C&: Reflections on 2023

#wearecontemporaryand

C& is looking back at an immensely rewarding, busy, stimulating, and overall special year. It’s been a year of celebrations, connections, and community – and equally a year of challenges, learning, and complex navigations.

First of all, it was C&’s tenth anniversary and our community came out to celebrate with incredibly beautiful and inspiring events in Berlin, New York City, São Paulo, Nairobi, and Santo Domingo. Thanks to all of you who joined!

But we also pushed forward: to enrich and expand the content created through the C& network, and thanks to the Terra Foundation for American Art, we facilitated C& Critical Writing Workshops in Atlanta and Dallas with the adjunct C& Mentoring Program.

We launched one of our most comprehensive C& Print Issues to date – an issue reflecting on Black and Indigenous ecologies. And you might have seen C&’s second book – All that it holds. Tout ce qu’elle renferme. Tudo o que ela abarca. Todo lo que ella alberga. It has just come out and its selection of texts function as an extension of the dynamic decade-long conversations within and around the C& network. Check out ourPatreon membership site to get your copy now !

Speaking of which, as a you can also gain early access to exclusive content from our global constellation of artists, writers, and thinkers. In DecemberPatreons can look forward to Ethel-Ruth Tawe’s reflection on South Africa’s first Black woman photojournalist, Mabel Cetu, and texts by Rosie Olang’ Odhiambo and Mashabela Khanya Mashabela about a recent research trip to Switzerland.

Another important step for C&: this year we received funding from the Mellon Foundation to research the best strategies and tools for enabling in-depth research into the enormously rich archive of texts that has grown out of our work over the past decade. Stay tuned for C& Cyclopedia!

Looking back, we can see that the extensive archive C& has built up since 2013 suggests strong, alternative narratives of not only one but many art histories and presents. This decade of multi-authored work also reflects an editorial practice in which postcolonial theory and decolonial perspectives have always been the core. We can see an archive that describes how multiple, sometimes contradictory layers of identity continually come together.

This brings us to a challenge: in the complex current global situation, a critical or judging tendency towards postcolonial theory and decolonial practices has emerged. To bow out of the year, then, we feel an urgent need to share certain texts from our archive in this reader onPost-Colonialism and Decolonial Practices. Through its diverse, equal, and inclusive voices which tap into and speak from different contexts, expanding and strengthening networks around the globe, we hope this reader stands as a reminder of how crucial the postcolonial and decolonial have been and still are.