UNTIL LIONS HAVE THEIR OWN HISTORIANS...

The margins and surpluses –of history and law, populations and subjects, representation and repression, the economy and education, violence and memory – are the two key concepts that the Declinación Magnética (Magnetic Declination*) group examines through its installations and production at this exhibition of two complementary artistic projects.   The colonial past and present of Spain is at the heart of the first production, a critical reassessment of the dominant accounts concerning the “Discovery” and Colonisation of America, as represented in Spanish and Latin American school textbooks over different periods. This is experience-based production involving a series of exercises with pupils and teachers of Spanish Secondary Education (ESO) and the Baccalaureate, formalised in video projections and panels with interventions on the books themselves.   If it can be suggested that the traces of violence and dispossession that still prevail emerged out of the margins of the history and memory of this colonial past, today this dispossession and violence has now taken on a different form. From dispossession through exploitation, we have moved onto dispossession through exclusion. For today’s capitalism, ever-increasing swathes of humanity have become entirely dispensable; they have been converted into a surplus of throwaway lives, dealt with in an ever more repressive manner through legal mechanisms that leave ever narrower margins for citizens to protest. This is the new form of dispossession that the second production attempts to chart, through a narrative shaped into an expanded cinematographic structure where objects and spaces are combined with moving images to create the meta-frames of an art installation film.   History and Law are the two supreme mechanisms that mediate between subjects and power, both defined by an apparently unquestionable set of regulations behind which a shared nexus of founding fictions hides. It is on these fictions that the two artistic productions given expression in this exhibition intend to shine a light.   The title comes from an African proverb: “Until lions have their own historians, the history of hunting will continue to glorify the hunter.” So that we are no longer the prey, to stop this atrocious hunt, to return this dispossessed sovereignty to the lions, we urgently need to create narratives "from below" to break the monopoly of the predators who dictate to us their History and their Law.   (*) Declinación Magnética is a research and artistic production group made up of theorists, curators and visual artists. Based on post- and decolonial studies and examining the immediate context, the DM group’s work consists of hybrid strategies and methodologies arising from a variety of fields in the practice and production of knowledge.   Members of the group: Aimar Arriola, José Manuel Bueso, Diego del Pozo, Eduardo Galvagni, Sally Gutiérrez, Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga, and Silvia Zayas, with the collaboration of Juan Guardiola.   Declinación Magnética emerges from a research group looking into “Decolonising Knowledge and  Aesthetics” (DKA), a joint venture between Matadero Madrid and Goldsmiths, University of London, launched in autumn 2012.   (*) The magnetic declination of a point on the earth is the angle between the local magnetic north and the true north (the geographic north). There are unexpected variations in the coordinates, warped perspectives and a reordering of geographies, which leave space for the unforeseen.