Exploring Decolonial Art Practices: A Case Study of "Isi Esemo (Ancestral Constellation)"

This article examines Isi Esemo (Ancestral Constellation), a finalist proposal for the Berlin Global Village Decolonial Memorial Monument, as a critical intervention in contemporary decolonial art practice. Grounded in the ancestral cosmology of the Isoko people of Southern Nigeria, where the dead are understood to become stellar presences guiding the living, the project mobilizes Indigenous epistemology as an active counter-archive to Eurocentric monumental traditions. Through artistic research, material symbolism, and decolonial theory, the study positions the monument as a site where public memory, coloniality, and embodied knowledge converge. Employing bronze, marble, and cosmological geometries, Isi Esemo materializes the tension between colonial imposition and ancestral continuity, reframing monumentality as a living, relational process rather than a static commemorative form. By inscribing African epistemic frameworks within a European civic landscape marked by colonial amnesia, the work disrupts dominant narratives of history, value, and belonging. The article argues that decolonial art practices, when rooted in specific cultural cosmologies operate not only as aesthetic propositions but also as epistemic, pedagogical, and political acts capable of reconfiguring public space, reparative memory, and the futures imagined through art.