Unlearning the Colonial Gaze: Grada Kilomba and the Poetics of Disobedience

Abstract

Since the mid-twentieth century, a profound reconfiguration of the epistemic ground of ‘art’ itself—aesthetic theory—has taken place. This review examines how modern logic and the inseparability of the modernity/coloniality pair have impacted aesthetic thought, revisiting traditional aesthetics through the concept of a decolonial aisthesis. Methodologically, it mobilises a bibliographic review of decolonial thought in dialogue with feminist theory and undertakes a case-based analysis of Grada Kilomba’s exhibition Poetic Disobediences (2019). This review also forms part of a larger research project on decolonial aisthesis, feminisms, and performance art, with results disseminated in various contexts. Distinctively, it foregrounds Kilomba’s installation The Dictionary (2019) as a central case study, emphasising how it dismantles the grammar of “healing” through language and performance and exploring its implications through the lens of Latina and Black feminisms. The results highlight the need to critically rethink aesthetics: if aesthetics is a modern and thus colonial construct, it must be unlearned and reimagined from within. The review concludes that poetic and epistemic disobedience emerge as insurgent gestures capable of destabilising coloniality in art, pointing not to the abolition of aesthetics, but to its decolonial reconceptualisation as a theoretical and methodological horizon.

1. Introduction: Modernity and the Colonial Wound

Language itself—in a broader sense—has become a contested site in contemporary decolonial debates on art. Few artists exemplify this more clearly than Grada Kilomba, whose installation The Dictionary (2019) stages the words denial, guilt, shame, recognition, and reparation. This work encapsulates a central question: if aesthetics is a modern and therefore colonial construct, can such a colonial gaze be unlearned and reimagined through new forms of art that operate from the perspective of a decolonial aesthetics? In this sense, the very notion of “healing” is reframed: not as restoration, but as the dismantling of the colonial wound through language itself.

This question is inseparable from the broader crisis of the modern concept of art, which since the mid-twentieth century has undergone profound scrutiny and redefinition. Avant-garde movements and feminist aesthetics radically reconfigured the relationship between embodiment, representation, and power, paving the way for a contemporary paradigm in which art is perceived not merely as an object but as an action, event, and—crucially—presence. This shift is accompanied by a turn towards the ‘non-Western’. Concurrently, contemporary scholarship increasingly seeks to subvert modern logic by recognising the inseparability of modernity and coloniality, as articulated by Quijano (2007), among others. This recognition necessitates a critical re-examination of aesthetic theory, prompting the urgent task of critically rethinking traditional aesthetics, which are constructs of modernity and, by extension, coloniality. In this context, the present review explores the works of seminal decolonial thinkers such as Mignolo (2010), Palermo (2010), Achinte (2010), and Mignolo and Vázquez (2013), who mainly advocate for a revision of traditional aesthetics through the concept of a decolonial aisthesis.

Such pivotal notion is examined here in relation to the exhibition Poetic Disobediences (2019) by the researcher and multidisciplinary artist Grada Kilomba.1 The exhibition brought together a set of works that juxtaposed text, performance, and installation to interrogate colonial epistemologies and to reclaim silenced histories. This review also forms part of a broader research project on decolonial aisthesis and performance art, whose results have been disseminated in different contexts.2 Distinctively, it foregrounds The Dictionary (2019), a work not examined in prior discussions or presentations, highlighting language as a privileged terrain of decolonial struggle and as something to be dismantled through a decolonial approach to aesthetics.

Kilomba’s trajectory begins with the book Plantation Memories (2016), and progressively materialises in the installations that compose this exhibition—first shown in Lisbon (2017), then Toronto (2018), and more recently, Berlin (2023), and Madrid (2024)—staging the colonial wound through performative gestures that confront the archive and re-inscribe insurgent memory. Kilomba’s exhibition in São Paulo, held at the Pinacoteca do Estado in 2019 (which I attended), likewise interrogated the Eurocentric roots of art history and proposed alternative narratives through her installations. Therefore, this review invites readers to question the very foundations of art theory and aesthetics. It argues that poetic and ‘epistemic disobedience’ (Mignolo 2009) constitute a decolonial strategy for destabilising coloniality in art and reconceptualising aesthetics as a space of epistemic dispute. Such exploration not only challenges the status quo but also seeks to inspire a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between art, modernity, and colonialism. As will be shown, this task cannot be separated from feminist interventions that expose how language itself becomes a terrain of domination and resistance.

2. On the Concept of Art: Naming the Unnameable Between Definition and Domination

A decolonial and feminist inflection makes clear that definitions are not neutral descriptions but acts of naming that organise visibility and authority. As bell hooks (1990, p. 146) has argued, “language is also a place of struggle”; the power of naming is the power of domination, and conversely the act of renaming becomes an insurgent gesture. Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) notion of the “borderlands” reframes the conceptual site of art as nepantla—a Nahuatl word meaning “in-between” or “middle”—a liminal, transitional space where identities, cultures, and knowledges intersect and are renegotiated. It signals both disorientation and the potential for transformation. Her emphasis on liminality allows us to see art not as a stable object but as a practice of crossing and dwelling in-between. Emma Pérez (1999), in turn, articulates the “decolonial imaginary” as a method for re-reading history and aesthetics from perspectives occluded by colonial and patriarchal narratives. By insisting on re-narration from the margins, Pérez highlights that any contemporary definition of art must include those voices historically silenced.

Thus, in dialogue with hooks, Anzaldúa, and Pérez, Kilomba’s work seems to expose colonial discourse while also offering the possibility of reconstituting meaning through poetic disobedience. This transition—from naming-as-domination to renaming-as-resistance—not only reframes “healing” as a linguistic and performative struggle but also prepares the ground for a renewed inquiry into what ‘art’ names and does today.

This feminist and decolonial reframing does not replace the long philosophical debate on art, but rather situates it differently: while Heidegger or Foucault approached “art” as a historically contingent concept within the episteme of their time, Anzaldúa and Pérez reveal how coloniality and patriarchy structured who could even speak within that episteme. In other words, both trajectories converge in showing that ‘art’ has never been a neutral term, but a contested terrain of naming and authority.

