As a report of my STSM activities, or better, as a collective piece of decolonial art
Gaia Giuliani, Centre for Social Studies (CES), Portugal
Ca’ Foscari Venice, even in the hottest summer, is a place you want to be. Many nice events to go to and to organise, and most importantly, the Venice Art Biennale, with all its official and collateral pavilions.
The main event my short mission of three weeks at the Department of the Humanities, Venice Ca’ Foscari, was the planned roundtable with colleagues from the COST action, namely myself, Paola Minoia, Uma Kothari, Yafa El Masri, Faith Mkwesha, Ana Cristina Pereira, Gisela Casimiro, Wissal Houbabi and Francesco Vacchiano, and to be held on the 11th of July. It was preceded and followed by two internal meetings, where with not only we had the chance to introduce our work and discuss our contribution to the workshop, but also plan other joint activities for the future. The initially planned roundtable was replaced by the workshop format to better include our fellow colleagues Wissal Houbabi and Gisella Casimiro, whose artistic practice needed a more flexible space for discussion than a more rigid roundtable.
“Memory and resistance: non-hegemonic pathways towards a critique of the coloniality of the present. A conversation about colonialism, resistance, art and activism” lasted the entire afternoon. More than 60 participants in presence and online (resident and international students and colleagues) engaged with us well beyond the planned three hours. In this event, scholars and artists came together to create a moment of sharing, setting the terrain for a future “fragile community of care” rooted in anti- colonial and decolonial perspectives. This gathering aimed to assemble forms of contestation and a toolbox against authoritarianism, armed counter-resistance and intellectual censorship – particularly pressing in a time when protests against Israeli settler colonialism are being increasingly outlawed. This volatile community of scholars and artists stood for radical transcultural dialogues that drive action. This assemblage included myself – a political philosopher – along with geographers Paola Minoia, Uma Kothari and Yafa El Masri; cultural studies scholar Ana Cristina Pereira (alias Kitty Furtado); artists and activists Wissal Houbabi and Gisela Casimiro; educator, researcher and activist Faith Mkwesha; and anthropologist Francesco Vacchiano. The conversation vowe together storytelling, decolonial theory, practices of survival and escape, and both individual and collective artistic creation and action. It was further enriched by interventions from the audience on an extemely hot afternoon in Venice’s summer. The discussions ranged from the mode in which drawing can uncover intimate and collective Palestinian refugee memory and its role in reshaping their lives under settler colonial dispossession (El Masri), to the use of irony and rage against the cultural industry’s cooptation and tokenism of artists of color (Houbabi). We also explored individual art creation in dialogue with collective resistance against state and police violence (Casimiro and Pereira), the preservation of personal and collective memory of anti-colonial struggles and the impact of colonial mentality (Kothari), and the invocation of hope in the face of colonial and racist violence (Mkwesha). The workshop created a space for a critical examination of the “coloniality of the present” – a concept that I have recently articulated, building on the decolonial idea of the coloniality of power, to capture the persistence of colonial mentality and its variations according to modes of accumulation and conservative “grammars of the nation.” These frameworks systematically exclude, differentially include, render vulnerable, and expose to premature and violent death those who are not meant to belong. Recalling the wave of protests against Israeli occupation of Palestine and the genocide in Gaza (Vacchiano), whose protagonists at Ca’ Foscari were also present in the sun-drenched room, we had the opportunity to connect a number of individual and collective stances. This connection was particularly vital in an increasingly retaliatory international environment for art and academia, where those who openly denounce the coloniality of our present are often silenced, expelled, or condemned.
Besides many convivial moments, we organised a collective (and open to local students and fellow colleagues) visit to the Portuguese Pavilion – introduced by Kitty Furtado – and to the Palestine museum – a guided tour in English by two local Human Rights focused associations.
Particularly stunning is the Portuguese pavilion. In the words of its artists-curators:
the “Greenhouse” blurs the boundaries of different areas of artistic knowledge through practices of interdisciplinarity, transversality, and radical solidarity. The curatorial and artistic team – a visual artist, a researcher, and a choreographer – proposes collective actions that use pedagogy, sculpture, video, sound, performance, and assembly spaces to reflect on the relationship between nature, ecology, and politics. The artists present a “Creole garden”, drawing on Édouard Glissant’s concept inspired by the private plots that enslaved people planted as acts of resistance and survival. Those gardens were, and are, the antithesis of the monocultural plantation. Densely planted and richly biodiverse, the “Creole Garden” fosters a material and discursive space of liberation, possibility, and multiplicity. Connecting ideas of ecology, decolonisation, diaspora and migration, the artist-curators have constructed a garden of plants native to African countries, which will grow in the palace’s main hall throughout the exhibition period. Here soil is understood as a vector of decolonial and ecological engagement, capable of both sustaining growths, as well as archiving traces of historical violence. The garden connects past, present, and future, and it highlights the politics of the land, history, body and identity. (Exhibition paper)
‘Greenhouse’ celebrates two anniversaries: the centenary of Amilcar Cabral (1924–73), a Bissau-Guinean anticolonial leader and agronomist crucial to the country’s independence in 1973, and the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution which deposed Portugal’s dictatorship on 25 April 1974. Emphasising the composite histories and identities that emerged from colonialism and the liberation struggles, ‘Greenhouse’ proposes actions that enact radical and decolonial solidarities, and challenge monocultural norms of nation, knowledge, and agriculture. […] Rather than a static experience, it proposes the creation of a ‘living archive’. The garden will be activated across the exhibition period, becoming a place of collective action and care, of multiple possibilities and pedagogy. (Press release)
Finally, publication-wise, my short stay at the Department of Humanities also allows me to finalise a publication in Italian (Studi Culturali journal, 2025) and two publications in English (Darkmatter, 2025 and Resistance. Radical Environmental Humanities, 2025) which own much to the intellectual exchange occurred during my STSM.
This production have the capacity of bringing together all my discussion on the violence of the border, with critiques of the Anthropocenic violence, and counter-archives of care, self-care and earth-care.
The first article, “Acts of radical care”, concerns a profound reconsideration of the relationship between bio- and necro-power and colonial and racist narratives and, more generally, of the Anthropocenic opposition—thus modern, Western, and capitalist—between nature and culture, through a reflection that emphasizes their circular relationship of co-(re)production. It then seeks to develop an epistemology of the fugitive by intersecting reflections that are distant from each other and to connect it to a feminist political project for the present, based on material and visual counter-archives of care, self-care, and care for the Earth.
As they were the one the continuation of the reflection of the other, the second and the third articles extend my reflection on these topics. The second article, prospectively titled “For an epistemology of the fugitive”, contemplates the relationship between the violence of racial capitalism and colonial archives of race in modern and contemporary history, and on the impact they have in terms of an epistemic violence that reduces the complexity of the relationship between “human life, non-human life and non-life” (Povinelli 2016) within the exploitative and extractivist ontologies and logics of the Anthropocene.
Finally, the third and last, whose prospective title is “Radical theory as for ‘the suspension of violence’. Or, of the moment right before we strike back”, reflects on what it means to be a radical scholar in Environmental Humanities, which in my opinion, should involve three interconnected moves: positioning, analyzing, and action. The goal of their reflections and actions is not only to propose an individual and collective exploration of power structures, forms of resistance, and potential pathways to emancipation within the contemporary socio-political landscape, but also to inspire concrete -and necessarily risky- individual stances and collective transformative actions. In essence, as a kind of an organic intellectual in postmodern times, the radical Environmental Humanities scholar must be able of acknowledging and practicing forms of active care, self-care and earth-care.
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