In her collection of poems entitled DMZ Colony, Don Mee Choi answers her own question of “How do I know?” with “Foreigners know”. As such, it is less a claim than a conclusion. Over one weekend, two installations by Andres Pereira Paz and David Reiber Otálora dive into this kind of complicated knowledge of the foreigner. Both gently trace it as expressed in the experience of those displaced, racialized and brutalized within the ongoing workings of European colonialism.

In Pereira Paz’s installation, it takes form as a flight path. Song and heartbeat evoke the unlikely journey of a Guajojó bird that had fled the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest to the Bolivian city of La Paz. Accompanied by astral figures that appear to be illuminated by flames, the installation registers the knowledge of an animal made a foreigner in their own right. The figures in Reiber Otáloras installation wear the hats of a different kind of foreigner altogether, those of the colonizers. Against the backdrop of the countless atrocities conducted in the pursuit of knowledge, the installation “Hot, Heimat, Horizon” indexes the delusional core of colonial knowledge regimes. The misty desire to lose oneself in the so-called “other” has brutal consequences for all those who are on the wrong end of the field-glass.