Property
Colonial Histories and Messages to the Future
To possess something is to lose something: Starting from this seemingly contradictory claim this essay invokes various registers to defamiliarize the ways in which property structures subjectivity, world relations and affects. Intertwined with colonialism, racism and sexism, concepts of property have found an echo in piracy and “postcolonial copyright.” At the level of theory, a crossing out and a reversal of time are required to undo property-related violence and its mindsets. At the level of artistic practice new modes of appropriation become imaginable. And while the commons will not be restored, multiple modes of having and commoning are possible.
