Friday & Saturday, March 12th & 13th 2021
A two-day event of live art performances and interventions that center body archives as sites of decolonial knowledge, resistance and self-empowerment for BIPoC, (post-)migrant, diasporic and queer communities in Berlin.
March 12th at xart splitta *online*
March 13th at Nachbarschaftshaus Urbanstraße *online*
Artists: Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Raju Rage + Nad MA, Nine Yamamoto-Masson, Sajan Mani + Aroh Akunth, a.s. sumukha
Curated by Kathy-Ann Tan in collaboration with xart splitta.
“When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of […] that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” – Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”.
Audre Lorde writes of the erotic as a deeply motivational and empowering force that lives within the bodies of womxn of colour. In centering the knowledges, histories, laughter, struggles, resilience and power of queer and BIPoC lives, “Moving Into Sunlight” disrupts and explodes the western, colonial gaze that has, for centuries, collected, “studied”, dissected, racialised, sexualised and regulated these subjectivities. Our bodies are our archives. They hold, store, keep safe, react to and process experiences of trauma, joy, shock, illness, excitement, pain, etc. For postcolonial, migrant and diasporic subjects, the body becomes a primary site for resistance and empowerment, for self-representation and transformation, for immersive experiences of connection with the lives and legacies of those who came before. The fight for social justice, accountability and reparations is far from over, and this event invites artists, cultural workers, activists, scholars and all those who feel this speaks to them in one way or another, to come together in the spirit of sharing, care and collective strategy.
The event will be held in spoken English and German and entirely online. BIPoC and (post-)migrant residents from the neighborhood of the venues in Berlin-Kreuzberg/Neukölln are especially welcome. Please send an email to movingintosunlight@gmail.com by 10.03.2021 to register if you would like to attend. Please mention if you require sign language interpretation.
Schedule
March 12th 2021
6:00pm: a.s. sumukha short intervention
6.30pm: Sajan Mani + Aroh Akunth performance
7.30pm: a.s. sumukha short intervention
8.15pm: Nine Yamamoto-Masson video performance
9:15pm: a.s. sumukha short intervention
9.30pm: End
March 13th 2021
1.00pm: Welcome remarks by Kathy-Ann Tan, Iris Rajanayagam and Bahar Sanli
1.30pm: Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro performance
2.30pm: break
3.00pm: Raju Rage + Nad MA performance
4.00pm: Break
4.30pm: Group sessions with facilitators on Zoom
5.30pm: Break
6.00pm: Q&A discussion and collaborative documentation
7.00pm: Wrap up and conclusion
Artists
Anguezomo Mba Bikoro merges archeology, sonic radio, writing, textiles, sculpture, live art performances, film & archives for immersive installations. The work analyses processes of power & science fictions in historical archives critically engaging in migrational struggles and colonial memory. The artist creates environments for alternative narratives and future speculations of colonial resistance movements led by African women of the German diaspora and indigenous communities. Sedimented in narratives of testimonial Black queer experiences of sonic nature archives, revolt, queering ecologies and postcolonial feminist experiences towards new monuments which reacts to the different tones of societies shared between delusions & ritual. The work offers complex non-binary readings pushing new investigations about the architectures of racisms in cities, the archeologies of urban spaces & economies of traditional systems by exposing the limitations of technologies as functional memory records.
“Where Is Your Fire?”
what to say to you now in the soft afternoon air as you hold us all in a single death i say “where is your fire?”
i say where is your fire?
you got to fight it and pass it on
you got to find it and pass it on from you to me from me to her from her to him from the son to the
father from the brother to the sister from the daughter to the mother from the mother to the child
i say where is your fire?
i say where is your fire?
can’t you smell it ?
coming out of our past
the fire of living not dying
the fire of loving not killing
the fire blackness not gangster shadows
where is our beautiful fire that gave
light to the world?
Excerpt from “Catch the Fire” by Sonia Sanchez
Anguezomo Mba Bikoro presents “Where Is Your Fire”, a mourning ritual drawing on archival material of Black Abolitionist women retracing the story of a lost 19 th century court case of the murder of a Herero Princess and a stolen African German theatre script. The artist follows the multiple routes of Black Feminist writers interlaced through fictions of botanical colonial fictions transmitting testimonies of anti-colonial struggles and warnings in the mythical spirit of Drexciyan uprising.
Sajan Mani is an intersectional artist hailing from a family of rubber tappers in a remote village in the northern part of Keralam, South India. His work voices the issues of marginalized and oppressed peoples of India, via the “Black Dalit body” of the artist. Mani’s performance practice insists upon embodied presence, confronting pain, shame, fear, and power. His personal tryst with his body as a meeting point of history and present opens onto “body” as socio-political metaphor. Several of Mani’s performances employ the element of water to address ecological issues particularly related to the backwaters of Kerala, as well as to the common theme of migration. His recent works consider the correspondence between animals and humans, and the politics of space from the perspective of an indigenous cosmology. Aroh Akunth is a Dalit-Queer Interdisciplinary artist currently based between Göttingen and Delhi. They hold a Bachelor’s in Social Sciences and are currently pursuing their Master’s in Modern Indian Studies. They are also the founder of Dalit Art Archive and Dalit Queer Project initiatives that center the narratives of their communities. As an artist, they are interested in exploring Caste and Queerness as worlds through their experiments with words, sound, visuals, and performance.
Aroh Akunth is a Dalit-Queer Interdisciplinary artist currently based between Göttingen and Delhi. They hold a Bachelor’s in Social Sciences and are currently pursuing their Master’s in Modern Indian Studies. They are also the founder of Dalit Art Archive and Dalit Queer Project initiatives that center the narratives of their communities. As an artist, they are interested in exploring Caste and Queerness as worlds through their experiments with words, sound, visuals, and performance.