The question ‘What is art?’ has troubled philosophers for centuries—not because of its apparent simplicity, but precisely because no single answer has ever sufficed. Following the discussion of language above, the focus here is on how the very category of ‘art’ operates within similar dynamics of naming and domination. As Martin Heidegger noted in his Vorlesungen on Nietzsche (Heidegger 1978), art is one of the ‘fundamental words’ that fluctuate with the ‘breath of history’, deeply intertwined with humanity’s temporal existence. Indeed, “the fundamental words are, and will continue to be in the future, founders of history, always each time according to the interpretation that prevails [in their era]” (Heidegger 1978, p. 131, trans. mine). This implies that what Heidegger refers to as ‘fundamental words’—such as ‘human’, ‘freedom’, and ‘truth’—are concepts so deeply embedded in their epoch and human existence that, from a phenomenological and hermeneutic perspective, their understanding is deeply shaped by their historical context and the prevailing worldview of each era. Consequently, a univocal definition of art has never existed and is unlikely to emerge; its meaning continually evolves across various times, contexts and relational historical configurations. This discourse aligns with Michel Foucault’s (1972) notion of the episteme, the historical ground of possibility for knowledge: the framework that defines what can be thought, perceived, and authorised at a given time.

Let us consider, for instance, the question of what constitutes art today. One possible, albeit somewhat outdated, answer emerges from what we might term the ‘aesthetics of modernity’.3 This perspective rests upon several well-established tenets. Firstly, it posits that the ‘great arts’ are the ‘Fine Arts’ music, poetry, theatre, painting, sculpture, and architecture, each defined and hierarchically categorised into distinct disciplines. Secondly, it conceptualises art invariably as a ‘work of art’, implying it is necessarily an ‘object’ created by an artist—often perceived as a uniquely gifted ‘creative genius’—for the appreciation of another subjectivity. Most importantly, this viewpoint establishes a profound connection between art and subjectivity.

Yet if subjectivity—like all modern categories—is currently under scrutiny, why should the modern concept of art be exempt from such a crisis? Is this traditional definition truly the only, or even the most appropriate, answer? Or has the very course of art history rendered this definition obsolete?

Thus, the problem of ‘what is art?’ cannot be separated from ‘who names art, under what conditions, and to what ends.’ From this perspective, the very grammar of definition shifts from ontology to enunciation: art is not only what is (a work, an object) but how it is spoken, staged, and authorised. This reorientation prepares the ground for understanding why a piece like Kilomba’s The Dictionary matters here: it does not merely thematise language; it exposes how the politics of naming—denial, guilt, shame, recognition, reparation—structures the field in which ‘art’ becomes sayable, seeable, and contestable. In short, to rethink art today is also to contest its regimes of naming.

While much of twentieth-century philosophy conceptualised the ‘crisis of modernity’ in terms of metaphysics, subjectivity, and representation, Latina and Black feminists remind us that such a crisis has never been neutral. Rather, it is grounded in colonial and patriarchal exclusions that determine who may speak, who is rendered visible, and whose experiences count as history or art. From this perspective, the ‘crisis of representation’ is not only a collapse of philosophical categories but also the exposure of their constitutive silences.

At this point, the feminist and decolonial critiques converge with the philosophical diagnoses of crisis: if hooks, Anzaldúa, and Pérez reveal how coloniality and patriarchy determine who can speak in the field of art, modern philosophy itself—from Nietzsche to Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida—exposes the fragility of the metaphysical categories on which that very field was built. What emerges, then, is a double crisis: of language and of metaphysics, of enunciation and of representation. It is precisely at this intersection that the question of modernity’s ruins must be approached.

3. Modernity in Ruins: Crisis, Representation, and Coloniality

The aesthetics of modernity strove to create a universal definition of art, applicable to all times and places, as outlined above, which still subsists, to some degree even in Western ‘common sense’. Yet this very framework has been destabilised by the dual crisis described above—the crisis of enunciation unveiled by feminist and decolonial thought, and the crisis of metaphysics diagnosed within Western philosophy itself. This broader crisis refers, above all, to the collapse of Western metaphysics and its consequences—notably the nihilism that continues to haunt the contemporary (postmodern/hypermodern) era—as well as to the crisis of subjectivity, accompanied by the crisis of representation,4 incessantly discussed by countless authors throughout the twentieth century.

One example, although not the only one, is the perspective presented by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (Foucault 1994) when he discusses the formation of the modern episteme and the crisis of representation as a symptom of the collapse of the underlying metaphysical structure. Furthermore, the crisis of metaphysics (and metaphysics as the foundation of the modern episteme) was intensely discussed throughout the twentieth century by authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida. In addition to them, many others, including Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, also sought to understand and think beyond the ‘crisis’, despite disagreeing on their diagnoses (and prognoses) of the contemporary era. In this review, these formulations—whether named the ‘crisis of metaphysics’, the ‘crisis of modern paradigms’, or the ‘crisis of the modern episteme’—are treated as articulations of the same historical problem. These different diagnoses could actually be considered symptoms of a greater crisis, namely the crisis of the modern (metaphysical) paradigm.

The crisis of metaphysics—understood in this context as the very foundation of the crisis of the modern episteme—is (re)produced in the most diverse fields, from politics to aesthetics. Any discussion on the crisis of the modern episteme, it should be noted, has an intrinsic relationship with the thought of Michel Foucault and his archaeology of knowledge. For Foucault, the episteme of each era demarcates the conditions of possibility for all knowledge.

The episteme (…) as a set of relations between sciences, epistemological figures, positivities, and discursive practices, the episteme makes it possible to grasp the set of constraints and limitations which, at a given moment, are imposed on discourse: but this limitation is not the negative limitation that opposes knowledge (connaissance) to ignorance, reasoning to imagination, armed experience to fidelity to appearances, and fantasy to inferences and deductions; the episteme (…) is a questioning that accepts the fact of science only in order to ask the question what it is for that science to be a science. In the enigma of scientific discourse, what the analysis of the episteme questions is not its right to be a science, but the fact that it exists.

(Foucault 1972, p. 192)

The seventeenth century was the century in which specific epistemic conditions—the consolidation of scientific rationality, the mathematization of nature, and the emergence of the modern subject—made possible not only scientific discourse but also the constitution of the modern subject. And it is precisely these conditions that are in crisis today. However, another aspect must be considered when speaking of the modern episteme and its metaphysical background as foundations of the aesthetics of modernity—an aesthetics that Hegel (2015) famously sought to elevate to the status of a ‘science of beauty’, but also as part of the modern worldview as a whole.

This worldview, however, is not neutral. Latina and Black feminists remind us that the ‘crisis of representation’ also exposes the exclusions that sustained modernity: it was not only categories of subjectivity or metaphysics that collapsed, but the very hierarchies of race, gender, and colonial difference that determined who could represent, who could speak, and whose experience counted as history or art (hooks 1990; Anzaldúa 1987; Emma Pérez 1999). From this perspective, the philosophical “crisis” appears inseparable from the silences it was built upon.

