2026-05-14 | Georges Senga: at The Decolonial Network's Annual Assembly: Unlearning & Undoing
Our fellow Georges Senga is a panelist on day 1 of The Decolonial Network's Annual Assembly: Unlearning & Undoing.
‘Makuto Njo Dunia (Money Make the World), 2025’
The title of this project is inspired by the Dutch expression ‘Geld regeert de wereld’ and the Congolese Swahili expression ‘Makuta njo dunia’; with different nuances, the two expressions affirm that profit builds the world and the way societies live in and with it. Drawing on archival photos and descriptions of objects from collections such as the National Museum of World Cultures and the Rijksmuseum, Senga imagines the everyday use of these objects in conversation with artificial intelligence – creating models of the visually undocumented Dutch colonial presence in the Kingdom of Kongo between 1641 and 1648. Combining artificial intelligence and collage techniques with image processing software, Senga worked with painters from Dafen Village in Shenzhen, China – renowned for producing copies of masterworks – to render his digital models as a series of oil paintings. The result is a new identity that navigates between the existing aesthetics of Dutch ‘Golden Age’ painting, the errors of technology, and the appropriation of the works by human expertise.
The Decolonial Network's inaugural annual assembly will critically explore the notion of 'decoloniality'. The assembly is structured across two days, organised around the thematic axes of 'Unlearning' and 'Undoing,' though the programme actively resists this rigid binary by entwining these trajectories throughout. Each day comprises a keynote address, a workshop, film screenings, and a panel discussion.
Based within the university consortium CHASE (Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England), The Decolonial Network critically interrogates the notion of decoloniality through its inaugural annual assembly. This event advances this inquiry across a diverse range of presentation formats — including screenings, performances, and research papers — and disciplines spanning art, anthropology, sociology, and literature, affirming its character as an 'assembly' rather than a conventional 'conference.' By bringing together interdisciplinary and mixed-media articulations of decoloniality, the assembly proposes a framework for examining the epistemological structures imposed by global forms of colonialism.
Initially theorised by Aníbal Quijano and subsequently expanded upon by scholars including Walter Mignolo, Achille Mbembe, Homi Bhabha, Françoise Vergès, Catherine Walsh, and María Lugones, decoloniality emerged as a critical challenge to the systemic inequalities produced by Western modernity. As method and framework, it has since developed across a broad range of research fields, including sociology, history, anthropology, visual art, art history, and comparative literature. Nevertheless, the fluidity of global geopolitics and economics demands continual reflection on and reevaluation of contemporary decolonial discourse. This assembly seeks to engage dialogically with the complexities of knowledge production hierarchies across different geographies and temporalities.
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