Indigenous Knowledge Sharing in Contemporary Art and Higher Education through Relational Ethics, Indigenous Ontology and Black Ecology

I will link two artistic examples from the Berlin Biennale 2022 that engage with Europe’s past, present and future entanglement with colonialism, to Jo-ann Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem’s Indigenous Storywork as one instance of a “new relational ethics” and an Indigenous, “non-colonial” way of sharing knowledge. In particular, I will discuss Moses März’s engagement with Édouard Glissant’s Philosophy of Relation in his “Maps for a Creolisation of the Word”. The impact of an ongoing colonialism is also critically assessed by Uriel Orlow, in his “Reading Wood (Backwards)”, who asks: “What happens when forest becomes library?” Both artists question western colonial concepts of extracting nature and resources, collecting and archiving material, as well as producing books, maps and texts as methods of unstainable knowledge transfer, whether within or outside academia. With the aim for working towards a relational ethics, whether through an “ecology of knowledges”, a “Black ecology” or Indigenous ontology, both artworks point to an Indigenous knowledge centred future and way of rebuilding the museum and university as open places, rather than as closed-up institutions, for sharing knowledge in a respectfully collective, reciprocally collaborative, holistically interrelated, synergetic interconnected, accountably reverent and responsibly relevant manner.