“Shambuka” is a performance piece that locates the continuing legacies of Hindu Epics and Caste Apartheid within the politics of the Indian Subcontinent in the 21st Century. Over the years murder of Shambuka, has been of academic interest to Anti-Caste scholars like Ambedkar and progressive artists alike. Where Eklavya was penalized for dreaming as an Avarna person, Shambuka paid the price for succeeding in a Caste society. The performance encourages people to think of the ways in which Caste supremacy informs and interacts with Identities we embody and what it means for peoples whose bodies are marked by Caste to be stuck in a metaphorical loop.
Raju Rage is a tender Taurean. They are also an artist and creative educator working with healing and care processes and practices. Raju uses tools of transformation and resilience in the face of predation and extractivism of hetero and homo normative cistems.
@Raju_Rage
Nad MA is a truly sensual Scorpio. They practice with corporeality and the politics of the body as a massage therapist, body piercer, shibari teacher, drag king and workshop facilitator. They are also interested in spirituality and healing of all beings.
@Nadnadius
Transistence: against bodies* we love
A participatory live stream drag – care – exchange with Raju Rage and Nad MA, two gender non conforming bodies, excavating what lies beneath the aesthetic and performance of drag, exploring non/sexual intimacy and erotic power beyond womanhood. Introducing alter-ego’s ‘Lola Love’ and ‘Hugo’, through the digital realm, we invite you to engage with us in solidarity, in acts of collective care.
Nine Yamamoto-Masson is a French-Japanese artist, theorist, writer, researcher, and translator. In academic research, artistic and activist practice, her work analyses the gendered necropolitics of (neo)coloniality with regard to the legacies of European and Japanese colonialism how they presently manifest as configurations of power and economies of knowledge that exert violence on bodies and futures. She studies the modes of organisation of networked resistance, and the workings of resistant memory challenging hegemonic dominant narratives, focusing on the role of art and inter-diasporic, internationalist, inter-generational solidarities. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam.
“Nobody Died” traces the friction of different forms of confrontations over the grieving of lives that are systematically devalorised and violently harmed or taken, in the context of how racialised and gendered violence accumulates in individual and collective bodies, itching under the inflamed scars like glowing constellation maps that reach forward and back through time and across the globe, across generations. It incorporates a video an installation of collages and drawings based on photographic documentation of the tense changes (and corresponding messaging) at street-level in NYC in spring/summer 2020, where the artist was stranded due to Covid, being like so many forced to improvise mourning rituals to honour the dead in the face of an ever-intensifying white supremacist hierarchy of emotions. The video reading Is a Film a Bone (2020) is part of a ritual. It is about the labour of mourning, about how to do right by the dead, about the battles to reclaim the past and reappropriate the future. It is about the hidden wormholes connecting the different space-times the artist is entangled in. It is about how to live with fire, and its role in midwifing a new world.
a.s. sumukha is a poet, scholar and activist.
BROWN KARMA * BLACK DHARMA (2021)
Sensing,
reading and speaking against the grain, a.s. sumukha commits model
minority suicide. Recalling the solidarity between Black civil rights
movements in the US and anti-caste resistance in India, it turns towards
‘Black dharma’, an emergent strain of North American Buddhism which
yokes together reformist post-Vedic practices with the Black Radical
Tradition. Thus, a.s. sumukha considers different relations of power
without domination, which it brings to bear upon a reading of Lorde’s
erotic as power.
Facilitators
Iris Rajanayagam is a historian (MA Humboldt University Berlin). She works on post- and decolonial theories, intersectionality, politics of memory and social change; She is director of the organisation xart splitta and lecturer at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin. Besides this Iris Rajanayagam is board member of the Migrationsrat Berlin and was active in the Caravan for the Rights of Refugees and Migrants for many years.
Rena Onat is a gender equality officer (Frauen*beauftragte) and an art and media scholar. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis on artwork by QTIBIPoC artists in the German context, highlighting expressions of queer of color critique in and through art and visual culture. She is a turkish-german femme of color who likes horses.
Yergalem Yagi Taffere has many irons in the fire. If she could, she would be in a different place every weekend, listening to the important stories of different people and their own diasporic realities of life. She is a director, photographer, performer and DJ. She is currently working on “Yagi’s Kaleidoscope”.
May Zeidani Yufanyi is a social scientist; in her work at Inssan e.V. she deals with antidiscrimination and postcolonial migration societies in Europe, asylum and migration policies. As a Person of Colour and migrant with Muslim and Jewish roots in Palestine and Europe, intersectional approaches play a central role in her work.
Magnus Elias Rosengarten is a writer and artist, currently based in Berlin. In his work he explores bodies and narrative—via text, performance, moving image, and the disembodied voice—that move and continuously manifest throughout the global Diasporas. He studied at Humboldt University in Berlin and completed his Graduate degree in Performance Studies at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts.
Sophya Frohberg is a curator and researcher based in Berlin. Her work attends on visibility of Black, queer and intersectional contemporary art, as well as radical decolonial practices within cultural institutions. She currently researches ways of responsible, non-hierarchal curating with her working group CCC – Curating Through Conflict with Care.
Curator
Kathy-Ann Tan is a Berlin-based curator, writer and independent scholar of visual art and performance, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and gender/queer studies. She is interested in alternative models of art dissemination, exhibition-making and institution-building that are attuned to issues of social justice in the contemporary moment. Her ongoing project decolonialartarchives aims to collaboratively build a forum for artists, curators and cultural workers to develop ways of interrogating colonial narratives.
Programme Flyer
Supported by Funds from the IMPACT-Funding 2021 program of Berlin’s Senate Department for Culture and Europe
The event is taking place within the framework of the project #CommunitiesSolidarischDenken, funded by the LADS.
