Words

Cultural heritage

Cultural heritage is a term used to describe the tangible and intangible legacies that a culture inherits. Cultural heritage often plays a role in the construction of national and regional identities; its genealogical understanding of culture presupposes a stable lineage. What counts as cultural heritage is therefore easily confused with establishment and if a lively debate around the terms of inclusion or inclusion is missing, it risks to become a tool for sedimenting conventions. In Belgium, cultural heritage is also an administrative term that sets apart cultural production from work being done at museums and archives. It is exactly these borders that DiVersions would like to blur.

Decolonial

Practice of rejecting everything we were taught by the system of racial oppression we were all born in. Decoloniality calls for intellectual and active unapologetic disobedience in the pursuit of dismantling this centuries-old system. In Belgium, the vigourous apology of Leopold II and the Belgian colonial rule in the public space demonstrates itself that the decolonial process has not reach to the collective consciences yet.

Intersectionality

Intersectionality is a framework developed by afro-american feminists to analyse how interlocking systems of power impact each other. It considers oppressions not as forces which exist separately from each other but understands that the entanglement of for example class, race, sexual orientation, age, disability and gender produce complexer forms of marginalization. To say that DiVersions is a site for 'decolonial and intersectional practice' means that we try to pay attention to different interfering patterns of inclusion and exclusion that are acting on the digital archive.