For
understanding the prevalence of colonial structures in European libraries and exploring ways to disrupt those structures;
recognising the ways in which library catalogues in the Global North form part of coloniality.
With the purpose
of understanding which processes sustain coloniality and finding methods to actively reject those processes and the privilege attached to them;
of forming networks to create awareness for the need to de-colonise the library;
of campaigning for the allocation of funds and time to do this work.
In contact
with Nora Schmidt’s PhD “The Privilege to Select. Global Research System, European Academic Library Collections, and Decolonisation” which investigates the limiting function of libraries and their search catalogues in the Global North - a topic that does not seem to have received much attention to date. We were curious to discuss these blind spots with Nora in the video conversation “Coloniality–it's just really everywhere” (2021) and to think together how day-to-day processes and habits in libraries could be changed.
with Nora Schmidt’s lecture in the series “Finders, Keepers: Search” im Sitterwerk.
with Susannah Haslam and Tom Clark’s stating in the annotated bibliography “Unbuilding Infrastructure” that infrastructure must be geared towards being repeatable – with that repetition as its aim.
with the “Cyberfeminist Index” generating a crowdsourced index of cyberfeminist projects asking how to include different perspectives without appropriating them. How to create a collection of literature which allows for a range of diverging and potentially conflicting historical accounts?
with “Creating Commons”, a research project by Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder that asks how new forms of organisation and collaboration can bring forth different kinds of cultural works and social relations?
with Bolivian activist and theorist Silvia Rivera Cusiquanci and her astute observations of and experiences made during her time researching at Columbia University library. “A Stroll through the Colonial Library” touches on several fundamental issues that I often forget when thinking about libraries: the implicit prioritising of written knowledge in the library that privileges writing over oral and performative bodies of knowledge that are rooted in daily life and communal practice. The appropriation of written knowledge that could be termed a form of intellectual colonialism and last not least, the required privilege of a valid keycard to be able to enter through the library’s gates and the need of an institutional affiliation – a requirement that bars a wide range of the population from accessing these resources.
with David Senior’s text “Infinite Hospitality” (2008) telling us about alternatives to hierarchical classification systems of the West (the popular Dewey Decimal Classification or the Library of Congress Classification) such as the non-hierarchical, faceted, so-called “Colon Classification” that S. R. Ranganathan, a librarian and mathematician from India, published in “The Five Laws of Library Science” (1928/31) is still in use in India today.
With Lise Vanderpiete’s organising of a “decolonising trajectory” at Muntpunt, a public Flemish library in the centre of Brussels and Constant’s persistence to keep this conversation going. Listen to the conversation in Chrome. and with Heleen Debeuckelaere’s “Decolonising is a Verb”, a conversation and guided decolonial tour through the catalogue of Muntpunt as part of Constant’s “Unbound Libraries work session” in 2020.