Since 2016, La Colonie has always challenged amnesic and deleterious postures, particularly related to all the forms of denials, the Western national narratives have been practicing. It was a friendly place that, remaining independent, engaged in thinking about living and sharing ideas together.
By implementing this project, the artist Kader Attia and his team intended to ask in the present the questions surrounding the decolonization of peoples, as well as that of knowledge, attitudes and practices, which were barely addressed in the West since independence times.
La Colonie hosted many collectives among which, Décoloniser les Arts, Collectif Adama Traoré, Collectif Rosa Park, the group of Arabophone psychoanalysts, The University Présence Africaine, The African Art Book fair, Chimurenga, The African Queer Cinema Festival, The Arab Queer Conference, activists and intellectuals (Françoise Vergès, Maboula Soumahoro, Sylvie Glissant, Mireille Fanon-Mendès France, Thomas Piketty, Olivier Marboeuf, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Paola Bachetta), university research groups, artists & cinematographers (Martha Rosler, Oleg Kulik, Khaled Jarrar, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Jihan El-Tahri, Rasha Salti, Alain Gomis), social actors (Felwine Sarr), philosophers (Achille Mbembé, Suleymane Bachir Diagne, Bruno Latour, Toni Negri, Wole Soyinka, Etienne Balibar, Seloua Luste Boulbina,) inviting them to the open sharing of experiences and knowledge.
Far from a museum or institutional context, the artistic proposals have been as much conceptual as they have been formal, a-formal or performed. The projects have also been an opportunity to develop non-academic critical thinking, in constant relationship to the issues of our present.
La Colonie has been built around the desire to answer to the compelling urgency of social and cultural reparations against the legacy of colonial violence, of which the racialized citizens continue to be the victims.
Beyond religious and political divisions, our contemporary societies have reached a hitherto unprecedented level of fragmentation that only the development of spaces for dialogue, meetings and confrontations, will push back. Here, as everywhere else, the fractures multiply in a deafening silence, with an increased violence. La Colonie was an experience of de-fragmentation, of de-compartmentalization, of reparations in which everyone was welcome.
As a project with a particular methodology of sharing, La Colonie intends to allow academic knowledge out of arcane institutional and elitist power by enabling it to confront other forms of transmission. It intends to emancipate common systems of understanding and knowledge, sometimes non-western, often underestimated. La Colonie aspires to de-compartmentalize knowledge and practices by valuing a trans-cultural, trans-disciplinary and trans-generational approach in which everyone finds a place to speak publically. We are betting that under the aegis of exchange and discussion, art and thought are the strongest vectors of this defragmentation in order reconstruct a common ground, based on diverse opinions: a cement of multiples autonomous minds but not separatists.
Since its opening, La Colonie has remained independent and has never received any funding, neither private nor public. Its activities have always been funded by the coffee and bar activity. Covid-19 has been a very hard blow on an already very fragile situation; a blow from which it has been unable to recover. So unfortunately, it has had to leave its space located on the La Fayette street in Paris.
La Colonie is both tied to a physical space and an immaterial space: it can be embodied anywhere; it is a kind of oxymoron that will keep on living no matter what.
Please help us find a new place to, together, continue the debates, exhibitions, film screenings and book releases, so that you can save the independence of your thinking by sharing it with others. Support the reopening by making a donation to one of these platforms, to help us open a new La Colonie space in Paris or its banlieue.