Pluriverso: un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos

Movimiento Zapatista

In the face of the multipronged planetary crisis, what kind of spaces exhibitions can provide, co-create or be part of? In this course, we will be drawn by pressing questions of our context, and examine what can we (un)learn by the intersection of exhibitions, radical pedagogies and pluriversal art histories. Will discuss theories, concepts, realities and reflect on cases across cultures and worlds.

We will start by examining the exhibition medium against the backdrop of colonial modernity, discussing the objectification of culture and the “ocularcentrism” (Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui), while reflecting on strategies of transformation. How do exhibitions perform? How do the spatial strategies of exhibitions produce and shape categories and value systems? What subjects do they aim to produce? To what extent do exhibitions transform or consolidate the existing order? What pedagogies are embodied in space? How can spatial strategies lead to radical pedagogies?

By asserting that there is no neutral pedagogical process, the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire published Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) for a liberating and anti-colonial education, understanding critical pedagogy as a political act of emancipation and creative power against the „culture of silence“ and the „passive learner“. For Freire, “education can only be liberatory when everyone claims knowledge as a field in which we all labor”. The seminar continues by discussing this seminal text by Freire through to its impact on various practices and theories, such as the publication Pedagogies of Travesti Liberation by Brazilian Afro-transfeminist and educator Maria Clara Araújo, which addresses the construction of gender identity, the relationship between the body and education, and the possibilities of transformation through education, claiming „Nossos corpos são pedagógicos“ (Our bodies are pedagogical). We will have the opportunity to meet and discuss with the author at her book launch on 18.10.2025, 18:00, at HKW.

Cusicanqui’s critique to the colonial regime of “ocularcentrism”, which ranks vision over other senses, will lead us to reflect and theorize “knowing as a bodily political practice”, that is the performative dimension of bodies, gazes, writing and relation to archives beyond the limits of ocularcentrism and within and through spatial strategies: “how we would decolonize Cartesian ocularcentrism and reintegrate the body’s gaze to the flow of inhabiting space-time, in what others call history”. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s concept of Corpoliteracy will be crucial to continue to reflect on the “effort to contextualise the body as a platform, stage, site and medium of learning, a structure or organ that acquires, stores, and disseminates knowledge”.

Within that critique, we will also situate and discuss how the performative intervention can be a force against the conditions of capitalism in which corporeal power has been transformed into labor, and reflect on Silvia Federici’s claim that “our struggle then must begin with the reappropriation of our body, the revaluation and rediscovery of its capacity for resistance, and expansion and celebration of its powers, individual and collective” and that “performance and dance is central to this reappropriation”.

On a second chapter, we will reflect on pedagogies of rest, that reconceptualize slowness against the backdrop of capitalist productivity, and discuss how these ideas may benefit a critical cultural practice, searching for models that resist chrononormativity (Anna Colin), and conceptualize rest as resistance (Tricia Hersey).

On a final section, we will reflect and discuss on the possibilities of epistemological difference, and the “cultural transitions” needed to confront the interrelated crises of climate, food, energy, poverty, and meaning (Arturo Escobar, also in part inspired by Paulo Freire). As Escobar remind us, “difference is embodied for me most powerfully in the concept of the pluriverse, a world where many worlds fit, as the Zapatista put it with stunning clarity”. Against the West’s universalizing tendency, “the pluriverse consists in seeing beyond this claim, and sensing

the world as pluriversally constituted” (Walter Mignolo). We will conclude this third chapter by reflecting on the concept of pluriverse, and discussing which strategies might shape exhibitions as spaces for pluriversal knowledges.

Main bibliography

Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance, 2022.

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (First edition 1968). ‎Bloomsbury, 50th anniversary Edition, 2022.

Maria Clara Araújo, Pedagogias das Travestilidades. Civilização Brasileira, 2022

Maria Clara Araújo, Pedagogies of Travesti Liberation, 2025 (translation into English and German)

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax. On Practices and Discourses of Decolonization. Cambridge, Polity Press, 2020.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Corpoliteracy: Envisaging the Body as Slate, Sponge

and Witness In: V.V.A.A, I Think My Body Feels, I Feel My Body Thinks: On Corpoliteracy, 2022.

Minna Salami, Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone, 2023.

Silvia Federici, “In the Praise of the Dancing Body”. In: Beyond the Periphery of the Skin. Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism. Toronto : Between the Lines, 2020.

Anna Colin, Alternative Pedagogical Spaces. From Utopia to Institutionalization, 2025.

Beatriz Colomina, Radical Pedagogies. MIT Press, 2022.

Renata Cervetto, Macarena Hernández, Miguel A. López, (Eds.), Agítese antes de usar. Proximidad y reciprocidad en las prácticas artísticas / educativas, 2023.

Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, 2018.

Bernd Reiter, Constructing the Pluriverse. The Geopolitics of Knowledge, 2018 (foreword by Walter Mignolo).

Françoise Vergès, A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum, 2024.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2012.