Dorothea Schlegel Artist in Residence

December 2024

Remapping Surrealism in Times of Tout-Monde

März's experimental cartographic practice is dedicated to making visible a relational imagination that is marked by a sensibility and respect for all the differences of the world, for which Édouard Glissant coined the term Tout-Monde, whole-world. The research method deriving from this perspective deliberately troubles divisions maintained by nationalist histories, temporal breaks and the disciplinary compartmentalisation of knowledge. It moreover challenges colonial-modern oppositions upheld by racism, sexism, anthropocentrism and capitalism. What forms did the real and imagined movements by artists, scholars and activists associated with surrealism take when they were placed within such a planetary framework? And how may the directions of the surrealist movement as a whole be reimagined once it is understood as a global, anti-Eurocentric and radically inclusive community of ethical views based on elective affinities, as suggested by surrealist scholars such as Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley? In pursuing these research questions, März will place a special focus on collaborative practices between representatives of the European avant-garde and the Black radical tradition that warrant to be taken seriously from a contemporary decolonial vantage point, as well as aesthetic and political theoretical innovations that emerge from this intersection. The research will result in a series of large-scale hand-drawn maps that will be shown in the spring of 2025 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) as part of the "Surreal Continuum: Revisiting, Remapping, Reimagining Surrealism" project.

Moses März is an independent researcher, writer and mapmaker based in Berlin. He studied Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin and African Studies at the University of Cape Town. In 2014 he joined the editorial team of the Chimurenga Chronic in Cape Town. In 2018 he co-founded the independent publication project Mittel und Zweck together with Philipp Hege. He received a PhD from the University of Potsdam in 2021 for a dissertation on the politics of relation of Édouard Glissant. In 2022 a series of his large-scale hand-drawn map series titled "Mapping Decolonial Berlin" was exhibited as part of the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, curated by Kader Attia. Since then, his maps have circulated between academic, art and activist contexts, among them several events organised by the Dekoloniale Memory Culture in the City project in Berlin. His most recent publications include "Édouard Glissant’s Politics of Relation – Mapping an Intellectual Movement of Marronage" (published in 2021), "Karten zur Kreolisierung der Welt and the Marvelous Arithmetics of Proximity and Distance oder Decolonial Reading Notes (Out of Berlin)" (2022) and "Sonne der Relation and More Postcards from a Postcolonial Museum oder Das Expressionismus Dossier" (2024).