Affective and Decolonial Cosmoesthetics of an Animist Counter-Archive: a Dialogic Approach through Trig Metawe Küra and Wenu Pelon #1012028

This excerpt is part of the volume Visual Narratives, Aesthetics and Decoloniality: Imagery and the Construction of the ‘Other’. Vol. 1 – Decolonial Aesthetics, Ontologies and Epistemologies, edited by Tomás Cajueiro and Estevão Bosco, published by Ventura Edizioni.



The question of representation constitutes a problematic node that structures the genealogy of Western thought, spanning the dialectical tensions between empiricism and idealism, to the gap between scientific knowledge and sensible knowledge, projecting itself toward contemporary disputes over political and artistic representation (Nancy, 2007). This critical questioning of its historical trajectories— and the epistemic privileges underlying the production of meanings—has allowed for the destabilization of the ethical, ontological, and epistemological dimensions of seeing. Under this premise, it is impossible to sever alterity from its material thickness and its social fabric, revealing that every regime of representation, far from being a naive gesture, constitutes an exercise of aesthetic-political mediation that administers the borders between the visible and the sayable, the known and the yet to be known (Soto, 2022).