We have been thinking recently about the resonance of the provisional. The provisional is something for the time being only, existing with the intention of being permanently or properly replaced. It is a temporary arrangement for present needs, while holding the hope for the future. It is speculative and hopeful. It is not organised around a certainty of knowing, but instead gives value to the uncertainty of thought, to the thought yet formed.
Provisionality provides us with a minor freedom from the inheritances of our innate thinking, the writing and doing that we carry within us. If postcolonialism attempted an expansive act of insertion into, recognition of (and mourning for) colonialism, decolonisation demands the possibility of an uncolonized space. Decolonisation calls for radical imagination that seeks to untether the inevitability of our systems, it opens up the potential to imagine something else, something unfamiliar, something improvisational.
Provisionality gives us a means to avoid “participating in a world of making as it is defined by a persistently white, Eurocentric academy and art world”. To continue to seek affirmation from the colonial academic institutions does not legitimize our thought, nor does it actively attempt to dismantle the “underlying heteropatriarchal and white supremacist structures that shape its current configurations and conversations.”[1] Instead, “the task of decolonial artists, scholars and activists is not simply to offer amendments or edits to the current world, but to display the mutual sacrifice and relationality needed to sabotage colonial systems of thought and power for the purpose of liberatory alternatives.”[2]
What is included in this section are a series of provisional thoughts about decolonisation. They emerge, less from a desire to provide solutions, but more from a hope to unmoor the structural integrity of the systems themselves. We consider them as different ways of proceeding with the complex task of imagining decolonial futuries. To decolonise our thinking requires radical action and imagination. Coppermoss believes in provisionality as an important means of proceeding - in finding a temporary action, a small gesture, in whose microcosm future action may reside. Each project takes a different form and scale - some are meant to be living bibliographies, others dialogues and walks; some will generate new work, others will remain as image archives of a particular moment or idea.
-- Sadira Rodrigues, M. Simon Levin
[1] Zoe Todd “Indigenizing the Anthropocene” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment and Epistemology, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin and published through Open Humanities Press (2015)
[2] Martineau, J. and E. Ritskes, “Fugitive Indigeneity: Reclaiming the Terrain of Decolonial Struggle through Indigenous Art,” DIES: Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education and Society 3, no. 1 (2014): ii.
