http://www.leslaboratoires.org/en/projet/architectures-de-la-decolonisation/architectures-de-la-decolonisation

From 2011-2012 Marion von Osten headed a project at the Parisian art institution Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers that asked how the process of decolonization has changed the epistemological structure of thought and radicalized aesthetic production. In the frame of this project von Osten initiated a series of gatherings and formed a research group that worked for several months on anti-colonial cultural magazines edited in Paris and French post-colonies in the first half of the twentieth century. This group of Paris based doctorate students and researchers consisted of Lotte Arndt, Mihaela Gherghescu, Fanny Gillet-Ouhenia, Olivier Hadouchi, Pascale Ratovonony and Cédric Vincent. The group studied magazines published in Algeria, France, Morocco and Tunisia in the first half of the twentieth century like Alif, Black Orpheus, El Moudjahid Culturel, Esprit, L’Étudiant Noir, Légitime Défense, Les Temps Modernes, La Revue Du Monde Noir, Masses, Miroir du Cinéma, Novembre, Opus International, Partisans, Présence Africaine, Souffles, Tricontinental, Transition, Tropiques. In the frame of the closing exhibition and public events entitled “Action! painting/ publishing”, the magazine Souffles was exhibited and compared with the Tricontinental and Partisans Magazine in a productive collaboration with the film and literature historian Olivier Hadouchi. Doing so, the larger frame of the constellations of aesthetic publishing in the former colonies and solidarity movements have been highlighted by showing the links, the simultaneities and divergences of Souffles with the other magazines and documents that were exhibited, but the Magazine itself was not yet studied in depth. This small-scale exhibition and its public events further encouraged the planned research application and its process-based, transdisciplinary approach.