Through the work of artists that denounced Eurocentrism as a tool of power, this room questions the inherited notion of “conquest”. For these creators, Spain’s traditional historical narrative around that process betrays the relationship between Western modernity and structural violence which, applied to the military domination of territories and people, has endured in the post-colonial world. This modernity-violence duality is translated into the dispossession of land and subjectivity, into conflicts of gender and race, into the exploitation of resources and people and into the theft of history.  Such processes of domination were still reproduced after the independence of the colonies, for the creole elites who led emancipation imposed models that were foreign to the ways of living and world-views of the Indigenous people and people of African descent.

These works highlight how colonialism articulated a racist, class-based, patriarchal and imperial logic moulded by the Christian doctrine and the heteronormative, erasing the alternative knowledge embodied by Indigenous peoples. The pieces in this space, therefore, critically analyse aspects such as the visual systems of representation, exhibition and colonial ideology propaganda, the entrenchment of the modern, heterosexual regime and the exaltation of white supremacy masked at different levels of society and present at once in individual and institutional behaviours.