Decolonization is a process, not a goal: Encounters in the library of the Kunsthalle Basel

Abstract

Abstract Chance encounters, some several years apart, form the basis of this article between 2 librarians and an artist, all 3 considering the process of decolonizing libraries within the wider context of colonial legacies in the societies in which they were born and in which they now live. The librarians Regina Vogel and Erica Foden-Lenahan have been friends and colleagues for many years, and their personal conversations over the years have often involved discussions of equality and injustice. The overlap in their professional interests led to this article proposal. A serendipitous meeting between Vogel and decolonial artist and curator Nistiman Erdede at an event2 organized by Abendschule Import in co-operation with the famous Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and later when he visited the Kunsthalle Basel where Vogel is the librarian, changed the original direction of the article, but presented an opportunity for a 3-way discussion of decolonization in the context of a Swiss and a German art library and a refugee artist's experience. The Covid-19 border and workplace lockdowns necessitated that some of these encounters happened virtually.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.