“Counter Narratives and Resilience in Practice: On Decolonial Strategies in Art and Communities”
Workshop: 7.12.22
The hybrid workshop addressed the potentials of performative, community-based, editorial and curatorial practices as narratives against the dominant canon of colonial histories. In the framework of a roundtable discussion, the five speakers Elena Agudio, Anna Ehrenstein, Patrick Flores, Yvette Mutumba and Alper Turan each contributed short impulse lectures, ideas and critical thoughts, in order to open the discourse to all participants afterwards. Methods of storytelling, queer curating, fictional archiving, the curatorial reconstruction of the global modern project and the rewriting of social constructs through the building of communities were discussed as resiliencies against, or rather, as Yvette Mutumba argues in her contribution, making visible parallel narratives existing next to master narratives and colonial systems. Find a video documentation here.
Realized / Produced by Dr. Anna-Lena Werner and Till Rückwart
for EXC 2020 Temporal Communities, Freie Universität Berlin
Workshop website and video: temporal-communities.de
Project: "Circulating Narratives – Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art"
The workshop is part of the transfer project "Circulating Narratives - Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art", lead by Prof. Dr. Annette Jael Lehmann and based at the Cluster of Excellence EXC 2020 Temporal Communities, Freie Universität Berlin. It contributes to the project's broader inquiry into how embodied creative practices, such as performance, can unfold alternative narratives, practices of embodying histories and the transfer of embodied knowledge and can be considered a continuation of the two-part video series "On Performance and Communities" (2020) and "On Narration and Embodiment" (2021).
The project is a collaboration with Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, initiated on occasion of the museum's exhibition "Nation, Narration, Narcosis: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories" curated by Anna-Catharina Gebbers, together with Grace Samboh, Gridthiya Gaweewong and June Yap. The exhibition was initiated by the Goethe-Institut in 2017 and addressed art’s relationship to political protest, historical trauma and social narratives from the 19th century to the present, as well as climate and environment.
