Kervin Saint Pere

Statement

The short film «We are all Kanaken», through its semantic exploration, addresses colonial patterns of representation that have permeated racist colloquial language, used to disparage migrant working-class communities. These patterns trace back to ethnological photography from colonial expeditions in the 20th century.

The critical and decolonial cartography project «The City of Hamburg and the Afterlife of Colonialism» highlights how the city of Hamburg has systematically forgotten its colonial past in its commemorative plaques, revealing that the colonial imagination remains present in public spaces, with buildings acting as Pathosformeln.

Similarly, the installation «Emil Nolde and the afterlife of colonialism», along with the analysis of the «The white background» exposes how colonial Pathosformelnpersist in artistic expressions such as expressionism, as well as in anthropological research and popular visual language.

These projects have expanded the concept of the «Afterlife of Colonialism» through various media, delving into archival research to demonstrate how images retain a colonial afterlife, with the aim of developing a decolonial perspective based on concepts from image theorist Aby Warburg. Transformative knowledge is to be generated through artistic research, the opening of archives to uncover the unarchivable and interventions in public space as decolonial acts. This knowledge emerges from a new legibility of images, understood not only as visual representations but also as mental images (Denkraum), as Warburg described. The «Afterlife of Colonialism» aims to transform these images and their underlying thought structures, originally constructed from colonial and racist imaginaries. The removal of this symbolic violence is possible only through a clear visibility of the problem and a conscious effort to change how these images are interpreted.

Vita

Kervin Saint Pere

was born in Peru in 1991, lives in Berlin, and works as a visual artist and researcher at the intersection of contemporary art and visual anthropology. He studied fine arts at the HFBK Hamburg and, in the scope of the Art School Alliance, at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the Studio of Art and Digital Media. In 2022, he completed his master’s degree at the HPBK specializing in time-based media. Kervin Saint Pere works with image archives and reflects on their (post-)colonial structures and the social imaginary in which they exist in order to develop counter-archives. Thematically, his work moves between migration, representation and decolonial theory.