TDN Annual Assembly: Unlearning & Undoing

The assembly is structured across two days organised around the thematic axes of 'Unlearning' and 'Undoing,' though the programme actively resists this rigid binary by entwining these trajectories throughout. Each day comprises a keynote address, a workshop, film screenings, and a panel discussion.

Based within the university consortium CHASE (Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England), The Decolonial Network critically interrogates the notion of decoloniality through its inaugural annual assembly. This event advances this inquiry across a diverse range of presentation formats — including screenings, performances, and research papers — and disciplines spanning art, anthropology, sociology, and literature, affirming its character as an 'assembly' rather than a conventional 'conference.' By bringing together interdisciplinary and mixed-media articulations of decoloniality, the assembly proposes a framework for examining the epistemological structures imposed by global forms of colonialism.

Initially theorised by Aníbal Quijano and subsequently expanded upon by scholars including Walter Mignolo, Achille Mbembe, Homi Bhabha, Françoise Vergès, Catherine Walsh, and María Lugones, decoloniality emerged as a critical challenge to the systemic inequalities produced by Western modernity. As method and framework, it has since developed across a broad range of research fields, including sociology, history, anthropology, visual art, art history, and comparative literature. Nevertheless, the fluidity of global geopolitics and economics demands continual reflection on and reevaluation of contemporary decolonial discourse. This assembly seeks to engage dialogically with the complexities of knowledge production hierarchies across different geographies and temporalities.

Info: 'From Decoloniality to Decolonisation: Subjectivity, Power and Struggle'

Info: 'A Counter-Cartographies Workshop Based on Cian Dayrit's Militant Mappings'

Info: Curated by Katarzyna Lukasik, the screening presents two films, Saodat Ismalinova’s The Haunted and Oleksyi Radynski’s Where Russia Ends, which explore the history of Russian imperialism. Focusing on environmental destruction, these films offer both a critique and mediation on the erasure of religious and cultural practices of indigenous and racialised populations. The films address the need for a decolonial reading of not only Russia’s colonial violence but also Russian Soviet expansionism and its longstanding imperialist ambitions. Here, filmmaking becomes both a practice of resistance and reinscription against loss of human and non-human life. Screening lineup: Saodat Ismailova, 'The Haunted', 2017 (23');
Oleksiy Radynski, 'Where Russia Ends', 2024 (26')

Info: Moderated by Eiji Yasuhara.
Tania Gomez, ‘The journey towards the territory: an ecological history explored through the life of peasant organiser Hugo Blanco (Perú)’;
Ding Zhining, ‘From “Spring Rolls” to “Chinternet”: The Defocusing and Reconstruction of Decolonial Discourse in Chinese Contemporary Art’;
Luan Staphorst, 'Reading Beyond Decoloniality: A Speculative Critique of Decolonisation-as-Ontology in Relation to Literary Studies, Tricksterly Knowledge, and |xam Bushman Folklore'; Geroges Senga, 'Makuto Njo Dunia (Money Make the World) (2025)'.

Info: Curated by Lee Kai Chung, this programme presents an Asian decolonial perspective, framing artistic research as a vital site of reclamation. Through Jane Jin Kaisen’s observations on geopolitical tension in sacred landscapes, Au Sow Yee’s hauntological melodies on colonial legacy and Liu Yujia’s borderland ecologies of the ginseng industry, these works converge in songs and rituals, bridging the human and more-than-human, longing and departure. As reverberations that transcend capture, these vibrations of land, sound, and spirit challenge colonial partitions and extractive logics, dismantling linear narratives of power.
Screening lineup: Jane Jin Kaisen, ‘Tales of One and Many Mountains’, 2017 (19’39”); Au Sow Yee X Chen Yow-Ruu (Her Lab Space), ‘Bad Dream Rocking a.k.a The Rocking Malaya’, 2024 (21’01”); Liu Yujia, ‘The Market’, 2023 (10’15”).

Info: Moderated by Marv Recinto. Lucy Thurley, ‘Community performance as a decolonial praxis’; Flurina Thali, ‘(Re)imagining the menstrual cycle in academia – an emerging decolonising epistemology’; Gitan Djeli, 'Reading from her poetry collection, unrest in the nebulae (Duke UP, 2026)' ;Linda Schilling Cuellar, 'Environmental witnessing'.

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