Image: courtesy Bayo Akomolafe

By Bayo Akomolafe, via his blog

Keynote Address [Bill Reid Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada / Organized by Simon Fraser University and the City of Vancouver] May 5, 2016

“…To be inappropriate or to be inappropriate/d is to be interrupted. It is to be silenced and rendered an ‘other’. It is to speak to a mountain and not hear it reciprocate your affections. It is to meet a dead rock where once there was a friend – an ally in this cosmic ecstasy of entanglement. It is to be italicized or parenthesized – as if one is an afterthought or not really crucial to the meaning of a sentence. Katherine Anne Porter reminds us that “the past is never where you think you left it”, and perhaps that’s shocking enough to remind us that colonization wasn’t a neat moment in time that ended with treaties and declarations of independence: it is the ongoing exclusion of bodies, stories, and worlds; it is the repartitioning of the sensible, even of time ‘itself’.”