Seloua Luste Boulbina :<\/strong> Disorientation is tangible only when it is not effected \u201cat will\u201d through intermittence; it should not be confused with all the borrowings that the \u201cNorths\u201d have transferred to the \u201cSouths.\u201d Here, it\u2019s about the relationship not between the North (global) and the South (global), but between the South and the North. When one is an artist or a writer from the South, how can one escape the norms established by the hegemony of the North? For example, if the works of African artists produced on the continent are sold in Northern countries, if they are discussed and chosen there, then they are oriented. The issue is both material and symbolic. This doesn\u2019t mean that everyone should be isolated in their territory of \u201corigin.\u201d Far from it, for the postcolonial context is the other side of globalization; it\u2019s what makes it possible. It\u2019s a question not just of space but also of time, since those for whom \u201cindependence\u201d is relatively recent\u2014the 1960s or 1970s\u2014enter this state overwhelmed with duties: the duty to know, do, and be. Independence is performative: a declaration that transforms a region or country from one state to another. It must then \u201close its bearings\u201d\u2014that is, pull away from, evade the hegemonies and other imperialisms imposed by Northern countries, be it symbolically or materially\u2014this is what I mean by disorientation, in a symbolic sense here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Following independence, decolonization consists of a labour of disorientation, of the abandonment of references imposed by European colonization. A labour of forgetting: not amnesia, but an affirmation unbound from a colonial past and its impositions. From this perspective, decolonization is a metamorphosis facilitated by this active and creative forgetting, a mitigation of sorts\u2014the opposite of a grievance or trial, for recollecting the horrors of the past is not, in the effectiveness of the present, a solution. It\u2019s an abyss. That\u2019s why art is so decisive here. A form of knowledge, it is a way of writing the Afterward. If it depends on the \u201cmarket\u201d and its institutions, it is less subject to censorship than work produced in universities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When Nidhal Chamekh, for example, was working on Nos visages<\/em> (2019), he cut out and reassembled historical portraits of \u201cnatives,\u201d thus breaking with the traditional means of representing the past. It was a way of reversing the images published in Le Miroir<\/em>, a French magazine founded in 1910, which constituted his archives for this work. A way to put an end to the negation of these soldiers from the past, to aphasia, and to the impossibility of speaking about them. Chamekh thus positively transforms the losers of the victory into the unvanquished. He stresses the Provence landings (so-called soldiers from the Empire) rather than the Normandy landings (North American soldiers). This way, he unravels a heavily oriented narrative, destroying the smoke and mirrors of colonialism by deconstructing the \u201charmony\u201d of the masks: the false portraits of colonial \u201carchetypes\u201d proposed in the magazine. Nos visages<\/em> is a series of drawings printed on fabric. Each piece of printed fabric partially obscures another. Europe is erased by Africa, the past by the present. Ours faces are rediscovered in our images, or our images in our faces. It\u2019s a distortion, a gesture that allow us to \u201cforge ahead\u201d without a compass. A rejuvenation of the mind. Especially since the Nos visages<\/em> exhibition was held in Tunis, not in London or New York. <\/p>\n\n\n\n MB :<\/strong> I completely agree with you when you assert that \u201cart cannot constitute a step backwards. It\u2019s a means of writing the Afterward. For art\u2014in this case the visual arts\u2014and literature are less normalized than academic knowledge.\u201d Yet how should we write about art? And for whom? The production of art discourse is itself still dominated by Western thought. You suggest the same about art criticism. Could you clarify this statement a little? How does the decolonization of knowledge relate to the field of research in the arts? <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n SLB :<\/strong> That\u2019s a very real difficulty. Not only in that no one in the South, and particularly in Africa, is writing or reflecting on the art that is produced and shown there, but there are also considerably fewer people, in general, writing in or about the visual arts than in the North. In addition, the impact of what is written in the South is less than the impact of what is thought, including by Africans, in the North. The hegemony and concentration of all capital\u2014of all kinds\u2014in certain regions creates legitimacy and determines dissemination. Works of art and literature also circulate more easily than do theoretical texts because we can always, in their reception, mitigate certain issues and relegate them to the