Every regime of colonial representation is built on the erasure, the silencing, the devastation of cultural ecosystems, existential geographies, emotional cartographies. The image is preceded by sounds, the colonial gaze erases sounds, strips context and objects of representation. It strips the object off representation of its own conception of space and temporality.

Through photography, texts, sounds, performance and video, the eight artists create spaces of intimacy for the everyday, collectively create tools that uncover family narratives, diasporic itineraries and archive the self in processes of self-actualisation and claiming one’s existence outside of a colonial gaze and temporality.

The artist does so through self/-portraiture, connecting through family objects as systems of transmission and historical recovery of counter memories. They bring this narration within a ‘home’ – the family homes, the bedroom, the photographic studio as a safe space and even the body – capturing the vernacular of the diaspora, claiming Black presence in the city entrenched within colonial narratives/monuments and to projects ‘home’ as a space for emancipatory and utopic horizons of collective living.

Through exercises of insurgency and political imagination, the diaspora dialogue with the spaces of monumentality in the city by activating spaces of memory, creates self-cartographic journeys, counter-monumental archives of anti-colonial legacy.

How does the regime of images have a role in informing future planning, utopic vision and dynamic desires around living in cities for the diaspora? Through the depiction and understanding of the movement that occurs (labor stratification, migration, social mobility, cultural and economic zonification etc.) against the current narratives of rejection, transformation, gentrification, and so on.

The exhibition is a pedagogical journey that not only displays but seeks for exercise of radical and social imagination of diasporic narratives in the future. It makes us question what are the metaphors of ourselves in the future.

The artists’ works are an invitation to fictionalise narratives, and a possibility to seek through fiction a pedagogical tool to visualize performative futures. The exhibition indirectly refers to the historical concept of “Heterotopias” and the resonance with the category of “localized utopias”, in which we build worlds within worlds, a new sense of spatiality into the colonial regime of spatiality.

With the supported

UCREATE is a Creative Europe project taking place in Belgium, Hungary, Portugal and Italy led by 4 artistic organizations (International Yehudi Menuhin Foundation (BE); HANGAR (PT); Mus-e Hungary (HUN); BIG SUR (IT)) aiming to use the arts and artistic co-creation as a means for creating social bonds between individuals.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.