Over the past fifteen years, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay has developed a fundamental reflection on the modus operandi of sovereign power, initially focusing on photography and the conditions of appearance and monstration of states of exception (The Civil Contract of Photography, Zone Books 2008), and then on the epistemological foundations that allow us to 'unlearn imperialism', to open up the perspectives of a 'potential history' (Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Verso, 2019). The latter project pays particular attention to the separation of narratives and archives, people and objects, now held in collections in the West and displayed in museums, and analyses them as tools of imperial domination.
This interview with researcher and curator Lotte Arndt (Paris, Berlin) returns to the project of a potential history through the unlearning of imperialism as a horizon for thinking about languages, both imperial and resistant, which is also the subject of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's new book, La Résistance des bijoux, published in May 2023 by Ròt-Bò-Krik.