Αnti-tour as Decolonizing Methodology

This webinar brought together decolonial activist groups, cultural workers and academics from Tanzania, Namibia, Germany, Italy and Greece who have experimented with the anti-tour as a practice of grassroots pedagogy and political intervention. The aim of the webinar is to exchange experiences and ideas and connect with groups and actors using this methodology around countries and continents.

*As a performative act of counter-memory, a mobile assembly and transient occupation of public space, how are -and might- anti-tours be deployed to expose and challenge colonial afterlives anchored in the monumental landscape? Are they effective in engaging broader publics and local communities and activating social change?
*Can the tour format interrupt travel/tourism as colonial technologies of mobility, access, knowledge and commoditization of culture? Or is this form susceptible to cooptation by political/economic actors as “alternative,” “multicultural” or “off-the-beaten-track” tours?
*How does one make an anti-tour? Can the anti-tour be a vehicle for decolonizing methodology and epistemology itself? Can bringing together researchers, artists and activists, locals and newcomers, universities and local communities to design -as well as enact- such a tour potentially destabilizing of knowledge hierarchies?

*Can we think about the digital/networked dimension of the anti-tour, as well as the goal of its repetition by more participants, beyond the logic of “appification”?

Convener/moderator: Penelope Papailias (University of Thessaly)

Participants:
-Berlin Postkolonial / Τhe organization studies and situates German colonial history in its global dimensions, highlighting postcolonial ways of thinking and societal structures that have endured into the present. BERLIN POSTKOLONIAL seeks to cooperate with other organizations critical of colonialism and groups against racism, as well as other postcolonial initiatives within Germany
-Areti Kondilidou, archaeologist/ social anthropologist

Organizers: dëcoloиıze hellάş in collaboration with the Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities
Language: English (the webinar will be subsequently translated/subtitled in Greek).