In the twilight of the nineteenth century, which saw the consolidation of many nation states in Europe, and at the height of imperial expansion, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened a conference in Berlin in 1884–85 to organize the division of the African continent between the emerging industrial and military powers. This meeting, attended by fourteen European countries, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, was primarily aimed at securing their extractivist and commercial interests. This process led to a profound fragmentation of the endogenous political structures of the African continent, leaving a lasting mark on its political, economic, and social history. For Africans, this process ushered in an era of resistance and struggle for self-determination. Colonial entrenchment had been made possible by their technological inferiority in terms of weaponry. Despite the undeniable firepower of the aggressors, the division achieved on paper guaranteed neither control of this vast region of the world, nor the cultural and spiritual domestication of its populations.
140 years after this pivotal event, it seems urgent to unravel the structures knotted by the principles of colonial appropriation, identify their continuities, and settle their epistemological legacies.
The Deberlinization Conference does this in the city where these structures were codified— bringing together activists and practitioners from the fields of visual arts, performing arts, cinema, music, architecture, literature, economics, the humanities and social sciences, and politics.
A quarter of a century ago, Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, a Berlin-based visual artist of African descent, imagined an original way out of the impasse created by these enduring structures through the creation of a Laboratoire de Déberlinisation [Deberlinization laboratory]. Over the years, he developed tools that could be used to map out a path to emancipation by fictionalizing reality. This emergency kit includes a Global Pass to facilitate freedom of movement in a world dominated by the friction of state borders, as well as the AFRO, a common currency freed from indexation to exchange rate guarantees and the tutelage of exogenous central banks. At the crossroads of artistic creation and social critique, this programme offers a propitious platform for reflection on the possibility (by individuals or in collectives) of a refabulation of the civil bond within and outside the postcolonial state, in a chaotic world.
The Deberlinization Conference follows on from this performative utopia to consider the possible conditions of an alternative narrative on the world order and its future, a transformative poetics of relationship between creative action and forms of resistance, history, memory, foresight—in short, a field of experience and a horizon of expectation.
Ibou Coulibaly Diop and Franck Hermann Ekra, co-curators Deberlinization Conference