realms of business or entertainment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n When I analyze a play or a work, or a gesture or an approach, created elsewhere, I\u2019m well aware that, because we don\u2019t inhabit the same spaces, my interpretations inevitably miss certain meanings that they convey relative to the place where they were produced. The cultural space in which I live and work constitutes a bias and inevitably produces a parallax. Globalization is a shared illusion. I don\u2019t think that the \u201cglobal elite,\u201d who rarely need visas or can at least obtain them easily, should have the last word in this regard, because their movements and overall vision would allow them to contextualize the play or work within a general overview that allows for comparisons and serves to substantiate market estimates. Between global (northern) and local (southern), the former is unquestionably overvalued, and the latter relatively devalued. This is why I insist on disorientation. The global represents a sense of orientation\u2014and, sociologically, of pricing and investment\u2014for Niamey, N\u2019Djamena, Harare, and Algiers are not\u2014yet?\u2014places where prices (material) and values (symbolic) are set in an internationalized neoliberal world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The current postcolonial model rests on the distinction between form, in its normativity, and material, notably raw material. It\u2019s the legacy not only of Western metaphysics but also of the colonial partitioning of the world. It\u2019s a type of discourse that, in the case of discursivity, pits those concerned with formal considerations against those preoccupied by material concerns, even when they are creators of artistic and literary forms. Instead, we should be reflecting on the various forms that aesthetic practices can take\u2014and, undoubtedly, considering the fact that practices can take paths other than those determined by discourse, or what I will call theory here. Thought must also be given, in many different areas, to the plural forms that \u201cart criticism\u201d can take. Yet the problem would be only partially resolved: funding, in whatever form, has only ever been a policy that benefits the few, not everyone. Access to information is also decisive: information itself represents capital. It\u2019s impossible not to take the economy of criticism and theory into account. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n SLB :<\/strong> Decolonization <\/strong>cannot be considered the objective, except as an ideal. This is why the idea of creolization is interesting, despite it being too widely depoliticized, perhaps under the influence of the person who defended it the most, \u00c9douard Glissant. Creolization, founded on the recognition of an irreducible heterogeneity, is ground for the creative development of new linguistic and cultural forms that preserve it. This heterogeneity is also a rupture or fragmentation, for we commonly think of \u201cculture\u201d as being not only \u201chomogeneous\u201d but also \u201ccontinuous.\u201d Creolization is experienced as something incomprehensible, unintelligible, or never seen before. Its otherness can be attributed to the fragmentation at its foundations: the pieces or fragments paradoxically hold together. This particularly applies to postcolonial Africa. It resonates in the languages spoken and written there. The coexistence of various languages has effects on each one. Certainly, no culture is impermeable or hermetic. The same goes for theoretical thought. It\u2019s clear that nothing, in this regard, can be calculated or anticipated. Creolization is a continuous act or creation, not a fight against. It\u2019s not enough, particularly with regard to knowledge, to object to or to simply criticize historically constituted knowledge (I include art and literature here). It\u2019s a matter of changing perspectives and the ways that questions are understood by turning away from mutual antagonisms and positional warfare. <\/p>\n\n\n\n SLB :<\/strong> Forgetting is not passive. It is neither omission, nor negligence, nor amnesia. It\u2019s not a reactionary position, or, in Nietzsche\u2019s term, reactive. That\u2019s what interests me most in contemporary art. And not just in the visual arts. This also applies to the performing arts. Myriam Saduis\u2019s Final Cut<\/em> is a moving example. