In many European and African cities, artists, activists and heritage practitioners have been trying to come to term with the controversies raised by the memory and trauma of colonial and slave trade histories. As witnessed by the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol in the summer of 2020, in the wake of Black Lives Matter, the signs of a contested past expressing nationalist and violent narrative of identity have been increasingly contested. Eliciting a profund reticence on the part of minority artists, activists and curator, colonial traces have become points of mobilization to investigate ways to decolonize the monuments, urban spaces as well as memory. May they active within museums or associations, acting in collective or individual ways, contemporary artists and activists use the colonial traces – the objects, the sites, the monuments -  in order to reinterpret the former cultural asymmetric relations between metropole and colony. What is the role of the artists and curators in the rewriting of these national and conflicting memories? To what extent can dissonant heritage be reframed in collective terms? What are relations set by the interventions of artists around commemorative practices between the past and the present?

This online panel takes place within the European research project ECHOES (http://projectechoes.eu/), funded by the european programme Horizon 2020. It gathers artists, curators, activists and art historians based in Bristol, Cape Town and Marseille who seek to question in their practices the legacies of this past in urban space. The event will consist in presentations and discussions with the audience in the three cities in order to confront the feelings and the reactions across this transnational space.

Free participation with mandatory registration

The conference will be available in English and French via a simultaneous translation service.