art as a digestive aid for the esteemed white person

by Mikaelah Drullard

By performatively occupying political positions—especially anti-racist and decolonial ones—that are falsely radical or reparative, contemporary art deploys and reproduces processes that involve hypocrisy and cynicism, reinforcing with each new project, exhibition, or curatorial text the status quo of whiteness and modernity. From our own frustrations and desires as creators with a critical perspective and political imagination, what strategies can we collectively activate to counteract the voracity of contemporary art, which wants everything to revolve around it, which wants to see and know everything, which wants everything to be accessible and immediately consumable? What methodological strategies can we use to carry out our artistic and curatorial research—from a critical, decolonial, and anti-racist perspective—without simultaneously feeding the coloniality of power and knowledge? How can we abandon the cult of the individual and enunciation—the foundation of contemporary thought—and favour other ways of relating, thinking, and creating, such as those that can occur, for example, in community processes linked to listening?

Privileging a transdisciplinary, critical and self-reflective approach, we invite artists, art curators, researchers, as well as anti-colonial writers and thinkers from Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe to initiate exchanges around these issues and provocations. Based on their work and perspectives, we seek to identify and share some of the tools and methodological reflections that we find inspiring. How can we generate a horizon of practical and conceptual practices and tools that allow us to create, facilitate or rediscover other types of relationships between communities, artists, curators and researchers?

In this lecture, anti-racist activist and writer Mikaellah Drullard will address the tensions between activism, academia and artistic creation and raise questions about epistemic violence, structural racism and the limits of decolonial discourses when they become institutionalised.
 

bios

Mikaelah Drullard beautiful, black transvestite, Afro-Caribbean and border dweller, inhabitant of the third world. Migrant and fugitive from the anti-Haitian Dominican State and the sex/gender system. Writer, artist, anti-racist thinker, marika journalist, performance artist, organisational process facilitator, voguer and popular educator. She is the author of the books El Feminismo ya fue (2023, 6th edition 2025) and Veganismo Blanco (2025) published by OnA Ediciones. 

AGUAS is a curatorial platform founded in 2018 by artist and curator Rodrigue Mouchez Armendariz with the aim of creating spaces for critical reflection and co-creation that collectively redefine the spaces of art, creation, and research. Its approach is based on collaborative work with artists, curators and writers from diverse artistic scenes and cultural contexts, especially from Europe, Latin America and the Maghreb. After organising exhibitions in Brussels (Belgium), Mexico City (Mexico) and Miami (USA), AGUAS opened an exhibition space in the Gràcia neighbourhood of Barcelona in 2023.

This activity is part of the series Decolonial Methodologies in Artistic Creation?, organised by the curatorial platform AGUAS and coordinated by Rodrigue Mouchez Armendariz and Andrea Velásquez Butrón, in collaboration with Editorial Ona and La Escocesa. 

If you have any needs or questions regarding the accessibility of this activity, please, visit the page "access La Escocesa" by clicking here