Raza de Bronce
Inverted Utopias: Decolonizing Narratives
“…We all shared five hundred years of exploitation and colonization, we were all linked by a common fate, we all belonged to the same race of the oppressed.”
Isabel Allende, in Foreword for Open Veins of Latin America
I am uncovering and juxtaposing two silenced narratives of realities that meet and connect at the very same start point: the erasure of history. In this diaspora, I create a new autoethnographic history as a way of self-representation that reproduces a mode of resistance and celebrates decolonizing narratives.
As a product of a colonized subject, I use the ‘autoethnographic’ literacy in an attempt to represent us and recreate our own chronicle, narrating the truth of history from a genuine perspective. In the colonial encounter, the erasure, possession and dispossession of the vulnerable subjects’ bodies, individualities and culture created a gap between the interpretation of the story by the other and the real meaning behind this way of resistance.
These hidden and forgotten stories are presented today because I want to reconnect them physically within specific geographic locations, which are already highly historically impacted and charged. The ones who have the power to rewrite history have erased both chronicles, and these untold tragedies exist in these photographs; consequently I am able to transgress time through space and I reinforce and appropriate the ownership of this discourse created by the colonizers and protest against the displacement and dispossession of our real memoir.
