Françoise Vergès

Françoise Vergès

Senior Fellow, Sarah Parker Remond Center for the Study of Racism and Racialization, UCL, London, UK

Being Slow/Being Fast in Times of Counter-Revolution

The state of permanent war that racial capitalism and imperialism need for their own survival and which they impose upon peoples, rivers, oceans, non-human species, soil, and subsoil, belie the discourse of a world that would have known peace since the Second World War. That peace was the name a new world order gave to its military interventions, austerity programs, and recast civilizing mission.

The museum is not protected from the current global counter-revolution unleashed on the planet, depriving human and non-human species of vital, basic needs for living, nor from its genocidal politics, destructive extraction, practices of stealing land, water, or resources. The current velocity of attacks raises new questions that go beyond practicing “diversity and inclusion.”

How does the museum resist the weird but effective marriage between far-right forces, conservatism, patriarchalism and individualism, libertarianism, and a free market?

Does increased militarization affect artistic and cultural institutions?

What will be the political economy of new models of museum making? The museum is not a neutral institution, it is a total social structure with its own racial, gender, social hierarchy and inequalities of positions, social status, and salaries. How will social, racial, and gender justice be implemented? How far can we go as we are confronting budget restrictions, structural racism, fascism, anti-migration politics, anti-intellectualism, and the cruelty and inhumanity of neoliberalism?

Why and how does reconsidering the qualitative over the quantitative in cultural work help us resist the velocity of attacks on public institutions?

Being slow: taking the time to reflect, build, organize, acknowledging the time anything needs to grow, what is nurturing, preserving in the temporality of doing less vs. doing differently?

Being fast: learning the strategies and tactics needed for acting fast, in a second, to hide, to obstruct surveillance and police, to protect, to save, and to preserve. Underground practices, creating refuges and sanctuaries.

Biography:

Françoise Vergès (La Reunion/France) is a writer, decolonial antiracist feminist, independent curator and an activist.

Last publications: A Program of Absolute Disorder. Decolonizing the Museum (2024) and Making the World Clean. Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment and Racial Capitalism (2024).