Silhouettes, Shadows and Masks as Thinking Models: Reflecting with Fanon, Mbembe, and Mudimbe

Name: Silhouettes, Shadows and Masks as Thinking Models: Reflecting with Fanon, Mbembe, and Mudimbe
Start: 2025-01-27T14:30:00+01:00
Location: Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai

Schedule

Mon, 27 Jan, 2025 at 02:30 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai | Florence, TO

n his seminal investigation on the psychological, individual and social impacts of colonialism on people of African descent (Peau Noire, Masques Blanc, 1952; translated to Black Skin, White Masks, 1967), Frantz Fanon centralized the signifying value of the experience of vision: of viewing and of being viewed. The author insightfully stressed how this dialectical optical interaction, departed from and projected onto the site of the body, fundamentally contributes to constructing assumptions of a supposed “otherness”. The so described dialectical phenomenon of vision involves notions of Blackness, shadows, masks, projections, and reduction. A series of concepts, and their accompanying visualizations, that are fundamentally constitutive of the motif of the silhouette, a visual, technical, conceptual and last but not least political site of obfuscation, opacity, and suspension of appearances and identities, beyond the enunciative trace of its contouring outline.
Thinking with and building on these notions and connections, we want to reflect further together on the different ways in which the visual and conceptual paradigm of the silhouette and its related concepts such as shadow and mask have been adopted and re-signified as kaleidoscopic thinking models by thinkers and poets like Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, Achille Mbembe and Valentine-Yves Mudimbe, and artists and like Kara Walker, William Kentridge, and Belkis Ayón, to name but a few. What (visual) language do the above-mentioned authors use in order to question the violent dimensions of the paradigm of otherness? What is the importance of figurative language and aesthetic experience in this rethinking of corporeality and identity? During this transdisciplinary workshop we aim to reflect upon, question, and/or dismantle philosophical and art-historical episodes, experiences, and narratives of colonialism and oppression, negotiation and contestation, empowerment and resistance.
Speakers:
Steyn Bergs
Giuseppe Capriotti
Alexandre Diallo
Ruri Kawanami
Bärbel Küster
Sophie Lynch
Azar Emami Pari
Vera-Simone Schulz