And as Walter Mignolo rightly points out,

’modernity’ is a complex narrative whose point of origination was Europe; a narrative that builds Western civilization by celebrating its achievements while hiding at the same time its darker side, ‘coloniality’. Coloniality, in other words, is constitutive of modernity—there is no modernity without coloniality. Hence, today’s common expression ‘global modernities’ implies ‘global colonialities’ in the precise sense that the colonial matrix of power is shared and disputed by many contenders.

(Mignolo 2011, pp. 2–3)

Countries that were colonised are still under the effects of colonial domination, even centuries after their independence—effects such as racialisation and Eurocentrism. Although the notion of a crisis of modernity is widely acknowledged, it is rarely connected to the idea that this crisis also exposes the darker side of modernity, one that often remained unacknowledged. From this angle, thinking of coloniality as the reverse side of modernity—two sides of the same coin (Mignolo 2011)—is a powerful interpretative possibility, which is supported here as relevant to thinking about art theory in its profound contemporary changes. Above all, because thinking of coloniality as a constituent of modernity is a central point for reviewing the construction and transformations of the modern episteme and how it affects not only us as Brazilians and Latin Americans, but also other colonised and racialised peoples across the Global South, who have necessarily absorbed modern categories through the colonisation process, and who now rework them critically in art, thought, and political imagination, generating new modes of thinking and sensing that unsettle the very grounds of the modern episteme.

Coloniality,5 a concept coined by Aníbal Quijano (2000) does not refer to a historical period, as colonialism does, but to an enduring structure that survives the end of formal colonialism. It operates in political, economic, epistemic and even aesthetic domains. This explains why coloniality has outlived colonialism and why it remains embedded in global capitalism’s exploitation of both humans and nature. According to Ramón Grosfoguel (2002), the modernity/coloniality framework is deeply tied to the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’, a project rooted in Eurocentric epistemology that claims universality while marginalising non-hegemonic ways of knowing. This epistemological hierarchy subordinates knowledge and artistic expressions produced outside dominant centres, reinforcing colonial power structures. Grosfoguel argues that understanding the modern/colonial world-system requires situating knowledge production from the perspective of those historically positioned on the subaltern side of coloniality (a notion that inevitably recalls Gayatri Spivak’s famous question in Can the Subaltern Speak? 1988). By adopting this approach, it becomes possible to challenge the limitations of dominant epistemologies and expose how global capitalism is not only an economic system but also a symbolic and epistemic order that dictates what constitutes legitimate knowledge and art.

There is also the “geopolitics of knowledge” (Mignolo 2002; Grosfoguel 2002): a fundamentally Eurocentric project and, for this very reason, reductionist of the knowledge and arts produced outside the hegemonic centres, given that the construction of power/knowledge by the modern/colonial imaginary subordinated and subordinates [all] other ways of living–thinking–knowing, from the moment [they] are considered inferior. This could be called “coloniality of knowledge” (Quijano 2000; Grosfoguel 2002) and permeates the subjugation of subjects and their domination, in a historical silencing of diverse epistemes from colonised countries. Racism, exploitation, gender violence, genocide, repression and the hierarchization of knowledge and cultures are characteristic of coloniality, which is precisely the “dark side” of modernity.

The world today, in its geopolitical organisation and in many of its hermeneutic possibilities, is still a consequence of the modern vision, its emphasis and expansion, in its vices and virtues. For Walter Mignolo, modernity—in the final analysis—is nothing more than a “narrative of salvation” that needs coloniality in order to carry out its projects, a process that persists even in the twenty-first century. However, once the mask of modernity is exposed, and the logic of coloniality appears behind it, decolonial projects also become evident as extremely necessary. To attempt to overcome the crisis of modernity/coloniality, from the perspective of the Global South, must also mean thinking beyond (and overcoming) colonialism—in other words, thinking outside the conceptual box of traumas and prejudices left by colonisation, opening ourselves to the multiple matrices that shape our identities and modes of knowing, beyond the Western/European frame.

In this light, the “crisis of modernity” is not only philosophical but also political and epistemic, grounded in exclusions of race, gender, and geography. It is precisely here that the contribution of artists like Grada Kilomba becomes crucial: by dismantling colonial epistemologies through language and performance, her work renders visible the silenced dimensions of this crisis and stages possible futures within the ruins of modernity.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, in Epistemologies of the South (Sousa Santos 2014), similarly insists on the urgency of perspectives that recover silenced peoples and cultures—first marginalised by colonialism and later by the logics of coloniality perpetuated under capitalism. But is this possible when we think about art theory or aesthetics? Is it possible to think about art beyond the modern matrix? If art is a polysemic word, what direction might history take it in, now that the modern ideology is being so deeply questioned in the Global South?6

4. Decolonising the Senses? Beyond Modern Aesthetics

Building on the double crisis outlined above—of language/enunciation and of metaphysics/representation—what would it mean to think aesthetics beyond the modern matrix?

It is important to say that the question of (what is) art has already been profoundly reconfigured. Namely, the long-standing question ‘what is art?’—and, in late-twentieth-century debates, its displacement towards ‘when is art?’ (Goodman 1978), i.e., under what conditions art takes place—shifted the focus of discussion, especially since the influence of the seminal work of the twentieth-century avant-gardes, as well as postmodern critiques and feminist interventions in art theory (see Lippard and Chandler 1968; Lippard 1973; Nochlin 1971; Foster 1983).7 Such trajectory would eventually lead to the more contemporary paradigm of art not as a work, static and finished, but increasingly as an action, event and, above all, presence.8 This paradigm already unsettles the modern assumption of art as object-for-a-subject and reframes it as embodied encounter—a mode of sensing that exceeds representation.

Adolfo Albán Achinte (2010), a Colombian artist and activist and an early thinker on coloniality in art, argues that Europe, in the early decades of the twentieth century, experienced a profound rejection of its own past. This rupture became a foundational element of emerging artistic movements, responding to the crises of capitalism and directly opposing the dominant principles of classical aesthetics. He suggests that these dynamics contributed to what Hegel (2015) had previously termed the ‘death of art’, later examined by Walter Benjamin (1968) as the “loss of aura”—a consequence, among other factors, of the increasing reproducibility of artworks. This trajectory, according to Achinte (2010), was further extended in the reflections of later philosophers of art. Nelson Goodman, in Ways of Worldmaking (1978, p. 57), reformulated the traditional ontological issue ‘what is art?’ into the question ‘when is art?’, that is, under what conditions art takes place. Building on this shift, Arthur Danto, in After the End of Art (Danto 1998), argued that the historical narrative of art—based on linear progressions of styles and movements—had come to an end, giving way to a pluralist condition. Together, Goodman’s displacement of the central question and Danto’s diagnosis of the end of art exemplify the broader reconfiguration of art theory in the late twentieth century.

