De-creating the Step of the World: Faustin Linyekula and Studios Kabako’s La création du monde 1923–2012, Pour en finir avec Bérénice, and More more more … Future

Abstract

In 2004, fifty years after the start of the Algerian War, Etienne Balibar noted in his seminal excursus on contemporary European politics, philosophy and identity, We, The People of Europe?, that the ‘critical labour of memory concerning the violence of European conquest and rule’ over non-European territories — European colonies — ‘did not immediately start with decolonisation’ but commenced, within the topographical boundary of Europe at least, ‘long after the event’. The event of decolonisation — and, indeed, the related event of colonisation implied by it — is seen to have operated with a temporal delay, or performative afterwardsness, in retroactively reconfiguring the social and cultural landscape of contemporary Europe. As Balibar suggests, this was doubtless ‘encouraged by the massive presence … of “postcolonial” populations within European nations’ as much as by an increasingly relational conception of ontology which, in a parallel way, sought to represent ‘the realities of colonial history, a history that has made Europe what it is’, and to decentre its self-authorising narratives and Eurocentric vision (2004: 222–3).