Events
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29.10.2020 | Glaskiste c/o ExRotaprint

The Power of Mourning: Decolonial Struggles and Queer Bodies

Live-Performances and prerecorded presentation

Live-Performances by Bartolina Xixa and Carlos Motta in collaboration with Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau and Isabel Gonzales Toro (sound design) and prerecorded presentation by Naomi Rincón Gallardo.

The 11th Berlin Biennale’s final gathering aims to move away from Western philosophy and cultural theory’s understandings of death and mourning. It emphasizes themes of death, mourning, and life after death from a queer perspective, using a critique of norms, questioning ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics, as well as bio and necropolitical agendas, based on the works of the artists presented in the 11th Berlin Biennale exhibition.

Taking into consideration that for Indigenous peoples death has been life’s silent companion since the start of the colonial conquest, these artistic interventions attempt to critique discourses on death and mourning associated with heteronormative models of familial bonds, chronological lifestyles, norms for intergenerational relationships, and “adequate” responses to biopolitical regimes of health and life. They delve into the cultural ties that Indigenous peoples have maintained in their understanding of mourning as a form of both cultural expression and struggle, and, in this sense, broaden the spectrum of the sexo-dissident struggle, understood as bodies that are battlegrounds and decolonial resistance beyond their mortality.

Moderated by Agustín Pérez Rubio