Anna Guilló

antiAtlas of Epistemicide is a collaborative artistic and scientific editorial project that brings together academic papers on epistemicides, past or present, anywhere on the planet. The articles will be accompanied by the reproduction of a work in the form of an alternative map, expressly designed for each example of epistemicide – the contributions thus being made by a duo of artists and authors. Since the question is as singular as it is unfathomable, this project has no encyclopedic vocation and aims, on the contrary, to establish a non-exhaustive atlas conceived as both a scientific work and an artistic catalogue, the project culminating in a travelling exhibition.

The project brings together contributors from a variety of backgrounds: art theory, sociology, contemporary art, philosophy, law, politics, history, anthropology, literature… and from different countries. The artists involved in the project are engaged in the field of alternative and radical cartography on an international level.

Structure of the book and initial research directions

Although the articles and images in the book form a constellation, this constellation is nevertheless organised according to different categories and thematic, historical, geographical conceptual, etc. entries. Beyond the title of the book, the aim is to distinguish between examples of destroyed, confiscated and/or hidden knowledge, bearing in mind that these categories are often porous.

This artistic project originates in a practice of extended cartographic drawing aimed at graphically compiling invisible practices. The somewhat hackneyed paradox of the representation of the invisible quickly gave way to the need to document this project scientifically and to open it up to epistemicides. The term epistemicide originates in the field of sociology (Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 2016), but is relevant to all disciplinary fields throughout the world.

The initial initiative was organised around a call for contributions to establish a preview of the project in which analyses of destroyed, confiscated or occulted knowledges would have an emergent, processual quality governed by curiosity and the pleasure of bringing another way of thinking about the world rather than be governed by a logic of productivity and outputs. It is in this spirit that we would like to produce the first volume of the antiAtlas of Epistemicide as an object from which different forms can emerge: exhibitions, seminars, meetings, programs, etc. Thus, where books generally come to restore experiences and research paths, this one would rather come to provoke them since its contents, not fixed, will require an extension in the public debate and undoubtedly the advent of other volumes.