HAMAN MPADIRE
Tracing the Transmission of Movement into the Future: Decolonizing pedagogy.
This research project proposal was conceived out of curiosity, urgency towards examining folk aesthetics and forms of dance, sound, rituals, native language(s) and ancient technologies, especially in Uganda; as embodied practices that could be relevant in the process of dismantling, decolonizing and developing distinctive methodology amidst the constant colonial reinvention. I am intrigued by how this can be influenced and supported by the intersection between archive and memory in colonial and post-colonial context. Archivist Kenneth E. Foote (1990) elaborated about the archive – as a collective memory that is sometimes employed as a metaphor for discussing social, political and cultural role of archive. Archives can also manifest themselves through oral and ritual tradition thus helping to transfer information and thereby sustain memory from generation to generation. The African archiving has been through masks, images, songs and stories. All these forms of archiving were broken and distorted with the arrival of the colonizers. Uganda was a colonial naming, making and a protectorate administrated by the British Empire. Questions to unfold, examine and manifest, include: What does decolonized pedagogy look like? How do we negotiate relationships between past, present and future realities of a colonialised body? How much is too much for an individual to endure in the process of internal decolonization? Can methodology developed through decoloniality become an embodiment of individual and collective healing of intergenerational trauma?
Haman Mpadire is an artist, performance maker and dance teacher born in Eastern Uganda, originally from Busoga tribe. Haman explores animistic notions of ancient Busoga kingdom and beyond + complex relationships between identity, visibility and colonialism towards black African bodies.
