RE-START, RE-SET, RE-IGNITE |19 april, CRL – Central Elétrica

LA COLECCIÓN: MIRADA COLONIAL, by Azkona & Toloza, 19H [IBERESCENA]

Third part of the research project in ethnographic and anthropological photography carried out by Laida Azkona Goñi and Txalo Toloza Fernández, this research residency in the field of live documentary arts, focused on the way of looking at the other conveyed by Western culture and education.

Ethnographic photography in its early stages, the result of expeditions and trips, closer to the documentary field and without clear scientific criteria, has become a powerful instrument in the academic world to build the image of the “other” as an exotic, inferior and, most of times, wild.

This last point is even more striking in the case of the former overseas colonies, where repression and barbarism cut off much of the oral tradition of native peoples at once. Over the years, ethnographic photographs, almost always taken by Europeans and built to scientifically endorse social Darwinism, have become the only documentary evidence of their past, the “true face of their ancestors”.

In short, it is no less true that it is in this way of seeing, understanding and explaining the world, understanding the other as an exotic being and assuming colonial barbarism as a habitual way of doing things, that we were educated, instructed and colonized.

The duo of artists exposes their process seeking to contribute to the reinterpretation of our cultural history and, ultimately, to the decolonization of our gaze and the memory of our bodies.