Colonialism and Understanding the Other in Davidson, Solaris and ‘The Amnesiacs’ #1012027

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.



According to the philosopher of language, Donald Davidson, mindedness and interpretation are conceptually inseparable. To have a mind is to be interpretable as minded by others and when attempting to interpret and understand others, we must assume that the alien is translatable into the familiar. In this paper we will interrogate Davidson’s radical interpretationism from the perspectives of Soviet science fiction and contemporary art by focusing on Stanislav Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris and Mike Nelson’s series of installations that feature ‘The Amnesiacs’ (1997–2023). Throughout our discussion of the role of the interpreter and their relation to the ‘alien’, we will argue that any such radical process of interpretation is inevitably prey to allusions and ideas that evoke the historically colonial, where differences between us are erased, to the point of denying the existence of the truly Other or alien.