WHILE I WRITE is part of a project by Grada Kilomba, where she explores forms of decolonizing knowledge, using writing and performance as alternative forms of knowledge production.
“This video is an experiment. I want to feel the words that I write, to associate them not only with theory but also with movement, sounds, memories, and emotions. I am quite obsessed with the idea of 'performing knowledge,' with the idea of transforming knowledge into something vivid, and bring it into stage and performance.
We are permanently taught to rationalize knowledge - we read the books and the essays, we remember the theories and we memorize the definitions, and still we often do not know what to do with them and how to perform them in our lives, because knowledge remains at a cognitive level, in the head. Knowledge is presented as something disembodied, detached from our bodies, from our biographies, and from ourselves; and we are taught not to have emotional access to knowledge, and play with the fantasy that knowledge production is something neutral, objective, and universal.
I have been lecturing at the university for so many years, and it is still common that students come to me and ask me, what is it that I would like them to write about, and I answer ‘Nothing. What about you, what is it that you would like to write about?' and this is always a moment of surprise: to realize that theory should be placed in their biography, and their biography in theory. I believe that only when we have this kind of emotional access to knowledge we can truly understand it, and become transformative - for me, this is decolonizing knowledge.”
Grada Kilomba's Statement for her Video Installation at the Exhibition "Knowledge Unbound," Stockholm 2015.

This video was produced during her artist/writer residency in Berlin, where she is developing the project "Decolonizing Knowledge: Performing Knowledge", 2015.

Grada Kilomba is a portuguese writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin. Her work draws on memory, trauma, race, and gender, and has been translated into several languages and published in international anthologies as well as staged internationally. Kilomba's work is best known for using a variety of formats, from print publications to staged readings and performance, creating a hybrid space where the boundaries between the academic and the artistic languages confine - creating what she calls ‘Performing Knowledge.'
She has been lecturing at several international universities and last was a Professor for Gender Studies and Post-colonial studies, at the Humboldt University, Berlin.
http://www.gradakilomba.com