The Incidental Insurgents Pt. 2: The Unforgiving Years, a project by Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas, is part of PLURIVERSALE I, the first edition of the new biannual constellation of intercultural and interdisciplinary events of the Academy of the Arts of the World.

Victor Serge and his contemporary anarchist bandits in 1910s Paris; Abu Jilda, Arameet, and their gang involved in a rebellion against the British in 1930s Palestine; the artist as the quintessential bandit in Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives set in 1970s Mexico; and the artists themselves in present day Palestine. Such are the characters in The Incidental Insurgents: a three-part, multilayered narrative, whose chapters complete and complicate each other, unfolding the story of a contemporary search for a new political language and imaginary. In Cologne, it takes the form of a total installation that transforms the space of the former caretaker’s apartment in the Alte Feuerwache complex, a site deeply connected to the history of alternative left-wing politics in the city.

Held twice a year over two months in autumn and spring, PLURIVERSALE, consisting of site-specific projects, exhibitions, concerts, discussions, film screenings, and performative symposia, proposes an alternative to the usual rhythms of biennials and their narration of unquiet times, too often universalist and relativist at once. The format’s name refers to the concept of pluriversality as used by Enrique Dussel, Walter D. Mignolo, and other thinkers from the context of postcolonial studies—the idea that one needs not a universalist but a “pluriversal” hermeneutic to deal with a world of many entangled cosmologies, the interrelation of which are regulated by a colonial power differential. In this spirit, PLURIVERSALE can be imagined as a platform that rejects a unifying narrative in favor of a critical clustering of different “worlds,” nevertheless entangled through their critical, negative, and resistant attitudes to the power differentials of a singular modernity and its universal claim.

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OPENING: 4. NOVEMBER 2014, 19:00

Opening hours: Mon-Fri 14:00 – 18:00 / Thu 14:00 – 20:00 / Sat/Sun 12:00 – 18:00.
Venue: Alte Feuerwache, Melchiorstraße 3, 50670 Cologne, Caretaker’s apartment, 3 €

www.academycologne.org