Digital Collage and Disputes over Colonial Memories in Barcelona: Archives, Coloniality and Counter-Visualities #1012033

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.



Visual narratives have been central to the configuration of coloniality, that is, the colonial hierarchies sustained by technologies active in the production of power (Quijano, 1992). Images are not neutral: they organise the gaze, legitimise violence and consolidate hegemonic imaginaries (Mitchell, 1994; Mirzoeff, 2016). From European imperial expansion to globalisation, visuality operates as a regime that decides what is seen, who looks and under what conditions (Mirzoeff, 2011), constituting the “white visuality” that naturalises colonial supremacy. The archive, through cartography, scientific illustration or ethnographic pho- tography, is part of these technologies.