Images from Wiki Commons. Paalen’s Atelier in his House in St. Angel (Anahuac, Mexico City)
Associate Professor Dr. Markus Hallensleben and Daniel P. Gámez, PhD, UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow (Department of History & American Indian Studies, University of California, Los Angeles) will introduce a new practical decolonial approach to digitally archiving, editing, and critically analyzing primary sources in European cultural, avant-garde and exile studies.
While collaboratively working towards a multilingual global online archive around the unpublished exile writings by Austrian-Mexican avant-garde artist Wolfgang Paalen (1905-59), including his collections of Indigenous belongings, Dr. Hallensleben and Dr. Gámez aim for an ethnography-informed, participant centred, Indigenous storywork-based approach. The project, “Reframing avant-garde networks in exile: A decolonial approach to editing Wolfgang Paalen’s literary writings,” reimagines the ways that critical editorial and reciprocal archival practices can make unrightfully taken cultural heritage accessible, and grapple with the impact and ongoing tensions of European colonial history at times of forced migration.
This transdisciplinary project addresses a core question that cuts across the scholarship and practice of cultural heritage preservation and repatriation: How can we move from Eurocentric, settler-centred archiving, cataloguing, knowledge production, and interpreting history, to a communal, interrelated, and reciprocal way of sharing knowledge? In this talk, Dr. Hallensleben and Dr. Gámez will focus on Paalen in Mexican exile and the complications that arise when reassessing his role as collector and author, locating cultural heritage items worldwide and bringing them to the attention of their beholders for the first time.
This talk is part of a symposium on “Avant-Garde across the Americas” in cooperation with the JSPS research group on Avant-Garde Autobiography and Historiography from a Gender Perspective (Lead: Akane Nishioka, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) and UBC’s Centre for Migration Studies Narratives Research Group.
How to Attend
This is a virtual event taking place on March 24, 2026 from 6:00 – 7:00 pm. Attendees can join this public lecture via Zoom.
