Grada Kilomba is a Portuguese writer, scholar and artist who enacts and delivers decolonial knowledge by weaving relations between gender, race and class. She is a professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her work combines a wide range of means — publications, performed lectures and theoretical texts, videos and performances — creating a hybrid space in which academic knowledge production intersects with artistic practice. Departing from a double gesture that interweaves decolonizing thinking and performatic acts of knowledge, Kilomba moves from text to acting and embodies her writings with voice and images.
At the 32 Bienal, in São Paulo (2016), Kilomba offered two projects. The Desire Project (2015-2016) is a visual work divided in three moments: While I Speak, While I Write e While I Walk, videos whose main visual element is the word and that indicates the apparition of an individual historically silenced by colonial narratives. In Illusions (2016), Kilomba delivers a performance that uses African tradition of story telling in narration and visual work. The act of reading evokes the myths of Narcissus and Eco as metaphors of a colonial past and of representantion politics that mirror only themselves.
To learn more about Grada Kilomba, click here.
To watch the video While I write
To watch the video Illusions