We will not delimit the theoretical framework for this paradigmatic shift here, we will just point out that it is located within the major change that took place in art theory in the twentieth century: the end of the (modern) conception of art based on works of art and a historical and linear evolution of artistic styles (‘art history’ seen as universal), a perspective that has been exhausted in the direction of new ways of making and experiencing art. It is also important to note that the avant-garde’s quest to overcome modern categories also led to a search for the ‘other’—necessarily found outside the perimeters of Western culture, as Marianna Torgovnick (1990) describes—something that, however, should be viewed with caution. Primitivism is another of the ‘isms’ often used to describe twentieth-century avant-garde art’s fascination with what was then called ‘primitive art’. Examples of primitivism could be found in Pablo Picasso’s ‘inspiration’ by African masks;9 Antonin Artaud’s fascination with Balinese theatre; Gauguin’s Tahitian motifs… It is interesting to think that this appropriation by European artists of elements from the artistic productions of non-Europeans is situated, in a sense, within the same hermeneutic horizon that also underwrote colonial conquest and racial hierarchies. Even when unintended, this continuity cannot be ignored. One may ask whether it was not necessary to be within a paradigm that saw the other culture as spoils to be ‘discovered’ and appropriated, as if it were ‘at their disposal’, so that such appropriation could take place to begin with… Still, the same avant-gardes that tried to think beyond the modern paradigm opened progressive fissures in art’s historical fabric, and contemporary times seem to be witnessing the emergence of a new paradigm, which tries to think about art beyond the Western tradition, aware of the possibility of other epistemic configurations and other traditions—even if its final configuration is not completely clear.

Echoing some decolonial thinkers, it can be argued that art theory and aesthetics are in urgent need of their own ‘decolonial turn’, a process that is unfolding at its own pace. Nelson Maldonado-Torres played a pivotal role in shaping this turn, significantly contributing to decolonial thought. In 2005, he organised the symposium Mapping the Decolonial Turn: Post/Trans–Continental Interventions in Philosophy, Theory, and Critique at the University of California, Berkeley. This event gathered scholars from diverse disciplines to examine the intersections of coloniality, modernity, and alternative epistemologies, helping to consolidate the decolonial turn as a critical movement (Maldonado-Torres 2005, 2007). By bridging Latin American decolonial thought with other intellectual traditions, such as postcolonial studies and critical race theory, it reinforced the necessity of challenging dominant narratives. The decolonial turn, as originally conceptualised by Maldonado-Torres, encompasses both theoretical and practical dimensions, functioning as a form of political and epistemological resistance against the structures of modernity/coloniality. It critically exposes the deep entanglements between colonial frameworks and modern knowledge production, advocating for alternative epistemologies rooted in subaltern perspectives.

Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge that the genealogy of decolonial thought is neither monolithic nor recent. Well before the popularisation of the term “decoloniality” by Mignolo and others, Chicana thinkers were already forging epistemologies that challenged colonial and patriarchal regimes of knowledge from within. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) stands as a seminal work in this regard, articulating the epistemic liminality and insurgent identities of racialised and gendered bodies in the Americas. Laura Pérez, in Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Alterities (L. E. Pérez 2007), further expands this feminist decolonial horizon by analysing how Chicana artists negotiate spiritual, political and aesthetic dimensions in deeply embodied ways. To omit these contributions would be to reinforce the very colonial hierarchy they seek to dismantle—a hierarchy in which male Latin American scholars often gain institutional visibility while Black and Indigenous women, as well as Latinas and Chicanas such as Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Chela Sandoval (2000) and Emma Pérez (1999), are sidelined. Their work is foundational to any meaningful understanding of decolonial aesthetics. In short, decolonising the senses is inseparable from these feminist genealogies that have long insisted on embodiment, language and imagination as insurgent terrains.

For art theory, such a movement of resistance to the logic of modernity implies two central points that we will discuss below, firstly, it implies escaping from modern categories (for example, the idea of a creative/enjoying subjectivity, endowed with a specific form of universal sensibility, and the idea of the work as an object, already mentioned); secondly, it implies going beyond the hierarchization of knowledge and practices instituted by modern thought.

On the first aspect—how art theory can escape modern categories—a few points are in order: initially, studies on the modernity/(de)coloniality pair focused more on epistemological, economic and political issues. Concerns about art took a little longer to appear on this horizon of questioning. The expression “decolonial aesthesis”, for example, was only consolidated in Spanish in 2010, based on a seminal publication on the subject from Walter Mignolo (2010), later expanded in other work published together with Rolando Vázquez (Mignolo and Vázquez 2013). As Mignolo and Vázquez explain “decolonial aesthesis is a movement that is naming and articulating practices that challenge and subvert the hegemony of modern/colonial aesthesis” (Mignolo and Vázquez 2013, p. 4). In their paradigmatic work, the authors propose a thesis, considered by many to be controversial, on how modern aesthetics has colonised our “aisthesis”—the term with which the authors chose to continue calling our senses/sensations/sensibility. The word aisthesis, as any student of philosophy or art theory knows, despite its origins in ancient Greek, has been appropriated by modern thought in a specific and even distinct sense from Greek usage—for whom aisthesis had not been the target of philosophical research into art. As Mignolo and Vázquez state:

A distinction between “aestheTics” and “aestheSis” is the first basic step. Both terms come from the Greek language. As Greek concepts, they are not Eurocentric for Europe did not exist at the time of the Greek wise men.

Aesthetics become Eurocentred in eighteenth–century Europe when it was taken as the key concept for a theory of sensibility, sentiment, sensations, and, briefly, emotions, in contrast with the obsession for the rational. On the other hand, Kant mutated it into a key concept to regulate sensing the beautiful and the sublime.

