In this interactive session, we will engage the audience in an exploration of the power which maintains norms of academic knowledge in our practices often in contradiction to our professed theories and epistemologies. Using the example of a visual essay, “Blind running: 25 pictures per page”, which we co-authored with 7 others, we will explore the challenges of using art as a way of knowing as well as other disruptions to taking a well-lit path.
My mind races in the darkness:
Tell me what it means…tell me… tell me… tell me
“Shut up” my feet cry, “you have had centuries of opportunity to make use of words, palavras, mots… centuries of text authority – text which condemned you to be enslaved, which classified your hunger as lesser than his, than hers; your children, your wings, your waters, your dreams… expendable.”
Hmm, sigh (breath), ah, now room to remember the passion of words leading to this place of searching for understandings, to make space for all sensory perceptions, reasons, intuitions, inspirations and wisdoms. Words that call me to live and be just.
What if we try to work together through the living things and experiences which our words describe? Whose language and authority would determine the meaning of an image I see? What is the meaning of the scent of a lemon thrown between you and I?
You are angry. I am confused.
What is the scent/sense of the lemon thrown?
Bright fragrance sparkles in my nose, knowing the nonsense – Sisyphus losing grip of isms as he reaches the top, now pushing postcolonialism and intersectionality. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest?
The words that run, run, run…
away from leaving languages and cultures behind, missing the life shared when you dance with you, the love seen, the hunger felt, the perceptions perceived.
Let´s try putting on a blindfold and stop looking for words... just for a moment… It is disorienting not knowing where are the dangers. Yet perhaps also exhilarating to run with a new freedom, one full of risks. Will you have my back?