Mapping decolonial futures through material memory, political imagination, and the art of world-making
Installation view of Gondwana la fabrique du futur , by Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Natt Fejfar / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
In this conversation, Brendon Bell-Roberts speaks with Mansour Ciss Kanakassy about Gondwana, his long-running project that reimagines African unity through speculative cartography and emancipatory thought. Blending political critique with poetic world-building, Kanakassy envisions a continent unbound by colonial borders and shaped instead by shared histories, resources, and futures. Here, he reflects on the symbolic and practical power of imagined geographies and how art can model new forms of liberation and global belonging.
Brendon Bell-Roberts: Gondwana la Fabrique du Futur emerges from decades of your Deberlinization Laboratory. How does this new chapter extend that long journey of unravelling imposed borders?
Mansour Ciss Kanakassy: The Déberlinisation artistic project challenges and erases the artificial borders imposed on Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. The process of decolonising minds and territories is transposed to Brazil with my installation, called Gondwana la Fabrique du Futur.
Gondwana was a supercontinent that included South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia and India. It fragmented around 180 million years ago. The work created is an installation in a space of ‘CARTOGRAPHIES’ drawings illustrating various expropriations. This installation also focuses on the appropriation of Quilombo territories by multinationals through real estate speculation. They offer inspiring connections on issues of territory, economy, cultural identity, power and self-determination.
To accompany this work, a new design for Afro-Quilombo local currency banknotes, in a Special Edition, will be issued for the 36th Sao Paolo Biennial in 2025. In the Gondwana installation, where the Quilombo Central Bank is located, this new community currency will be symbolically exchanged for the Brazilian currency, the REAL (BRL), or the US dollar. The project holistically addresses a diverse audience, and particularly the Quilombo community.
Abdias do Nascimento recto. © Mansour Ciss Kanakassy
Gondwana evokes a shared pre-colonial world. What possibilities did this ancient continent open up for you when you designed your work for São Paulo?
For me, Gondwana evokes a shared pre-colonial world, a standard matrix of territories and imaginations. This concept provided me with a powerful symbolic framework for thinking about São Paulo beyond its colonial history, reconnecting fragmented geographies, memories and identities. During my first trip to Brazil, I was deeply struck by what I perceived as a great ambivalence within the Afro-Brazilian population. What struck me goes beyond a simple identity crisis: it is an older, deeper trauma that paradoxically coexists with an intense joie de vivre and faces of indescribable beauty. This tension moved me profoundly and fuelled my artistic reflection.
The language of art allowed me to address these issues without passing through the filter of spoken language. My installation at the Central Bank, with its own currency, functions as a universal and immediately readable metaphor: money. Talking about money means talking about the real economy, power, circulation and sovereignty. The work aroused great curiosity among visitors. It also raises the question of Quilombo territories, particularly through cartography, creating inspiring links between territory, economy, cultural identity, power, self-determination and economic independence.
All of these elements paved the way for rich discussions on new perspectives for endogenous development among Afro-Brazilian populations, particularly Quilombola communities. Gondwana thus becomes a mental and political space, a place of projection where past, present, and future can dialogue.
Installation view of Gondwana la fabrique du futur , by Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Natt Fejfar / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
By putting the Afro-Quilombo currency into circulation, you are directly intervening in value systems. What conversations do you hope to spark with this gesture?
The circulation of Afro-Quilombo currency constitutes a direct decolonial intervention at the heart of the value systems inherited from colonial modernity. By substituting hegemonic monetary regimes with an alternative symbolic device, the project questions the historical foundations of the capitalist economy, while revealing the continuities between economic exploitation, memory erasure and racial domination.
Designed specifically for the 36th São Paulo Biennial, Afro-Quilombo banknotes adopt a politically situated and pedagogically active iconography. They put into circulation the faces and thoughts of Afro-Brazilian intellectuals and activists such as Abdias do Nascimento and Maria Beatriz Nascimento, not as frozen icons, but as contemporary agents of knowledge production. This presence of the present is brought into tension with a genealogy of Quilombola resistance embodied by Zumbi dos Palmares and Tandara dos Palmares, thus affirming a decolonial temporality in which the past, present and future engage in critical dialogue. The Afro-Quilombo currency, therefore, functions as an educational tool and a medium for the transmission of subalternised knowledge.
