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BE.BOP. Black Europe Body Politics Event in Berlin

From the 1st of June until the 3rd of June, the ‘Black Europe Body Politics 2016’ event will take place in Berlin

June 01st, 2016
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The ‘Black Europe Body Politics Festival’, organized by Art Labour Archives, a decolonial transdisciplinary and indisciplinary agency active in the international cultural industry since 1996 and based in Berlin, will take place from the 1st of June until the 3rd of June in Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin. The event is organized in partnership with the ‘AfricAvenir International’ event which is taking place in Copenhagen from June the 5th until the 7th and is sponsored by the Danish Arts Foundation.​

The Art Labour Agency is an organisation which mainly focuses on providing consultancy services to international events, they are key to the creation of situation specific art events and help to organise high impact theoretical meetings in the cultural field and is recognised as a platform that has been influential in the amalgamation of theory, political activism and aesthetics. The organisation describes itself and its journey as, ‘our journey is one of experiencing “art” as a labour of love and mutual examination and recognition beyond geographical, discursive and disciplinary thresholds.’

The festival will be hosted and organised by Alanna Lockward, a Dominican author and decolonial catalyst who is the founding director of the Art Labour Archives agency. Her areas of interest and expertise are Caribbean marronage (strategy of resistance and escaping) discursive and mystical legacies in time-based practices, critical race theory, decolonial aesthetics, black feminism and womanist ethics. She has published a number of books on these various different subjects, using a variety of different styles, including short stories and more investigative pieces. She was also a cultural editor of Listín Diario, a research journalist of Rumbo magazine and columnist of the Miami Herald. She is currently a columnist of Acento.com.do.

This specific event ‘BE.BOP. Black Europe Body Politics’, was first established in 2012 and now takes place in various cities across three different continents; Africa, Europe and America. The event in Berlin will feature screenings, parades, performances as well as numerous panel discussions on subjects such as marronage and border thinking, (de)coloniality and intercultural education, contemporary marronage and collective healing, enslavement, genocide and the colonialiality of memory, free women of color in Europe and a lot of other subjects. The variety of the different events which are taking part throughout the festival ensures that the event is extremely worthy of attendance especially for individuals interested in the field of cultural diplomacy.

References:

News from Berlin
Pierre Even, Berlin Global