Travelling to Africa can take a white European person to an uncomfortable spot: you can see the vestiges of colonial occupation, its consequences upon present-day African societies, the signs left in our imaginations, the implications of racism and Eurocentrism. The easiest reaction to all of this is guilt, which often only leads to temporary self-loathing and a feeling of impotence, or just to the cynical acceptance of a situation. Historical contingence is thus transformed into destiny, which amounts to a reaffirmation of existing prejudice and to ruinous strategies based on charity and the like. Another option is to assume that history and culture are living entities we can act upon: a feeling of responsibility seems a better starting point than white middle-class guilt. Part of this effort stands in deconstructing cultural stereotypes and working on our own narratives. After living in Mali for three years, doing research on what she refers to as “the idea of Africa that Europe has created for its own benefit”, Gloria Oyarzabal started working on a meditation on how Europe’s welfare was built on suffering and terror, how colonization of the mind is a subtle macabre tool of domination or we can’t universalize western mainstream feminist discourses. Through dialectic images that try to establish links between the past and the present, or that highlight the interplay between reality and its image, she uses archive images -sometimes manipulating them-, as well as her own photographs, creating multilayer projects on its narratives.