The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge

The publication of these parts of a fundamental book on representations of Africa, drawing on the analyses of a set of knowledges and discourses from travel narratives or missionary works to anthropological studies and theories on ‘primitive' art -, was thought in articulation with the virtual exhibit "African Art Photography: San Payo and Mário Novais". The latter can be also understood as pointing to the ways in which a set of epistemologies made possible the discourses that would offer the conditions of possibility for the exhibition and classification practices that would come to play a decisive role in the invention of ‘African art'. It is this organization of knowledges that contemporary artistic and curatorial practices evoke, displace or contest, and that an analysis that associates historical depth with the questioning of epistemological presuppositions allows to critically recognize.