With this current and collective book project 'being imposed upon', publiekeacties facilitates a literary platform for decolonisation from a feminine and afro-descendent perspective. One main goal during the Belgian colonisation of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, was to embed patriarchal ideas into the native communities. This was an effective strategy. For that reason and within this project, we perceive the concept of decolonisation as a process that must include feminism to dismantle the unique oppression women of the colour face until today.
A committee of female Afro-Belgian decolonisation activists and thinkers; Heleen Debeuckelaere, Tracy-Bibo Tansia, Sabrine Ingabire, Modi Ntambwe, Anne Wetsi Mpoma and Gia Abrassart, focused on the question which feminist themes are underexposed in the decolonisation debate in Belgium and how these might be implemented in the book. The conversations are held around a small stage that functions as a table. This installation can be seen as a modular stage that will transform into a book in the years to come. The audience is invited to 'listen rhetorically' - i.e. to foster conscious identifications with decolonisation, gender and (non)whiteness in ways that may, in turn, facilitate cross-cultural exchange.
Heleen: '...it is about externalising the historical cost, and the cost of remembrance to people who are actually not supposed to do that... to the victims of that oppression. So all of us around this table- all of us have done a lot of work to get things back on the agenda... We have written texts, brought about discussions about things happening around us, such as racism and the colonisation of the public space. But the interesting thing is actually that we shouldn't be doing this work. This work should be done by other people and the fact that we have to do it is a form of externalising the internal cost and a form of colonisation.'
Wetsi: 'I like this point, really...'
Modi: '...you made my day!'
Tracy: 'I did not quite understand...'
Sabrine: 'The fact that we have to... that we, as victims, have to do this work, is also a form of colonialism. Because it is not up to us, and as you said, we could have been doing other things and even should have been doing other things... Instead, we are doing this.'
Heleen: 'It falls to us to do this work, but it should be the state and the educational system that should be doing it.'
Video part 1 is below and Links to part 2 and 3: Video 2, Video 3