The Aníbal Quijano Chair

Spain’s position in the modern/colonial global order is unique and entails a discussion around multiple “souths” and “norths”. Although Spain was a key agent in the construction of colonial power in the sixteenth century, at the end of the eighteenth century it lost the pomp of modernity and was relegated to Southern Europe — the first transformation in the colonial pattern of power, subsequently managed by France, England and Germany. At that juncture, the invention of Southern Europe coincided, temporally and conceptually, with Orientalism. Mignolo looks to untangle the specific paradigm of Iberian and Spanish space in these constellations and what this mixed-race and Creole place, at once colonising and colonised, tells us about the colonial pattern of power.

The twentieth century’s first genocide was committed by the German empire between 1904 and 1908 in South-West Africa — Namibia today. This genocide targeted Nama and Herero ethnic groups, Indigenous peoples from the region, within a context of European powers dividing Africa at the Berlin Conference (1884–1885). As in his previous works, Brodsky focuses on the way in which this crime against humanity is remembered and comprehended from specific research work and the recreation of photographic archives.

A conversation on the life and thought of Aníbal Quijano, with whom both worked, and, more specifically, on his theory and practice of friendship. Quijano believed friendship holds a central place as a mode of doing in an intrinsic union between experience and thought. Setting out from this evocation, it is possible to examine other contemporary questions linked to the inheritance and validity of decolonial thought. In facing today’s geopolitical transformations, for instance the emergence of possible de-racialised capital as a result of China’s current economic dominance or before the climate crisis and global energy emergencies, there is a need to question the generativity of the emancipatory potential of Quijano’s decolonial project.

El sueño es vida (A Dream Is Life) is a monologue by Thimbo Samb, produced by Teatro Sin Papeles and written and directed by Moisés Mato López. In the work, Samb touches on his migrant life path — dreams are life because they move feet and hands along the way and in tasks deemed necessary. The piece prompts us to read his experience in relation to La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), a baroque drama by Calderón de la Barca, thereby setting up a dialogue with the opposition and duality between free will and predestination, and between reality and dreams. Together with this performance, in conjunction with World Refugee Day (20 June), different awareness-raising activities against border violence will be held and implemented by Red Solidaria de Acogida (The Refuge Solidarity Network) and the Museo Situado assembly, spotlighting the southern border (Ceuta and Melilla) where tragic events such those in Tarajal on 6 February 2014 and in Melilla on 24 June 2022 set in motion a campaign against neglecting justice and repair.

In this lecture, Rita Segato proposes an understanding of roots as the last space of resistance before the commodification and privatisation of space and territory, characteristic of neoliberalism. If the anthropological base of community is its affective, imaginary, symbolic, aesthetic and sensitive connection to a specific space and irreplaceable in its uniqueness, then the denomination of these links makes territory sacred and constitutes powerful and invisible lines of resistance to capital’s needs. Opposite the imperial logics of urban planning and rural colonisation, based on the de-characterisation and continuous mobilisation of spaces, and before the major migratory and ecological crises that are commonplace in the current context, Segato defends the geographies of the soul of Indigenous peoples, their micro-toponomy and non-replicability, as a trench and a bridge with the past which survives in community.