Colonialismo e amnésia

Até 1 de Agosto, esteve patente no Innsbruck Art Pavilion uma exposição de Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa que reunia trabalhos sobre o colonialismo britânico de África oriental, focados na questão da memória e do esquecimento colonial e a narrativa actual sobre África. Sønke Gau escreve na Contemporay and:

The dominant narrative propagated by the media – of people fleeing war, poverty, and hunger in their countries of origin to settle in safer, more prosperous Europe – is juxtaposed against a more complex story. The “promised lands” to which the artist Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa is referring in her video installation of the same name are not the rich nations of Europe, but two countries in eastern Africa: modern-day Kenya and Uganda.

Wolukau-Wanambwa, whose artistic approach grapples with the tangled relationships between land, architecture, and the body in late colonialism, has been researching the legacy of British colonialism in East Africa since 2011. She is particularly interested in “mnemonic technologies” introduced during the colonial era, such as museums and state archives, which play a major part, as sites of remembrance, in the construction of “imagined communities.”

On a research trip to the northern shore of Lake Victoria, she learned of a cemetery used as a resting place for people largely from Poland and the Ukraine. Upon further investigation, she found out that these were refugees who had been housed in local camps during and after World War Two. In 1941, when the United Kingdom and the USSR were allied in the war against Germany, they were deported from the Siberian Gulag via Tehran and British India to what was then the British “protectorate” of Uganda, where they lived in isolation from the locals.

O texto completo em COLONIAL AMNESIA, YESTERDAY AND TODAY