(Mignolo and Vázquez 2013, p. 6)

They argue that modern aesthetics emerged from a specifically European historical experience—but positioned itself as the global standard for perceiving beauty and the sublime: from the seventeenth century onwards, aesthesis—the fundamental capacity for sensory perception shared by all living beings—became increasingly restricted within the framework of aesthetics, which reduced perception to a Eurocentric theory of beauty. This shift marked the colonisation of aesthesis by aesthetics, imposing a particular, culturally situated understanding of sensory experience as universal (Mignolo 2010, pp. 13–14). As a result, aesthetics and reason became integral to the colonial matrix of power, regulating not only what could be considered beautiful but also how sensations themselves were structured. In response, decolonial aesthesis challenges modern and postmodern aesthetics by exposing their role in maintaining epistemic domination and reclaiming diverse, historically marginalised ways of sensing and interpreting the world.

It is the supposed universality of a theory about art that Walter Mignolo criticises. He does not deny its validity as a specific way of thinking about art within European contexts—that remains. The question is why what should be a specifically European experience (and therefore representative of the way in which a particular community, in a particular space–time, conceptualised the “aisthesis”) should necessarily be considered universal or valid for all times and peoples? For him, this is how “the mutation of aisthesis into aesthetics” would have laid the foundations for “the devaluation of any aesthetic experience that was not conceptualised in the terms in which Europe conceptualised its own regional sensory experience” (Mignolo 2010, p. 14).

If the use of the word aisthesis, which modernity enshrines, refers to a specific conception of how our senses and sensations could operate, is it still possible to think of aisthesis beyond notions such as ‘faculty of sensibility’ or ‘judgment of taste’? When Mignolo revisited the subject a few years later, in 2013, together with Rolando Vázquez, they reinforced the continued use of the word aesthesis, as it even “predates the emergence of the idea of Europe”. Only in the eighteenth century did aisthesis become a key concept for a theory of sensibility, in contrast to the modernity’s obsession with the rational:

Kant mutated it into a key concept to regulate sensing the beautiful and the sublime. This was the starting point of ‘modern aestheTics’ that emerged from European experience and local history, and that became, even already in Kant’s work, the regulator of the global capability to ‘sense’ the beautiful and the sublime. In this way, aestheTics colonised aestheSis in two directions: in time, it established the standards in and from the European present, and in space, it was projected to the entire population of the planet. Aesthetics and reason became two new concepts incorporated in the colonial matrix or power.

(Mignolo and Vázquez 2013, p. 6)

Rescuing aisthesis from any conception based on a metaphysics of subjectivity is Mignolo and Vázquez’s proposal for constructing the idea of a “decolonial aisthesis”. With this, they emphasise the pre-European character of the word, in a decision that the authors take in order to confront it with its use by modern aesthetics. This confrontation would aim to “decolonise the regulation of our senses” and the sensations to which our bodies can respond. And even earlier, in the seminal article of 2010, Mignolo had already discussed the work of artists he considers non-colonial (such as Fred Wilson, Pedro Lasch and Tanja Ostojic), because they pointed to a possibility of constructing an aisthesis and a subjectivity that differs from the modern one.

5. The Painful Division: Art, Craft, and the Colonial Hierarchy

Another point to note here is that, almost at the same time as this regulation of the senses and the institution of taste took place, there was also the hierarchization of the arts and knowledge, as well as peoples and cultures in modern and colonial thought. This hierarchization cannot be dissociated, even indirectly, from the construction of a history of art and an aesthetic theory, which also took place in modern times. Hegel, the great proponent of aesthetics as a science of beauty, in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art10 was also the first to suggest an art history synonymous with the evolution of the spirit, categorising not only the fine arts but also creating a progressive timeline that pointed to the modern state as the apex of history (until then), leaving many peoples (even peoples with ancient traditions such as China and India) on the margins of such linearity. Other cultures, considered backward in the face of this progression of the spirit, would bring with them not the manifestation of art as a fine work, but at most its intuition or aspiration in its artifacts.

Immanuel Kant, thirty years before Hegel, had already presented his considerations about fine art and the judgment of taste, the beautiful and the pleasant, in his paradigmatic book Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant 2013). For Mignolo and Vázquez (2013), aesthetics emerged as a philosophical discourse in eighteenth century Europe, which ended up creating parameters to ‘regulate taste’, with repercussions not only within Europe, but as a movement from Europe to the rest of the globe. This regulation would have brought about the “transmogrification of ‘art’ as a skill into ‘art’ as a norm, as good taste and beauty” (Mignolo and Vázquez 2013, p. 11), based above all on Kant and his influence. By starting to regulate (good) taste, art ceases to be a skill (a ‘know-how’ in the sense of the Greek techné) and aesthetics is consolidated as the possibility of a ‘universal norm’ for taste. Skills that do not fit into such ‘superior’ category of art, in the face of this ‘norm’ of good taste, would be reduced to mere artefacts devoid of spirit or simple ‘craftsmanship’—the manual work that was never of an artist, someone elevated to the category of creative genius, a ‘modern demiurge’. It is no coincidence that artisans and handicrafts are almost always found in the realm of popular cultures, among women, and those considered ‘exotic people.’

Additionally, such dimension of the art/craft divide has long been problematised by feminist art history as gendered. As Rozsika Parker (1984) and Griselda Pollock (1999) have discussed11, the historical devaluation of women’s creative labour is rooted in hierarchies that associate the feminine with the domestic, the decorative, and the artisanal — forms of making long dismissed as “craft” rather than “art”—a devaluation that is not only gendered but also racial-colonial as well: given that “craft” has historically been assigned to racialised, Indigenous and diasporic makers whose epistemologies are read as ‘non-art.’

In parallel, Elvira Espejo Ayca12 (2020) argues that the “painful division of art,” which intensified throughout modernity, played a crucial role in hierarchising and colonising societies and bodies. This division, she explains, established a rigid separation between what is classified as ‘craft’ and what is recognised as ‘art.’ According to Ayca, art came to be defined as an exclusive realm of refined aesthetic pleasure, intellectualised through a model of subjective contemplation. This Eurocentric, patriarchal, and anthropocentric perspective, she explains, was inherited from rationalist thought and justified by Kant, who framed aesthetics as a distinct form of pleasure tied to a Western philosophy of detached contemplation.

Taken together, Ayca’s critique and feminist analyses expose how colonial and patriarchal hierarchies of modern thought converged in defining what counted as legitimate art. As Ayca puts it, this “separates the contemplation from the action, from the doing and the praxis”. In other words, art as fine art or erudite art is seen as the only truly legitimate art, as opposed to popular craftsmanship in its “naivety”, denying to this day the epistemic plurality that lies at its base, by not understanding “other community [epistemic and creative] logics of our peoples of the Americas” (Ayca 2020, p. 2)—in what can also be framed in the project of a “geopolitics of knowledge”. In this sense, we could say that the modern episteme did not present favourable conditions for the emergence of statements that would ensure the possibility of legitimising the production of popular and local knowledge as valid knowledge and skills, because the very idea of a universality of knowledge or taste was a “categorical impediment”.

