This special issue origins in the research project EXPECT_Art, i.e. EXPloring and Educating Cultural literacy Through ART[1], which has decoloniality as its methodical foundation. The aim of the project “is to identify current barriers and potentials for promoting critical cultural literacy by means of arts education, education through arts and uses of arts in education … Continue reading Introductory note
Read More...This article explores how ‘deviation’—as both a concept and teaching strategy—can help decolonise the school curriculum. Drawing from the EXPECT Art project and critical ethnography in a Barcelona primary school, it highlights how engaging with artistic practices and personal stories enables students and teachers to challenge the traditional school canon. While deviation fosters inclusion and meaning-making, it also brings challenges, such as tensions around curriculum priorities for students from different backgrounds. Ultimately, deviation marks a starting point in the ongoing process toward a more decolonised and culturally responsive education.
Read More...This paper presents a philosophical reading of decolonial visuality as a co-creative and educational practice whereby communities that have been marginalized in the Global South resist inherited visual practices and create new knowledge. The first part of the paper engages with the film La Noire de… by Ousmane Sembène from 1966, whose depiction of colonial subjectivity can serve as a concrete starting point to discuss how visual practice can subvert the established link between seeing, interpreting, and power. Further on, the film will be engaged into conversation with the mural practices of the Tlacolulokos collective, active in Oaxaca and Los Angeles, as well as the Indian television series The Sword of Tipu Sultan from 1990. Through the use of Frantz Fanon’s theory of sociogenic subjectivity, Mignolo’s concept of coloniality of knowledge, Sylvia Wynter’s criticism of over-representation of ‘Man’, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s discussion of the decolonization of the sensorium, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, I argue that visual meaning does not just appear within the images but is created through the dynamic relation between forms, body and community. In all three examples, visual practice is discussed not only as a mode of resistance but also as a production of knowledge.
Read More...This article examines the growing institutionalization of decoloniality within contemporary curatorial discourse, asking whether its expanding circulation corresponds to an epistemic transformation or risks consolidating a new critical vocabulary. Moving beyond representation, it approaches curatorial practice as a site of decolonial inquiry, tracing exhibitionary practices alongside intra-European genealogies of the “classical canon” and the construction of a Southern European “other.” It argues that the European South functioned as a laboratory of coloniality, where mechanisms of aestheticization, temporal distancing, and epistemic displacement developed in interaction with colonial forms of knowledge production. Against this genealogy, the article proposes contextual curating as a decolonial research method that treats context not as a setting but as a constitutive element of curatorial inquiry, seeking to redistribute epistemic authority through situated knowledge and co-creation.
Read More...This article examines what happens when decoloniality moves from critical theory into the institutional language of museums and heritage organizations. Drawing on decolonial scholarship, institutional theory, and museum studies, it explores how decolonial ideas are translated into policy, professional vocabularies, curatorial practice, and institutional discourse. It argues that decoloniality operates within a tension between critique and containment: institutional recognition can create visibility, legitimacy, and material change while also standardizing and limiting critical demands. It further considers how institutional authority, unequal knowledge production, and researcher positionality shape the circulation of decolonial discourse within contemporary cultural institutions.
Read More...This paper examines “Becoming TAIGA”, an annual gathering of women and queer artists and activists from/in Eastern Europe, as a space of reconnection and healing the colonial wound of separation. Drawing on collaborative (auto)ethnography, interviews, field journals, and somatic experience-harvesting from the 2024 gathering in Suseja, Latvia, it analyses four participatory workshops held by community members. Findings explores how embodied, multisensory, and more-than-human practices turn personal pain into collective strength, decentre the individual self, and cultivate relational interdependence. The study also acknowledges tensions around exclusion, language, and researcher exhaustion, situating decolonial practice between Western and russian imperial legacies.
Read More...This paper draws upon Walter D. Mignolo’s concept of coloniality as a modern state of being and a notion derived from a decolonial/postmodern standpoint. The recognition of coloniality, based on Western-oriented perspectives and narratives, is argued from a Balkan historical standpoint, through which coloniality is reflected in the reigns and regimes of large state formations, such as the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. Decolonial internalized practice of writing, i.e. the act of creating against the dominant hierarchical voice, actually gives rise to questions about how a narrative should be created so that it becomes the challenging voice of future generations. We take one vivid and clear example, Bogomil movement and its rise in Macedonia, as a form of decolonizing practice against the monolithic Byzantine macronarrative. In order to illustrate the practice of decoloniality, Bogomilism is viewed in the context of Christianity and its relevance afterwards, when diverse narratives reveal the relationality of various voices and practices. In a historical sense, Bogomilism is a rebellion against the dominant Christian dogma, and also an opposition to feudalism and its power/knowledge structure. This paper tackles the concept of vincularidad/relationality, adopted by several Andean indigenous thinkers like Nina Pacari, Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, Felix Patzi Paco, etc., and regards decoloniality not merely as coexistence and a correlation, but also as a shared influence, mutual impact, and standing on a common ground of shared experience. In the Balkan realm, the coexistence of Christianity and Bogomilism unravel Bogomilism’s importance as an early decolonial practice, further explained in Kosta Racin’s work.
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