BADS_LAB

BADS_lab – Black Arts & Decolonial Sciences – is a curatorial project, residency program, and cultural hub designed to redistribute creative energies to challenge colonial systems of knowledge and representation. It is a space where suppressed histories and practices are reactivated as living, dynamic forces. Bringing together artists, researchers, and thinkers, BADS_lab fosters shared inquiry, collective creation and resistance. BADS_lab runs counter to the dominate contemporary cultural and scientific paradigms and their practices of brutalization and isolation through specialization. Visitors to the lab encounter artists, works-in-progress, research symposia, and unstructured gathering spaces for conversation and networking.

The “brute matter” and “brute facts” of Colonial Science are not givens: they are made by Colonial Science via processes of “brutalization”.

Colonizers submit beings to scientific study because they intend to brutalize them, to make efficient use of force as they transform beings into perversely pleasurable and profitable objects for collection and consumption.

It is only when beings resist brutalization in remarkable ways that Colonial Science calls in the specialists in complexity, chaos, and indeterminacy as reinforcements, for the purposes of risk management and damage control. Colonial Science then endeavors to marginalize those beings that are remarkable for resisting brutalization, writing them off as special cases, as cases for specialized know-how, and rendering them inaccessible to the multitudes.

BADS_lab assembles artists, philosophers, scientists, technologists, and organic intellectuals who are intent upon (i) deconstructing the colonial practices of brutalization and specialization that have entrenched themselves in the modern techno-scientific imagination, and (ii) (re-)constructing “other-whys” that enable scientists and technologists to approach beings otherwise than brutalizing and specializing them.