The idea of universality ignores the specific link between knowledge and power, which is never neutral. In fact, the very idea of ‘neutrality’ would be a fallacy, and a dangerous one, since it would legitimise asymmetrical power relations and social and cultural hierarchies, often perpetuated in the school, academic and scientific environment. This claim to universality was not restricted to the scientific field. Modern aesthetics, as the construction of the canon of its time, could not be totally neutral either. For Adolfo Achinte, it was deeply marked by the tensions and contradictions inherent in the modern/colonial project, as well as by the “Eurocentric ink of art’s self-reflexivity” (Achinte 2010, p. 87). It taxed everything external to it as “the other”, or “exotic” or “inferior” and

consequently, other latitudes were left on the margins (…). The possibility of conceiving Latin American art has always been mediated by the narrative of universality, leaving out the specificities of local contexts in a kind of necessary universalization of an art that has been relocated and transferred from its own universe of creation and production. Perhaps for these reasons, the actions and products created by peoples with different histories and trajectories, but who have suffered the action of inferiorization and disqualification, such as the indigenous and Afro-descendants, have continued to be silenced and relegated, considered as handicrafts or products for consumption by tourists in need of exoticism to reaffirm their own centrality.

(Achinte 2010, pp. 87–88, trans. mine)

This debate has been gaining increasing ground in contemporary times, when the current epistemic soil—in crisis, as already mentioned—and its cracks make it possible to increasingly question the hegemonic model of scientific knowledge production that modernity has built. Many voices have emerged questioning hegemonic models of making and thinking about art. Many thinkers and artists, some already mentioned in this text, have dedicated themselves to this task, which questions the idea of a universal canon and a neutral aesthetic theory. For example, interdisciplinary researcher and artist Grada Kilomba, whose work will be discussed below, argues that dismantling the power structures of colonialism would necessarily involve questioning and dismantling its visual and semantic language as well—that is, unlearning the colonial gaze—and reconstructing new readings. Her work addresses issues of race, gender, memory, trauma and decolonisation of knowledge: ‘Who can speak?’ and ‘What can we speak about?’ are constant questions in her work. And to take up Adolfo Achinte (2010, pp. 87–88), the aforementioned process of exoticising the ‘other’, the ‘non-European’, their creations and meanings, was more than just a process of colonisation: it was also a process of debasement and, above all, silencing.

In a text about the exhibition discussed here, Djamila Ribeiro13 (2019) recounts her interview with Grada Kilomba. As Ribeiro (2019, p. 11) records, Kilomba stated: “Because we are seen as different, and this difference is considered problematic, we are left out of the power structures, which is structural, institutional, academic, daily racism, etc.”. To this Djamila, later in the text, adds that it is the “colonial imposition of a single voice which submitted Black people to the condition of objects. When Kilomba narrates it, she takes on a voice which had been silenced” (Ribeiro 2019, p. 12).

6. Discussion: The Dictionary and the Politics of Language (and Silence)

6.1. Poetic Disobediences as Hybrid Praxis

In 2019, the Pinacoteca de São Paulo hosted the exhibition Poetic Disobediences, by Grada Kilomba, consisting of four works marked by an unconventional, interdisciplinary use of installation, performance, text and staged readings, deliberately unsettling Eurocentric logic and expectations, “designated to juxtapose, to question and provoke new interpretations on the museum’s collection of art from the 19th and 20th Century art, (…) and the histories that have remained invisible.” (Volz 2019, p. 5). It is to this exhibition—in which Grada Kilomba sought to create images that dismantled the concepts of knowledge, power and violence and their silencings—that we will turn here to advance a little further in our discussion about the possibility of a decolonial aisthesis, as proposed by Mignolo (2010) and Mignolo and Vázquez (2013). After all, as the artist said in an interview with the newspaper El País at the time of the exhibition: “We normalise words and images that tell us who can represent the human condition and who cannot. Language is also the transportation of violence, which is why we need to create new formats and narratives. This poetic disobedience is decolonising” (Kilomba and Oliveira 2019, trans. mine). This disobedience can be seen on many levels, both because of the voice that refuses to obey and be silenced, but also because it was an exhibition that operated in a “hybrid space between art theory and practice, through publications, staged readings, performances, video installations and texts.” (Volz 2019, p. 6).

This hybrid nature of Kilomba’s work, navigating between theoretical elaboration and artistic embodiment, exemplifies the movement from decolonial thought to decolonial praxis. Her installations do not merely illustrate concepts, they perform them, inhabiting the very borderlands between knowledge and art that decolonial aesthesis seeks to reclaim. In this sense, her work resonates with what Anzaldúa (1987) called the “borderlands”—the epistemic and affective spaces where fragmented identities and insurgent forms of knowing take shape. In what follows, we examine two key pieces from the exhibition as instances of this embodied disobedience.

6.2. The Dictionary: Language, Silence and Resistance

This embodied disobedience is also linguistic. In The Dictionary (2019), words themselves become monumentalised, stripped of their colonial weight and re-signified as gestures of resistance (see Figure 1). Here Kilomba materialises what bell hooks (1990) described as the violence of language: by staging the terms denial, guilt, shame, recognition and reparation, she exposes how language reproduces domination, but also how it can be reclaimed. As Volz notes, these words “appear chronologically one after the other, creating a path of consciousness. It is a work about unlearning and how to transform formats and how we speak” (Volz 2019, p. 6). Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) concept of “borderlands” and Emma Pérez’s (1999) “decolonial imaginary”, previously mentioned, help situate Kilomba’s intervention as a border practice: a re-writing of history in which silenced subjectivities enunciate themselves through language.

Poetic disobedience also entails articulating what was once unspeakable. In recent years, institutional spaces such as museums have sought to revise their collections—and, by extension, art history itself—recognising the need to incorporate narratives that have long been excluded from hegemonic Eurocentric discourse. Within this broader effort, Grada Kilomba’s exhibition at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo stands as a significant example. Her works reframe the silenced history of colonialism and its enduring traumas, critically examining the ways in which stories are constructed, the reasons behind their telling, and the authority that determines who has the right to narrate them. Kilomba “challenges the dominating forms of knowledge sharing, preserved in official curriculums, by stating that knowledge is the mirror of social, economic, racial and gender relations.” (Volz 2019, p. 6).

