festival contre le racisme

Call for the online festival contre le racisme 2021!

Decolonize University! Decolonize your knowledge and your anti-racist practice!

The free association of students’ unions (fzs) and the Federal Union of Foreign Students in Germany (BAS) are calling for participants in the festival contre le racisme 2021! The fclr will take place for the 19th time and is a campaign against racism and xenophobia which has been held once a year at German universities since 2003. The fzs began in 2003 for the first time to organize a decentralized festival contre le racisme, which was to consist of many local events. Since 2005, the fclr has been organized together with the the BAS.

2020 was a very challenging year. As the pandemic started, fear spreaded even faster than the virus and suddenly, many people felt the need to hoard and defend, instead of supporting and caring. But fear brought people together as well, and this situation gave many of us the chance to reevaluate what is really important to us and encourage a big change in our society, like the indigenous climate activist Aylton Krenak says »COVID is a lesson from the Mother Nature that made us stop and think«. 

It was a difficult year but it was also a year of strong resistance from marginalized groups around the globe. Many of us, living two realities, because our beloved ones live in another part of the world, submitted to a different healthcare system, got the chance to compare the situations from different perspectives. For all of us has been difficult to renounce to see and spend time with our closest friends, but online meeting platforms have brought us together with people from all around the world, people we never imagined we could be sharing a space with and learn a language, or to play an instrument or discuss about politics or sciences.

We were able to see that international gatherings are possible without environmental pollution but also made clearer how communities from the global south are disproportionally more affected by the pandemic than the ones in global north. It’s important to note that accessability is not something we should take for granted and it is a real matter for many of us. The pandemic also forced us to see, that we are globally intertwined as never before, and if we want things to change, we must reflect on the bonds that tie us together and consider the plurality of voices and struggles in the fight for a better society.

In order to build a network of solidarity without borders, we must take the verticality of the global power relations into account and understand that the hierarchal categories of modernity such as race, gender, sexuality and class affect us in different ways.

We, from fclr 2021, think that decolonizing our knowledge, institutions and ouserlves is an urgent and more than needed matter. Since every sphere of our lives is affected by the coloniality, we can’t think of anti-racist work without thinking it intersectionally. The goal of fclr 2021 is to be a platform for the multiplurality of voices from all around the world and open discussions about privilege and real solidarity. This is a great opportunity to get to know alternative ways of organization, knowledge and production. It’s also a great chance to reflect on our own privileges and use them to shape a better and more equal society.

We want to discuss about colonialism and the coloniality of our structures as well as the different effects that coloniality has on our lifes. We hope that this fclr can offer critical and ethical approaches that may help a shift of paradigms.

We open the space, and we invite you to start the deconstruction!

 Would you like to be part of it?

The festival will take place from the 15th June to the 15th July. Send us the event you want to organize, we are open to any online format (presens events are up to you, but we don’t want to facilitate superspreader events).

For instance, you can contribute with:

  • Web seminars
  • Workshops
  • Online concerts
  • Performance
  • (Impro-)Theatre
  • Arts
  • Readings
  • Streetart (installations, banner, footprints)
  • Videos
  • Films
  • Digital Zines
  • Images
  • Infographics
  • Memes, …

You can suscribe your event in this form until 15 May 2021 here: https://t1p.de/7h5o.

If you have ideas and you don’t know how you can technically implement them, please contact us at: fclr@bas-ev.de or fclr@fzs.de and we can think of something together!

Solidary greetings,
Nadia Galina (BAS) and Letícia da Rosa (fzs)