Reparative Encounters

Stitching fragmented histories through artistic research

Abstract

This article explores what happens when artists, who have been separated by coloniality, meet across different geographies. Which experiences, vocabularies and strategies resonate across different spaces, how are different practices transformed through encounter, and how can they, in dialogue, reveal new horizons for repairing colonial legacies? The article explores these questions drawing on the ongoing work of the Reparative Encounters network for artistic research. Established in 2023, Reparative Encounters brings together artists and curators from the US Virgin Islands, Ghana, Kalaallit Nunaat and Denmark, locations differently impacted by Danish colonialism. Throughout 2023-2024 we have organised three encounters — in Nuuk, St. Croix and Kumasi — where we met to share artistic practices with each other and to learn from each context. In this article, we reflect on these three encounters to create an “alterarchive” of the insights and possibilities that began to emerge from these meetings. Activating our method of working alongside each other, we write alongside, bringing together reflections, images and poems, to consider what happens when our bodies, histories and practices meet across various locations. Throughout, we reflect on the relation between artistic research, repair and coloniality, and foreground artistic praxis as a means for creating new vocabularies and spaces for inserting other forms of knowledge and being.