Building on this perspective, Barreiros and Moreira (2019) describe Grada Kilomba’s decolonial practice as a hybrid praxis—knowledge produced through performance. For them, her trajectory from scholar to artist confirms that to decolonise knowledge is to perform knowledge, a formulation that is not merely descriptive but programmatic. Decolonisation, in this sense, occurs through the enactment of other epistemologies—through embodied gestures in which memory, trauma, and silenced histories are staged anew. Scientific knowledge, Kilomba (2016) argues, is never universal nor neutral but always located somewhere and always written by someone who has a history. Within the white conceptual world, the Black subject has long been cast as a ‘bad object’, embodying what white society represses. Kilomba’s performances disrupt this projection and act as processes of recognition and healing within the Afro–Luso–Brazilian space, providing a vital reference for decolonial artistic and intellectual movements that understand knowledge as something to be enacted as much as thought.

In this context, it is worth noting that the seminal text by Mignolo and Vázquez (2013), aforementioned, which proposed the term ‘decolonial aesthesis’, has an extremely meaningful subtitle: “Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings”. Thus, for Mignolo and Vázquez, the healing of colonial wounds is the necessary task of a decolonial aisthesis: which would necessarily start with conscientization14, precisely because it can make things visible—and making visible:

the wound of coloniality hidden under the rhetoric of modernity (…). Decoloniality is at once the unveiling of the wound and the possibility of healing. It makes the wound visible, tangible; it voices the scream. And at the same time decolonial aestheSis moves towards the healing, the recognition, the dignity of those aesthetic practices that have been written out of the canon of modern aesthetics.

(Mignolo and Vázquez 2013, pp. 17–18)

Yet precisely here a caution is needed: if “healing” risks reproducing modern logics of salvation, a decolonial stance may privilege unlearning—a refusal of the very grammar of cure. From this perspective, art does not mend; it unsettles and reconfigures the sensible. This unsettling force is exemplified in The Dictionary. Kilomba monumentalises five words—denial, guilt, shame, recognition and reparation—staging them as a “path of consciousness” (Volz 2019, p. 6). Each term echoes the stages theorised in Plantation Memories (2016): denial as refusal, guilt as spectacle, shame as projection, recognition as turning point, and reparation as demand. In dialogue with Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak 1988), we may say that Kilomba makes the subaltern speak precisely by restructuring the very lexicon of speech. María Lugones’s (2007) notion of “world-travelling” further illuminates this gesture: Kilomba obliges her audience to traverse worlds where words no longer dominate but liberate.

6.3. Towards Decolonial Futures

Alongside The Dictionary, the exhibition also featured Table of Goods (2019), an installation invoking the plantation15 economy through materials such as coffee, sugar, cocoa and chocolate. This work will not be discussed in detail here, yet it serves primarily as a counterpoint: if The Dictionary interrogates the coloniality of language, Table of Goods exposes the coloniality of consumption (Dias 2025). Together, they show how discourse and economy intertwine in sustaining colonial violence—and how poetic disobedience re-inscribes both as sites of struggle.

Grada Kilomba’s work is essential in rethinking historical narratives as a means of creating new possibilities for existence. Rather than looking to the past for healing, her art confronts the persistent and still present wounds of colonialism, making them visible and tangible through artistic expression. In this sense, her practice aligns with the concept of a decolonial aisthesis, as it reconfigures pain into a form that can be seen, heard, and acknowledged. If the cure is anywhere, it is not in the past. What else could the task of art be today, even after modernity and its consequences, if not to make visible what would otherwise remain unseen, to give voice to what has been silenced? The questions that Grada Kilomba emphasises in her exhibition, such as “Who can speak?” and “What can we speak about?”, are questions that highlight the power relations stemming from the global logic of coloniality—made visible in her work. By restaging silenced histories in installations such as The Dictionary or Table of Goods, she transforms absence into presence and personal memory into collective narrative. In doing so, her art unsettles fixed categories of belonging and subjectivity, thereby reshaping our understanding of identity as something relational, historical and contested. She sees art as a space for knowledge production, where new questions emerge, challenging established narratives. For her, a crucial role of artistic creation is to dismantle existing power structures by retelling stories in ways that resist erasure and affirm alternative modes of being.

The theme of a decolonial aisthesis is far from exhausted and here it has barely begun to be sketched out: it must be said that questioning a dominant canon has long been a task in the making, even though it is still far from completed. It is necessary to rethink not only art theory, but also art history, in the direction of new forms of artistic making capable of escaping from geopolitics of knowledge and its painful hierarchies, reconfiguring knowledge and the power relations that are still in force, so as to perhaps heal colonial wounds rather than keeping them open. To paraphrase Mignolo (2010, p. 25, trans. mine), the installations described here, in a precursory way, would already point to “constructions of decolonial futures”—even though he was referring to the work of other decolonial artists and not to the work of Grada Kilomba, it seems to me that this also applies. To which he continues:

it is decolonial installations and performative processes that are forcing the decolonisation of art history and criticism and the construction of decolonial aesthetics. (…) But it is soon, too soon, to build global futures in which the conditions and possibilities for the formation of such subjects and subjectivities no longer exist.

(Mignolo 2010, p. 25, trans. mine)

As we approach the end of this discussion, when I think about the poetic disobedience proposed by Kilomba, I wonder if a decolonial aisthesis can, beyond modern limits and determinations, come to terms with what Suely Rolnik (2023) calls the ‘sphere of insurrection’ against all this entrenched unconscious that still keeps the wounds of coloniality open, hierarchising and marginalising individuals, peoples, knowledges and practices. In Kilomba’s case, this insurrection seems to materialise in the very act of breaking silences: by transforming what was historically unspeakable into performance, voice and image, her installations interrupt the colonial-capitalist unconscious. They convert silence into speech, absence into presence, and subaltern memory into collective narrative, destabilising the very epistemic and institutional structures that sought to erase them. For Rolnik, healing is intrinsically linked to artistic creation, as healing is only fully realised through the emergence of new modes of existence. In this sense, each act of micropolitical insurrection can be understood as a reawakening of life itself—the emergence of alternative ways of existing that resist colonial–capitalist forms of subjectivation and open possibilities for other futures. Artworks, in this perspective, embody such gestures of resistance, becoming micropolitical insurrections that open up spaces for new modes of existence. The possibility of truly overcoming coloniality remains dependent on the construction of alternative global futures that have yet to be imagined.

