"REPARATIONS BEGIN IN THE BODY, AND THAT IS WHERE OUR POEMS MUST BEGIN"1. ON THE LABOUR OF REPAIRING AND SAVVY CONTEMPORARY'S PROJECT "FOR THE PHOENIX TO FIND ITS FORM IN US: RESTITUTION, REPARATIONS, AND REHABILITATION".

 

Abstract

 

Reparations are juridically understood as a compensation for historical crimes and inequities, having the aim of remedying injustices and helping specific groups of people or populations to re-prosper. Considering reparations not as a financial debt only (but also), this lecture grapples with the thinking and writing of activists, scholars, and writers that address reparations as a way to find “new ways of redeeming bodies in the society”2.
 
Reparations may begin in the body, as poet Harmony Holiday states. In this lecture we will ponder: What are possible formats of reparations? How can communities and vulnerable individuals be remunerated and supported in more complex and alternative ways? What forms of solidarity are possible when relations are broken beyond repair? Reparations correspond to both immaterial and material injury, since the injuries of past actions are not just experienced materially, but felt intergenerationally, corporeally, affectively. While material remunerations thus involve, for instance, the return of stolen land, objects, monetary payments, and the reconstruction of infrastructure, immaterial possibilities of addressing the mental and cultural legacy of colonialism are much more complicated and involve psychic reconciliation, moral recalibration, and a complicated process of self-and community repair.3
 
 
1 Harmony Holiday, Reparations begin in the body: A look at why the first and most crucial poetic gesture for a black poet in the West is a knowledge and mastery of her body, originally published: October 6th, 2016 on poetryfoundation.org: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2016/10/reparations-begin-in-the-body-a-look-at-why-the-first-and-most-crucial-poetic-gesture-for-a-black-poet-in-the-west-is-a-knowledge-and-mastery-of-her-body. Last access: 25 May 2021.
2 Harmony Holiday, Reparations (forthcoming, see: https://www.amazon.com/Reparations-Harmony-Holiday/dp/1944380132).
3 For the internalization of colonialism see also: Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1983. (https://web.archive.org/web/20120227110138/http://multiworldindia.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/the-intimate-enemy.pdf) and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization” in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Winter 2012 (http://www.adivasiresurgence.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Silvia-Rivera-Cusicanqui-Chixinakax-Eng1.pdf)

 

 

Biography

 

Elena Agudio is a Berlin-based art historian and curator. She studied Art History at the University of Venice - Ca’ Foscari and in 2010 she received her PhD in Contemporary Art and Design. She is interested in curatorial practices as forms of troubling, with a focus on its performative and relational aspects. Since 2013 she has been artistic co-director of SAVVY Contemporary, where she curates and co-curates exhibition projects, discursive programmes and series, among which recently Ultrasanity. On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry and Resistance; Soil is an Inscribed Body. On Sovereignty and Agropoetics; and the series Speaking Feminisms/We Who Are Not The Same dedicated to an exploration of current feminist practices and alliances. She is also artistic director of the non-profit association Association of Neuroesthetics (AoN)_Platform for Art and Neuroscience, a project in collaboration with the Medical University of Charité and The School of Mind and Brain of the Humboldt University encouraging both dialogue and lasting cooperation between contemporary art and the cognitive sciences. She writes, and since 2017 has been teaching at the Weissensee School of Art in Berlin (the last three semesters at The Master of Arts-programme in “Spatial Strategies”). In 2017 and 2018 she was Guestprofessor at HfBK (Kunsthochschule für Bildende Künste) in Hamburg and Resident Fellow at Helsinki University of the Arts.

 

Universidade Católica Portuguesa

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Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa

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