As part of the exhibition You Breathe Differently under the Weight. Debt and Credit we cordially invite you to a collective reading of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unbezahlbare Schulden: Szenen des Werts, gegen den Pfeil der Zeit.
The novel Kindred by the American science fiction author Octavia E. Butler is a crucial starting point for da Silva’s text. Through readings of individual scenes and from a Black feminist perspective, da Silva develops a fractal understanding of time and colonial debts, bringing the interconnections of coloniality, race, and capital into focus.
Her text invites us to question the relationship between the way we understand reality and how we shape it through categories, principles, and methods. By neglecting fundamental principles of the understanding of linear time, also one of the defining principles of Butler’s novel, she reveals new connections between capital, exploitation, expropriation, and appropriation. As a philosopher (Prof. University of Columbia), artist, and activist, da Silva focuses on the debts that arise as ongoing burdens and obligations, and demands the return of the wealth accumulated through slave labor. At the same time, she problematizes the existing legitimization of inherited debt and loss through racist narratives.
Unbezahlbare Schulden provides impulses for how we can think about credit and ownership. We want to approach these with you and engage in conversation.
In the exhibition You Breathe Differently under the Weight. Debt and Credit Denise Ferreira da Silva, in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman, presents the video work Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, filmed in the Chilean Atacama Desert. The work examines patterns of thought and relationships to the Earth shaped by European colonial modernity, thereby revealing stories of violence that largely remain hidden.
The event will be held in German.
Unbezahlbare Schulden provides impulses for how we can think about credit and ownership. We want to approach these with you and engage in conversation.
The event will be held in German.