Verena Melgarejo Weinandt has created her first performative video within the Repatriates research team. Through her alter ego Pocahunter 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 (Pocahunter Part II)” 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.
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.
“How to imagine the world without Europe? That was the question we put in 2019 to a group of racialised and mixed-race artists from Abya Yala committed to decolonisation processes. The idea was to recreate the future that could have been, had Europe not intervened, and showcase other societal models that have refused to be wiped out and which protect the memory that another way is possible. Through different formats, this exhibition seeks to appeal to the sensibilities and world orders that challenge and resist the future model proposed by the Western World. This exercise in speculative fiction and critical fabulation falls back on the anti-futurism as an undominated concept of time, and asks us to retrace our steps in an exercise of memory and reinvention of space and time. If the today we live in is the future that modernity dreamed of, the people who have suffered its onslaught and its ideology remind us that “the future is gone”; the future is behind us and not ahead.”
https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/lavirreina/en/research/future-gone-cimarron-anti-futurism/550
https://artssantamonica.gencat.cat/en/detall/Anti-Futurisme-Cimarron