The Body’s Legacies. The Post-Colonial Body (2018) and Untitled (2018)

Kader Attia conducts research on the relationship between the individual and the social body, with a specific focus on the post-colonial body today. His interest lies in the question of what the body of enslaved or colonised people’s descendants has become, in a moment when a new disaster of bodily displacement is happening, namely the current refugee crisis. His film The Body’s Legacies. The Post-Colonial Body reflects on the repressed post-colonial body through interviews with four protagonists that are descendants of colonised people or slaves. The narration goes back and forth between individual experiences and wider analysis, with a focus on a particular story as a pivot: the aggression on young Théo Luhaka that happened in February 2017 in a Parisian suburb. The young man was beaten and raped with the truncheon of one of the policemen arresting him. Kader Attia’s film builds a counter-narrative to the Western hegemonic racist national one, setting out to prevent erasure of the violence that is perpetrated in a so-called democracy, and documenting the struggle of those who resist. In addition to the film, Kader Attia presents a sculpture, Untitled, made of a cracked piece of wood repaired with traditional staples, that appears as a metaphor of a fragile human being. Both works are on view at Palazzo Forcella De Seta.