Decolonial Interventions

by Decolonize Zurich

In the last decades, archives have been in the midst of a discussion about their accessibility and transparency. Such a debate has resulted in new challenges for the democratization of the archives. New voices need to have access to their knowledge and its production. VOLUMES has taken such challenges seriously and extended its already diverse and non-hierarchical archive to new perspectives.

Our decolonial interventions of VOLUMES Archive aims to decentre the possible (unconscious) repetition of Eurocentric centres and to extend the political agency of the archive to often marginalized voices. We interrogate the colonial legacy and neo-colonial power relations in the existing Zurich Archive’s publications. We experiment with different forms of intervention in the publications themselves to explore the possibilities of the archive as sites of political resistance and challenge to colonial imaginaries. We seek to show the potential of creative (and joyful) interventions as a decolonial tool for other actors to continue the decolonization of the archives. Please join us! In our fanzine “Decolonize Zureich”, you can read some instructions and quotes to inspire you. Furthermore, we suggest some publications to deepen the decolonial reading of historical narratives and current structures.

Decolonize Zurich is a group of creators, academics and activists who want to bring postcolonial theory into action. Theory forms the basis for our action, aiming to bridge the gap between academia and the public, theory and action. Accordingly, practice follows theory - anything from roundtables, get-togethers, cookouts, or workshops. We believe that changing the current social and political status quo requires us to invent new measures and formats: collectively, creative, and provocative.