Navigating Turbulences: CCC Public Seminar

Monday 8 May 2017

HEAD, Boulevard Helvétique 9
Seminar room CCC, salle 27, 2nd floor
at 7 PM

FRANÇOISE VERGÈS 
STRANGE FRUIT. A DECOLONIAL ANALYSIS OF THE MULTIFARIOUS 
SIGNIFICATIONS OF THE BANANA: RACE, SLAVERY, SEXUALITY, 
RACIAL CAPITALISM AND ENVIRONMENT
 

The banana, a fruit given to children and elderly for its nutritional qualities, a fruit that can travel great lengths without too much damage, has also been a metaphor for male sexuality, associated with slavery, with Banana Republics, i.e. US imperialism and military coups, with formidable use of pesticides, with images of Black savagery, with racism in soccer and politics, with environmental pollution and racial capitalism and with contemporary art. In her presentation, Françoise Vergès will follow these different threads and suggest how useful a decolonial methodology can be to bring these threads together. 

Françoise Vergès holds the Chair “Global South(s),” Collège d’études mondiales, Paris. Vergès grew up in Reunion Island in a communist, anti-colonialist and feminist family. In the 1970s–1980s, she was a journalist in a feminist monthly and weekly, an editor in a feminist publishing house in France and worked in anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements. She has written extensively on vernacular practices, memories of colonial slavery and colonialism, psychoanalysis, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and on processes of creolization in the Indian Ocean world. Between 2000 and 2010, she was Head of the scientific and cultural program for a forthcoming museum in Reunion Island for which she advocated the idea of a museum without objects.” Between 2009 and 2012, she was president of the Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery in France, created in application of the May 21st 2001 Law (Loi Taubira) recognizing slave trade and slavery as “crime against humanity.” Beside her activism-based writings, Françoise Vergès is author of moving-image documentaries, collaborated with filmmakers and artists and has been working as an independent curator. 

Navigating Turbulences names the Public Seminar 2016/17 that is organized by the Research-Based CCC Master Program, one of three Masters of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD – Genève. More a frame than a theme, Navigating Turbulences proposes to continue to think together about the need for new vocabularies for living in global turbulences by means of contemporary research processes. All sessions emerge from the CCC-Curriculum with its faculty members The Colloquium departs from literally “a speaking together”: from com- “together” + -loquium “speaking”. Such an approach does not propose thinking to be a philosophical method to study a subject matter but departs from a moment under conditions of turbulence when knowledge is in crisis that makes it necessary for us to think, to think differently.
 

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Navigating Turbulences: CCC Public Seminar
© Gaston Emerigon Fabre, Antillean Woman Banana Vendor, studio photography, Martinique, ca 1885.