JEP » Issues » Un/Doing Epistemic Violence » Performing Cracks in Public Memory: Undoing Epistemic Violence Through Artistic Interventions

Performing Cracks in Public Memory: Undoing Epistemic Violence Through Artistic Interventions

https://doi.org/10.20446/JEP-2414-3197-39-1-50
Volume XXXIX • Issue 1/2 • 2023
Pages 50-73
Keywords: postcolonial urban activism, decolonial interventions, epistemic fissure, Bismarck, relational temporalities  

Abstract

The article explores the potentials and challenges of artistic interventions for undoing epistemic violence in public urban memory. Focusing on temporal imaginaries that underlie the politics of memory and their contestations, it problematises the coloniality of time materialised in practices of monumentalisation which inscribe epistemic violence onto public urban space. Focusing on the intervention ‘Bismarck-Dekolonial’, which addresses the world’s largest monument to Otto von Bismarck, in Hamburg, the article applies an analytic framework of epistemic fissure that lays bare the cracks in the Western temporal imaginary and traces the complexities of ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ epistemic violence.

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