A Thousand Years of NonLinear History

Kapwani Kiwanga / Mario Garcia Torres / The Speculative Archive (Julia Meltzer and David Thorne) / Deimantas Narkevicius / Mariana Castillo Deball / Olivier Debroise / Monica Mayer / Louis Henderson / Christine Meisner / Yael Bartana / Rania Rafei et Raed Rafei / Santu Mofokeng / Mathieu K. Abonnenc / John Akomfrah & Black Audio Film Collective / Mark Tribe

Encounters with: Ingrid LaFleur, Louis Henderson, Erik Bullot, Annabela Tournon, Françoise Vergès, Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Estelle Nabeyrat, Rasha Salti, Christine Meisner, Monica Mayer, Yael Bartana, Elena Sorokina

Curated by Aliocha Imhoff et Kantuta Quirós

Other venues :
Ecole des Beaux-arts de Paris, Institut Culturel du Mexique, Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Nantes Métropole, Le Cinématographe Nantes

In recent decades, the concepts of History and historical time have been challenged on a fundamental level. With the collapse of master narratives and the postmodern turn in historiography, history can no longer be thought of as an ordered, regulated and linear continuum guided by Progress. In a seminal work published in 1997, A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, the philosopher Manuel DeLanda proposed to envisage History not as a sequential chain of cause and effect, but as consisting of reversals and bifurcations.
If in recent years the figure of the artist as historian has massively entered artistic practice, it originally sparked as many discussions about the protocols of historical inquiry, the constructivism of historical facts, the unstable boundaries between fiction and history, the index value of the archive, the monumentalization of Memory. Moreover, it is starting from methodologies which delineated the writing of history, such as anachronism, bifurcation, alternate history and reconstitution, that artists exacerbated the movement to deconstruct the sequential representation of historical time.
Summoning concepts from this historiographical renewal, the event A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History focuses on alternative temporalities put forward by artists to rethink the staging of History (potential, speculative, retrospective, projective and retrocipative histories).

Aliocha Imhoff et Kantuta Quirós

Event produced by the curatorial platform A people is missing in partnership with the Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art, FILM department, the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, the School of Fine Arts in Nantes, the Cinématographe, Nantes, and with the support of the institutions, the Région Ile-de-France, the Polish Institute of Paris, the Institut Culturel du Mexique.