Its circulation aims to create spaces for collective discussion within Quilombo communities and beyond, towards the wider biennial audience. The project seeks to promote critical awareness of contemporary economic realities by highlighting the logic of extraction, dispossession and marginalisation that continues to structure postcolonial economies. With this in mind, the initiative is accompanied by concrete educational measures—open workshops, community meetings, interventions in schools and universities—designed as spaces for co-learning and the reappropriation of knowledge. The aim is not to transmit knowledge vertically, but to create horizontal pedagogical conditions in which art becomes a place for the collective production of knowledge, critical autonomy, and emancipatory imaginaries.
Dandara Afro-Quilombo Verso. © Mansour Ciss Kanakassy
Your work constantly challenges the power of the nation-state. How does this installation reinvent movement and belonging beyond these rigid frameworks?
My work unfolds as a challenge to the power regimes that structure the modern nation-state, revealing the mechanisms of exclusion, hierarchisation, and the naturalisation of borders that it produces. The installation mobilises the Bank of the Laboratory of De-Berlinisation and its currency, the Afro, as critical instruments for undoing the epistemic and political authority of these institutional architectures. The most obvious proof is that it exists: our currency is traded and collected, proving that another system of values and belonging can emerge outside state structures.
For more than twenty-five years, the Afro has been circulating in the legitimising spaces of contemporary art; this performative circulation demonstrates that an alternative economy— symbolic, memorial and political — can emerge outside any sovereign framework, revealing art as a place of production of other forms of value and different modes of belonging. It embodies a praxis of deterritorialisation that replaces the state model with a transnational, relational and decolonial horizon.
The installation thus reconfigures movement and belonging by placing them within a post-national dynamic, where subjects are no longer defined by territorial assignment, but by their ability to participate in processes of shared creation, historical reappropriation and free circulation. Committed to this perspective, my artistic practice asserts itself as a sovereign act, a stateless sovereignty grounded in inspiration, imagination, and the need to create spaces emancipated from the authorisations and prescriptions of power.
My gesture does not seek to reproduce the logic of power, but to open up a space where movement, exchange and creation can freely reinvent themselves. I am fully committed to a dynamic of autonomous creation: to create, I need only inspiration—certainly not authorisation.
Installation view of Gondwana la fabrique du futur , by Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo © Natt Fejfar / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
The installation’s maps are redrawing the world. What role do these maps play in redefining our vision of Africa and its diasporas?
From this perspective, art is conceived as a significant educational tool, capable of functioning as a barometer of contemporary changes and as a device for unlearning naturalised knowledge. La Fabrique du Futur is built precisely against the colonial educational heritage that continues to structure our understanding of the world. The installation tackles head-on one of its most persistent pillars: the Mercator map projection, developed in the 16th century and still dominant in school curricula worldwide.
The Mercator projection is not simply a technical convention; it is an ideological tool that has shaped a hierarchical view of the planet, in which Europe is symbolically enlarged while Africa and the southern territories are systematically reduced. By using Gondwana as a counter-model, the installation offers a radical reinterpretation of global cartography. It
reveals significant distortions in surface area: the African continent, covering 30.37 million km² and comprising 54 states, is three times the size of Europe and fifteen times the size of Greenland, yet it is presented as equivalent in mainstream school maps. These fundamental facts, largely absent from educational curricula, are placed at the centre of the artistic installation.
Zumbi Afro-Quilombo II Recto. © Mansour Ciss Kanakassy
Ultimately, this work resembles an invitation. What futures – or what freedoms – do you hope visitors will perceive when they enter Gondwana, La Fabrique du Futur?
Gondwana, La Fabrique du Futur is a political statement. It asserts that the future of Africa and its diaspora cannot be conceived using the mental tools inherited from colonisation. Through the Laboratoire de Déberlinisation, which I founded in 2001, I directly challenge the legacy of the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, which fragmented the continent and continues to organise its domination.
De-Berlinization means rejecting imposed borders, narratives, and dependencies. It is a struggle against neo-colonialism, but also against the internal alienation it has produced. This work is not a monument to memory: it is a tool for intellectual and cultural combat.
When entering Gondwana, I want visitors to understand that they have a responsibility. The future is not a given; it is created. It is made by reclaiming knowledge, the economy, the imagination and sovereignty. Here, we learn to unlearn to rebuild.
With Afro-Quilombo and the Sankofa symbol, I propose a concrete vision: a unified pan-African economy designed to break with dependency and pass on to future generations something more than mere survival—a vision of dignity and absolute freedom. Gondwana clearly states this: the future is not begged for, it is built.
