La Descolonizadora is a publishing project based in Chile, committed to documenting the decolonial protest actions of the southern cone.
In the fall of 2019, Chile saw a wave of anti-establishment protests erupt. Part of these protests included the derrocation and graffiting of countless monuments throughout the country: actions that came to be known as demonumentalizing efforts. No colonizer was safe from this collective guillotine: Francisco de Aguirre, José Menéndez, and Pedro de Valdivia are some of the historical figures whose statues came to pay the symbolic price of their efforts.
In order to document this movement, the collective La Descolonizadora created and distributed an open-access map that declares “colonialism is not just a Spanish inheritance, nor the action of a state in expansion, but continues to be a reality imposed upon our contemporary moment.” Available on Google Drive, the team at La Descolonizadora felt that this information should be freely accessible to anyone who wished to understand and reflect upon the actions of 2019. They believe in honoring and shaping a collective memory and experience of political dissidence, contesting official histories through the liberation of information. The map, and the actions it documents, are just a small part of a larger decolonial ethics that undergirds their work.
La Descolonizadora describe their ethics as one of “aesthetic disobedience.” Coming out of a tradition of mass printing, multiple reproductions, collage, and graffiti, this aesthetic practice seeks to rebel against formal artistic constraints and so instrumentalize visuality to express dissent. It re-approriates mass media and rewrites official histories: beheading statues, tagging murals, a slew of guerilla tactics that inspire reflection. It’s also about uncovering hidden histories, stories that might have been repressed under dictatorships and authoritarian regimes.
In an interview published in early 2020, La Descolonizadora aligned themselves with the Zapatista slogan “a world where many worlds fit.” Through their projects, they aim to find the symbols of our time, and visualize the revolution.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.