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In this play, the most intimate and personal is tightly interwoven with the highly political and pushes beyond the memorialization of the past, in this case Tunisia\u2019s colonial past. How can we move forward? How can we turn the page on the past? How can we put an end to this history? How can we cut with that which has been cut out, unstitched, dismembered, disassociated, disjointed, separated, severed? And with a single thread, sew back together the separate pieces, the parts that were defeated, the lost fragments. It\u2019s a challenge, indeed, to stage and represent the overlapping and magnified distances, failings, and divides. Saduis proposes an integral disorientation <\/em>as regards country, language, father, mother, and name. Transformed and whitewashed, what remains of a father (a Tunisian Arab) who disappeared in the madness of his mother (a European blackfoot), except for being captured in the restricted framework of a photographic negative? Almost nothing. An autobiography. Writing, at most. In this work, we see an active and affirmative forgetting, which has nothing to do with former executioners and former victims, or with previous trials or past battles, for times have changed. It is this difference that must be deeply examined. It\u2019s in this sense that a positive (in the photographic sense) emerges from an old negative. The present is thus detached<\/em> from a past with which it was once connected. <\/p>\n\n\n\n More generally, practically speaking, I associate forgetting\u2014active and affirmative\u2014with Freud\u2019s essential concept of working through. Freud distinguishes among repeating, remembering, and working through. It\u2019s interesting to note that the last is conceived in relation to resistance. It\u2019s a way of saying that decolonization and forgetting meet with resistance. Formulating the question in terms of political opposition means conceptualizing it on an exclusively discursive level, on a political or philosophical level, without necessarily considering how our practices are less told than they are telling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Working through, or metaphorization, displacement, transposition, metamorphosis, elaboration. This paves the way for a positive interplay of differences and of multiple and successive differentiations that could put an end to the negative effects of the past (suffering, humiliation, colonial deprivation). This past is a kind of dual raw material, political and psychological, which must be metabolized fragment by fragment. This is what is understood, in the North, when it\u2019s decided to \u201cdecolonize\u201d museums, images, bodies, dance, and so on. The rehabilitation of the (once dominated) subject is the key issue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The labour of construction, of symbolization, allows us to overcome the difficult and very likely traumatic events of the past. Yet this does not happen alone; it develops through intersubjectivity, through co-construction. Today\u2019s side-by-side replaces the face-to-face of yesteryear\u2019s colonialism. It\u2019s a real step forward, a genuine pas de deux. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n![\"Nidhal](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/98-DO1-IMG4-IM_Boyadjian_Chamekh_D-2_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
Nos visages<\/em>, 2019.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Galerie Selma Feriani, Carthage<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Nidhal](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/98-DO1-IMG3-IM_Boyadjian_Chamekh_D-2_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
<\/strong>Nos visages<\/em>, 2019.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Galerie Selma Feriani, Carthage<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Nidhal](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/98-DO1-IMG2-IM_Boyadjian_Chamekh_D-2_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
<\/strong>Nos visages<\/em>, 2019.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Galerie Selma Feriani, Carthage<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/98-EDIT-IMG1-IM_Boyadjian_Chamekh_3_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
Nos visages<\/em>, 2019.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Galerie Selma Feriani, Carthage<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
MB : <\/strong>Decolonization is a labour, not a linear process. This labour entails or, rather, invents processes. In your view, decolonization is also accomplished through creolization. How does that occur? <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/98-DO1_IMG5-IM_Boyadjian_FINAL-CUT_21_Marie-Francoise-Plissart_18K4800_CMYK-C-FLAT_resultat.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/98-DO1_IMG7-IM_Boyadjian_FINAL-CUT_21_Marie-Francoise-Plissart_18K4800_CMYK-C-FLAT.tif_resultat.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/98-DO1_IMG6-IM_Boyadjian_FINAL-CUT_21_Marie-Francoise-Plissart__resultat.jpg\")
Final Cut<\/em>, 2018.
Photos : Marie-Fran\u00e7ois Plissart<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
MB :<\/strong> Forgetting is at the heart of decolonization. In the final chapter of your book, you explain the virtues of forgetting. It\u2019s an adventure, a possibility to \u201cremodel the facts and open up new horizons,\u201d notably through artistic research of \u201crestorative significance which begins with the production of a commons, intelligible and shareable by both sides of coloniality.\u201d How can this labour of forgetting be elaborated in contemporary art, as a gesture of resistance against the phantoms of a colonial past and the (symbolic and material) dispossession that it implies? <\/p>\n\n\n\n