Decolonial Aesthesis
Author: Yuliia Kishchuk
Translation from Ukrainian: Galyna Kotliuk
Editor: Clemens Poole
Initially, the term aestheSis meant the various senses — taste, hearing, smell, sight, etc. As one of the mechanisms for generating and regulating sensations, aestheSis is inevitably connected with the body. The Cartesian dichotomy of the “corporeal”, sensual, and the “rational” is pivotal for understanding why, in the perception of modern subjects, rationality is often esteemed higher in the hierarchy than sensuality. Madina Tlostanova, a decolonial thinker of Circassian-Uzbek descent, offers a similar logic of interpretation, which emphasises the false dichotomy of “passive sensuality” and “active understanding of art” rooted in modern aesthetic theories [1].
The concepts of “aesthetics” and “aestheSis” originate from the ancient Greek language. In their original meaning, they are not Eurocentric, since, in Ancient Greece, the lexeme “Europe” denoted a mythical entity and had not yet become a geographic name for the continent [2]. The concept of aesthetics acquired its Eurocentric character during the Enlightenment (17th–18th centuries). At the same time, aestheSis became a part of aesthetics, which began to be perceived as a global measure of the “beautiful” and the “sublime”. As Vásquez asserts, aesthetics colonized aestheSis temporally and spatially, first establishing the European experience as a model for the whole world, and later projecting this experience to other parts of the world [3].
For researchers of decolonial theory, the starting point for the colonisation of senses and experiences is Immanuel Kant’s work Reflections on the Beautiful and the Sublime (1767), which justifies the division of art into “high” and “low” (closer in meaning to the Greek techne [τέχνη]) [4]. Modern aesthetics theory is part of the larger structure of what the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano defines as the “colonial matrix of power”, a structure of control that subordinates and shapes everything from politics to culture. This matrix often determines which artistic practices are “genuine” high art, and which are rather folklorised forms of “popular/folk” or “naive” art or, for example, kitsch, which is also referred to as “popular art”.
The concept of decolonial aestheSis was formulated by thinkers from South and Central America in response to Western colonialism. It is also applied regarding the former colonies of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union [5]. Attempts to talk about Ukrainian manifestations of decolonial aestheSis are quite difficult to debate: do we have grounds to talk about the decoloniality of nation states — a phenomenon that is interpreted in decolonial theory as a manifestation of the project of global coloniality? Doesn’t it make more sense to focus on the decolonial aestheSis of localities instead? Is it enough to de-link from russian, Soviet and Western forms of experiences and perception, or is it also important to rethink the Ukrainian context itself?
In the search for Ukrainian decolonial art, it is important to explore practices which have been marginalised by Western and Soviet art history as crafts, because such forms of artistic interaction often decentralise the concepts of author and “artistic genius”. In this regard, traditional crafts or “decorative and applied arts” should be considered part of decolonial aestheSis: carpet making, ceramics, weaving, embroidery, etc.
According to such an approach, an example of a local form of decolonial aestheSis can be the works of Polina Raiko — an artist from the village of Oleshki in the Kherson region, who painted her house, recreating the story of her life in pictures. Unfortunately, this house was flooded after the russians detonated explosives on the Kakhovkha hydroelectric power station dam, and most of the works were lost forever. A similar practice of aestheSis is the home of the Hutsul artist and photographer Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit, who not only painted pictures, but also made vytynakas [vytynanka is the traditional Ukrainian art of papercutting. Trans.] and painted household objects. Via photography and other artistic practices Plytka-Horytsvit reconnected with the local community after nine and a half years of deportation to Gulag camps. In both cases, artistic practices became a way to survive personal and political/colonial trauma and re-exist). Polina Raiko and Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit were, and sometimes still are, considered local weirdos, and their artistic practices are seen by many as unimportant and unrecognized.
The concept of decolonial aestheSis has the potential to become part of a new analytical language that can help set oneself free from the dichotomies of “high” and “low”, “naive” and “professional”, and rethink the coloniality of connections in which modern art interpreted the folk art as a source of inspiration for an “authentic” genius, and in certain cases used it as an anonymous material database.
Scraps of fabric collectively embroidered by Ukrainian women in the Gulag can be perceived, in the context of decolonial aestheSis, as a sensual practice with the capacity to heal from colonial wounds [6]. The main function of such an activity is not so much representation as a process of cooperation and solidarity. Therefore, it seems productive for those who continue to think about decolonial aestheSis in the context of Ukraine and Eastern Europe to search for it on the margins of artistic practices and interactions, in communities whose ways of being did not fit into the normative framework of Western and Soviet modernity. Artistic and sensual practices of the Roma community living in Ukraine can also serve as an illustrative example of decolonial aestheSis.
Endnotes
02. “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings – Social Text,” accessed February 22, 2024, https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/.
03. Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez, “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings – Social Text,” Social Text, n.d.
04. Ibid.
05. Madina Tlostanova, “Decolonial AestheSis and the Post-Soviet Art,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 48 (September 2019): 100–107, https://doi.org/10.1086/706131.
06. Oksana Kis, Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag, Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies 80 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674258341.
For further reference
Vázquez, Rolando. "Vistas of modernity: decolonial aesthesis and the end of the contemporary." (2020).
Author
Yuliia Kishchuk
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