global Studies and Humanities.
Evento realizzato nell’ambito dell’allestimento Museo delle Opacità, in collaborazione con il gruppo Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture della Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute, Roma

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LINGUA: INGLESE

INFO ITA
Il prof. Mignolo, su invito di DAAR (Alessandro Petti e Sandi Hilal), Research Fellows del Museo delle Civiltà, affronterà nella sua conferenza il tema della decolonizzazione in relazione alle pratiche artistiche contemporanee.
Il sociologo argentino si chiede quando e in quale contesto sia stata accettata l’idea che i concetti di arte ed estetica venissero considerati universali, tali da permetterci di parlare di arte ed estetica cinese, africana, azteca o maya. Rintracciando la risposta in un’aberrazione della modernità e dell’incurante accettazione occidentale di un vocabolario europeo, Mignolo approfondirà le modalità grazie alle quali, attraverso l’investigazione delle pratiche decoloniali, si possa definire un paradigma che passi attraverso la ricostruzione gnoseologica dei fenomeni culturali.

INFO ENG
In this lecture, Prof. W.D. Mignolo will address the themes of decolonization and artistic practices, at the invitation of Museo delle Civiltà’s research fellow DAAR (Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal). The lecture is promoted as part of the collaboration between Museo delle Civiltà and the Bibliotheca Hertziana’s Research Unit Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture.

What we (in general) do is very much entangled with what we think and talk of what we do. Neither aesthesis, even less aesthetics was a keyword in Aristotle’s Poetics. Aesthesis was a keyword in Aristotle´s De Anima. But what is more, not even art appears next to what today could be called, in retrospect, ¨artistic practice¨ (tragedy, epic, comedy).
So, when and where art and aesthetics became so domineering to eclipse poetics and aesthetics and to convince us that art and aesthetics are universal concepts that authorize to speak of Chinese art and aesthetics, African art and aesthetics, Aztec and Maya art and aesthetics? Clearly an aberration of modernity and careless acceptance of Western European regional vocabulary, institutionally consecrated in the six languages of Western Europe grounded in Greek and Latin. Hence, one of the tasks of decolonial praxical investigations–that I will address in this talk– is the aesthetic reconstitution of aesthetics consistent with the gnoseological reconstitution of epistemology.

BIO
Walter D. Mignolo is a William H. Wannamaker Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. He was associated researcher at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, 2002-2020 and an Honorary Research Associate for CISA (Center for Indian Studies in South Africa), Wits University at Johannesburg (2014-2020). He is a Senior Advisor of DOC (Dialogue of Civilizations) Research Institute, based in Berlin and received a Doctor Honoris Causa Degree from the University National of Buenos Aires, Argentina and an Honorary Degree from the University of London, Goldsmith. Among his books related to the topic are: The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995); Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of Decoloniality (2007). Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000); and The Idea of Latin America (2006). Forthcoming: On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analysis, Praxis, co-authored with Catherine Walsh (2018); and The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021).