Verena Melgarejo Weinandt has created her first performative video within the Repatriates research team. She presents a ritual that expresses the interweaving of past, present and future. The work addresses the transformative and healing potentials of artistic interventions in colonial entanglements. Through the representation of the interconnections between time, place and beings, her understanding of art as a way to go beyond the limits of rational concepts is presented.
Transformation. Braiding Renewal is part of a cycle of video-performances created as part of her artistic research project and expresses her approach to the many remains of indigenous people that exist within German museums and the widely circulating imaginaries of indigenous people as part of an expression of a German colonial legacy reconfiguring itself again and again to the present times.
The artists thought about the method(s) of healing through braids and braiding as an activity, not only a reference to Indigenous hair but also a symbol of constant transformation and the possibility of bringing different elements, energies, and stories together and separating them again. Braiding itself refers to the never-ending cycle of this activity. Although the individual strands of the braid form a unit, they remain visible and separate from each other. This resembles the idea of a visible and continuous difference within what creates a unity, which allows us to think about our connections to each other, non-human beings, our ancestors, but also processes of identity formation. Braiding as a process conveys the capacity for transformation, the possibility of creating change and healing, and therefore, having the ability to create and transform what lies ahead of us while braiding onto the past and present.
This video was developed within a one year Seminar-Laboratory called “The Future is gone: Cimarrón Anti- Futurism” which invited a group of artists to envision a world and notion of time without the existence of Europe (as a trope) and was first exhibited at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge Barcelona.