Anti-tour as Decolonizing Methodology
Date: Wednesday June 2, 2021
Τime: 6-8pm, UTC/GMT+3
Organizers: dëcoloиıze hellάş in collaboration with the Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/477170276823248?ref=newsfeed
Convenor: Penelope Papailias (University of Thessaly)
Language: The workshop was conducted in English (the webinar will be subsequently translated/subtitled in Greek).
This webinar brought together decolonial activist groups, cultural workers and academics from Tanzania, Germany, Italy and Greece who have experimented with the anti-tour as a practice of grassroots pedagogy and political intervention. The aim of the webinar is to exchange experiences and ideas and connect with groups and actors using this methodology around countries and continents.
- As a performative act of counter-memory, a mobile assembly and transient occupation of public space, how are -and might- anti-tours be deployed to expose and challenge colonial afterlives anchored in the monumental landscape? Are they effective in engaging broader publics and local communities and activating social change?
- Can the tour format interrupt travel/tourism as colonial technologies of mobility, access, knowledge and commoditization of culture? Or is this form susceptible to cooptation by political/economic actors as “alternative,” “multicultural” or “off-the-beaten-track” tours?
- How does one make an anti-tour? Can the anti-tour be a vehicle for decolonizing methodology and epistemology itself? Can bringing together researchers, artists and activists, locals and newcomers, universities and local communities to design -as well as enact- such a tour potentially destabilizing of knowledge hierarchies?
- Can we think about the digital/networked dimension of the anti-tour, as well as the goal of its repetition by more participants, beyond the logic of “appification”?
Convener/moderator: Penelope Papailias (University of Thessaly)
Participants:
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- Berlin Postkolonial studies and situates German colonial history in its global dimensions, highlighting postcolonial ways of thinking and societal structures that have endured into the present. BERLIN POSTKOLONIAL seeks to cooperate with other organizations critical of colonialism and groups against racism, as well as other postcolonial initiatives within Germany
- * [unfortunately due to technical problems Mr. Peringanda was unable to join us] Laidlaw Peringanda, founder of the Swakopmund Genocide Museum and Chairman of the Namibian Genocide Association
- Postcolonial Potsdam is a working group that deals with traces of German and Prussian colonial history in the sculptures, paintings and botanical species of Potsdam palace and garden landscape and with the post-colonial silence about their histories.
- Old Moshi Cultural Tourism runs cultural and (colonial) historical tours of the old administrative town of Moshi was established by Germans in the early 1870 and is located in rural Tanzania.
- Decolonize the City/ Decolonizzare la città (Annalisa Frisina, Elisabetta Campagni, Emmanuel Mbayo Mertens: University of Padua/Decolonize your eyes collective/Arising Africans Association). You can follow the video of their action in Padua in December 2020 here.
- Areti Kondilidou archaeologist/ social anthropologist
You can download this article, which discusses in more detail the actions of Berlin Postkolonial and Postcolonial Potsdam discussed in the webinar, as well as those of other groups in Spain and Belgium.
- Mboro, Mnyaka Sururu, Christian Kopp & Yann LeGall (forthcoming). “’Small is beautiful’ Postcolonial Walking Tours as a Form of Street Justice,” in Everything Passes Except the Past, edited by Jana Haeckel, Brussels: Goethe Institute Brussels.
