What position do we take when we are asked to inform, and for whom?

Across artistic, cultural, and academic contexts, individuals from colonized, Indigenous, and marginalized communities are routinely called upon to explain, translate, or authenticate their cultures for others. Whether framed as an invitation, an obligation, or an expectation, this ask echoes the long history of the “native informant,” a figure that once anchored ethnographic and colonial authority and continues to shape who is recognized as a knower.

Originating in anthropology as the often invisible source through which colonial knowledge was produced, the native informant was later refigured by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to name the structural dependence of modern knowledge systems on those they render legible but not fully heard. Today, the notion of the native informant persists as a trope and epistemic framework, encompassing the postcolonial intellectual (or exilic or comprador intellectual, to follow Edward Said and Achille Mbembe) and responding to contemporary art’s renewed desires for Indigeneity and cultural diversity.

A marker of both epistemic privilege and dispossession, the position of the native informant is inherently double-edged. It confers the authority of lived experience and “insider knowledge” while simultaneously operating through power imbalances that reduce knowledge to information and visibility to a demand for representation and authenticity. Artists, writers, and scholars are often expected to serve as custodians or transmitters of a culture or a group—a representational role not always of their choosing—cast as intermediaries, translators, or gatekeepers. 

The term carries an added charge: to be called a native informant or informer (following Hamid Dabashi’s recasting of the figure), often from within one’s own community, is to be accused of collaboration, of speaking too fluently to power, of rendering one’s community legible to institutional or Western desires.

Rethinking this figure and its historical and contemporary iterations, this seminar, part of the Vera List Center’s Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series, takes up the informant and informing as a strategic mode of sharing intelligence that refuses essentialization and resists collapsing knowledge into information or data extraction. Drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist frameworks, we turn toward forms of relational knowing that invite agency, opacity, and reciprocity, and unsettle the assumption that understanding must rely on exposition and explanation. 

Here, the native informant offers a position from which to withhold, misinform, or speak obliquely, playing with the demand for cultural authenticity or knowledge, with humor, irony, or even misdirection. 

Ultimately, the program considers what it might mean to inform, and to intentionally position oneself as an informant while sharing and transmitting knowledge otherwise: not as informers performing legibility and representation, but as artists, thinkers, and communities asserting how, when, and whether we wish to be known. With curator KJ Abudu and artists Jackson Polys and Selma Selman, moderated by Eriola Pira.

Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series
Through modes of shared study, rehearsal, and iterative dialogue with invited artists, thinkers, and the public, the VLC Seminar Series develops and presents artistic and scholarly research centered on the Vera List Center’s 2025–2027 Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence. Comprising twelve sessions convened from September 2025 through May 2027, the Seminar Series is conceived as an open curriculum and a site for collective inquiry. Each seminar is paired with a curated reader on the Matter of Intelligence Are.na channel, grounding the dialogue and opening new paths for exploration.