Counterspace is an independent curatorial platform functioning as the first decolonial thinktank mapping cultural activism worldwide. It shapes collectively decolonial toolkits with common tools and resources, and a global directory browsable by continent, praxis, and social construct, as a Beuys-inspired ‘social sculpture’ revisited, and an alternative map of the universe. The first global network and social movement linking the countercultural experiences and radical culture shakers (artists, curators or both) creatively decolonising culture, while inspiring others to join the collective machinery towards change.
Departing from creativity as the source that any human being has, and via these unlearning and relearning toolkits, Counterspace aims to create new collective knowledge production pools in circulation addressed to individuals, collectives, and institutions while self-organising, exploring horizontal relationships, unlearning and relearning personal and community development, with a decolonial and hence intersectional, decentralised, and holistic approach.
PHILOSOPHY
Oppression as a mechanism works alike everywhere, is intersectional, overlapping, and inflicted by a hierarchical power interested in promoting divides to sustain the privilege structure. As Guy Debord did with his ‘critique of separation’, deconstructing colonial binaries and paving the understanding of our commonalities, is in that regard the true revolutionary key of global freedom. That’s why Counterspace pushes the conversation further beyond the -still dividing- identity politics activism scene by:
-Believing that we are not governed by people but ideas, and that art/creativity is the only counter-space to question, imagine, create and inhabit other realities (in words of James Baldwin, the only asset which- unlike government and religion- has ever been able to revolution culture).
-Being deliberate to do so -but unprecedentedly- together. Not only intersectionally connecting our current neocolonial and hierarchical socially constructed gaps in the paradigm shift mission, but understanding healing, health, and the expansion of personal and community development as a necessarily interdependent exercise on a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, and natural level.
TEAM, COLLABORATING PARTNERS, AND SUPPORT
Counterspace was founded in 2019 by cultural activist Cristina Morales, a critical anthropologist and transdisciplinary cultural practitioner working internationally as a critical researcher, educator, writer, and social practice producer-artist at the intersection of art and politics for self and community development. Although she has curated the platform since, it has been designed as a living collective knowledge production pool shaping the content, growth and direction of it.
Counterspace has so far partnered up with Actipedia by the Center for Artistic Activism (New York), Social Art Network (UK), Humanities, Arts & Society + Memory of the Future (Paris), Antiuniversity Now (London), Socially Engaged Art Salon (Brighton), Publib (UK), Utopian Studies Society (UK), Ephemera (International), Primary (Nottingham), Design Science Studio by Buckminster Fuller Institute and HabRitual (San Francisco), and Narratopias by Plurality University Network (Paris).
Counterspace is so far an independent, open access, and adverts-free project. Punctual and recurrent donations are welcome here. If you would like to support it financially in a larger manner please get in touch.
Image credit: Counterspace cultural strategy by Cristina Morales – London, 2021.
Except where otherwise noted, content on this website is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
COUNTERSPACE 