If what we still call art today carries the potential to be a sphere of insurrection, it may not be out of duty but out of necessity—a gesture of survival and disruption rather than obligation. Such disobedience would necessarily take place in a context in which we need to “decolonise aesthetics” and the entire tradition of art. Even, as Rolnik (2023) also points out, using the word ‘art’ or ‘artistic operation’ to define what is responsible for/able to think of such ‘embryos of worlds’ (or ‘germs of modes of existence’, terms used by the author for new possible futures) that overcome all the irrationality that coloniality (and capitalism) keeps as an open wound in our world—what she also calls the ‘colonial–capitalistic unconscious’ (since the author never separates the two terms)—is limited.

After all, in modern Western culture, shaped by the colonial–capitalist regime, the power of creation has historically been confined to a specific domain institutionalised as ‘Art’, a construct that emerged just over two centuries ago. Rolnik (2023) argues that the micropolitical approach aims to liberate this creative potential from its restricted framework, allowing it to be reactivated across broader social practices and fostering new modes of existence beyond institutional constraints.

Once again: we need to disobey tradition and free creation from the hierarchies and categories that modernity has confined it to. We need to decolonise our senses—and also our practices and theories, our imagination and creative force. There seems to be a profound convergence, at least on this point, between the thought of Suely Rolnik and that of Walter Mignolo—and also a profound dialogue with the work of Grada Kilomba. In fact, in 2016, Rolnik interviewed the artist, and in that interview, she said of her work (a statement with which Grada Kilomba agreed at the time) that her installations would be:

an incredible device to bring out the colonial relationship in its living pulse, and not in its ideological representation. It is the experience of the living presence of the other in the body which, in white Western subjectivity, is totally anaesthetised and, as a result, the other is a mere representation: they do not exist. For me, this is what fundamentally defines what I call the colonial–capitalist unconscious. It is like a spell that runs through all the relationships in our societies, and not just between coloniser and colonised. Breaking that spell is the question and I think that is what you [Grada Kilomba] are looking for in your work.

(Rolnik and Kilomba 2016, trans. mine)

But how do you break this ‘spell’? How do we go beyond the rubble and shadows of modernity, coloniality (or what Rolnik calls the “colonial–capitalistic unconscious”), in which we are all inserted—in the labyrinth of its irrationality and its silences?

A final note: This question also reverberates within the very institution of the museum. As Griselda Pollock (1999) observes, museums are not neutral containers of memory but contested arenas of power. Kilomba radicalises this condition: by curating words rather than objects, she exposes how the colonial unconscious is preserved in institutional spaces, and how it can be unsettled through decolonial practices of enunciation. In doing so, her work aligns decolonial aesthetics with transnational feminist struggles over who speaks, what is spoken, and under what conditions.

7. Conclusion? Towards a Decolonial Aisthesis

Beyond regulating taste, aesthetics as normativity also has served to reproduce the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality: the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of beings. Modern aesthetics have served as a mechanism to produce and regulate sensibilities. Decolonial aesthesis are processes of thinking and doing, of sensing and existing, in which the modern distinction between theory and practice has no purchase. Decolonising the senses means, in the last analysis, decolonising modern, postmodern, and altermodern knowledge regulating aesthesis, in order to decolonise the subjectivities.

(Mignolo and Vázquez 2013, p. 11)

Decolonising our sensibility—what Mignolo still calls aisthesis—does not mean abolishing aesthetics altogether, but repositioning it critically, recalling what has been silenced through its modern–colonial framing. This entails confronting how our bodies and subjectivities have been trained by modernity’s rigid separations of sensibility and rationality and reclaiming ways of knowing and feeling that were relegated to the margins. In this sense, what Adolfo Albán Achinte (2010) calls a “pedagogy of re-existence” becomes fundamental: an aesthetics not only of resistance but of invention, of learning to exist otherwise, of creating worlds against colonial erasure. Here, feminist interventions remain decisive: if hooks insists on the violence of naming, Anzaldúa on the liminality of borderlands, and Pérez on the imaginary as decolonial rewriting, each converges with decolonial thought in showing that aisthesis itself must be reclaimed as a field of struggle. Accordingly, this review proposes ‘unlearning’ as a form of ‘healing’ as restoration, since it is an operative figure for decolonial aisthesis, where dismantling the colonial grammar of language is unlearning the colonial gaze. As so, it becomes method and horizon, and, crucially, a way to dismantle the patriarchal logics that subtend those grammars.

Could this be the cure? Or, as Achinte (2010) anticipated, can decolonial aisthesis be a pedagogy of re-existence—not only resisting, which has always been present, but also inventing new ways of existing, learning to exist otherwise? In this sense, the art of native and of African diaspora peoples becomes exemplary: it teaches us to re-exist, to transform silenced memories into creative practices, to recover what modernity suppressed as mere ‘craft’ or ‘tradition.’

Thus, to ask, with Nelson Goodman (1978, p. 57), “When is Art?”—that is, under what conditions art takes place—is to move the question of aesthetics beyond the modern search for universal definitions and into the terrain of situated practices and struggles. Kilomba’s intervention shows that this question is not only epistemic but also ontological: it unsettles both the ‘how’ and the ‘when’ of art, repositioning them within the afterlives of colonial violence and the performative urgencies of the present.

Her praxis insists that to decolonise is to perform—to embody knowledge otherwise, through acts that unsettle, unlearn and reconfigure—foregrounding re-existence rather than cure and unlearning the colonial gaze in the process. In this sense, Kilomba’s poetic disobedience converges with feminist calls—from Gloria Anzaldúa to bell hooks—to reclaim language and imagination as insurgent territories, where alternative modes of existence can be rehearsed.

If art is profoundly historical, then in a world in upheaval a new ‘art’ must also be dreamed: not confined to objects or categories, but as imagination and practice forging new paradigms, new worlds, new forms of existence. Kilomba’s poetic disobedience resonates as an eloquent gesture, reclaiming silenced memories and unsettling colonial hierarchies. In her staging, words become wounds and wounds become words; art takes place as both remembrance and insurgence, as mourning and as possibility.

In this key, feminist re-narration (hooks, Anzaldúa, Pérez) is not an addendum but a condition of possibility: decolonial futures will be spoken not only against coloniality, but from the margins where gendered and racialised silences insist—and where they are turned into speech. The task of a decolonial aisthesis is therefore clear: to displace and recompose aesthetics, liberating our senses and our bodies from the categories of modernity. An art that refuses, that re-exists, that rebels—and, in doing so, gives form to worlds still to come.