Paloma Passetto de Souza

Image from “Museum of disobedience” project by Paloma Passetto de Souza

Biography

Site: https://palomapassetto.com/

Brazilian-born, UK-based artist Paloma Passetto employs analogue photography alongside a range of artistic practices to explore socio-political and cultural themes of identity, belonging, and political resistance. Influenced by Latin American decolonial theory, her work investigates how societies shaped by the Western epistemic and political project of modernity/coloniality are influenced by cultural and political events. She examines how ‘othered’ communities resist this domination through practices of epistemic disobedience, using documentation as a tool to reassert agency and self-sovereignty.

The project

“Museum of disobedience” is an exploration that stems from extensive research on Elephant & Castle, a vital hub for South American and other diasporic communities. Through interweaving historical allegories and ancestral mythologies, the work examines the poetics of resistance within Latin American communities as they unfold across spatial and temporal realms.

I aim to investigate how society, shaped by the Western epistemic and political project of modernity/coloniality, responds to cultural and political events, and how ‘othered’ communities counter it through the practice of epistemic disobedience.

Not far from Elephant & Castle, the British Museum houses a collection of pre-Columbian objects looted from across Latin America. With this in mind, this work emerges from a reflection on the disparity between the meticulous preservation of these objects and the systemic neglect of immigrant communities.

Image from “Museum of disobedience” project by Paloma Passetto de Souza

Image from “Museum of disobedience” project by Paloma Passetto de Souza

As a way of tapping into epistemic disobedience, the “Museum of disobedience” explores ritualistic practices as a disruptive force that has been employed since colonial times to reflect on contemporary issues of cultural oppression and insurgence. It honours oral history, popular traditions, ritual customs, and folklore, forging a space to celebrate surviving ancestral knowledge in contrast to the canonised idea of Western scientific, absolute truth.

The “Museum of disobedience” presents artefacts from an unofficial history within a speculative space that challenges the notion of the museum as an imperial machine. Everything in the museum is perishable: sculptures are made of food or unfired clay, and photographs are anthotypes—a printing technique in which the image is constantly fading into disappearance. Nothing can be owned or preserved. Everything is ephemeral, existing only within this temporality and the imaginary.