Face A
Tatiana Macedo was at Iwalewahaus (Bayreuth, Germany) as an artist in residence from the 4th to the 16th of July 2017 in the context of the EXODUS STATIONS # 2 – a project initiated by Marta Jecu, which invites international artists to work with and from the ethnological archives of different institutions. During the residency period, and from the close collaboration with the curators of the museum, the artist was invited to elaborate her critical and interpretative views on the history of the objects and their invested meanings, which are subjugated to fluctuating ideologies.
EXODUS STATIONS # 2 at Iwalewahaus in Bayreuth, invited two artists at different moments, Tatiana Macedo and Raphael Denis, to an incursion through the archive materials and the activities of its founder Uli Beier, in Nigeria. Tatiana Macedo’s residency at Iwalewahaus will be followed by an exhibition to be held in November 2017, curated by Nadine Siegert and Marta Jecu.
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FACE A is my first reflection, or the first side of it, in the shape of a visual essay which is also ‘diaristic’, in which I start my interpretative game on the ‘overture’ moments of the archive. These moments reveal the archive’s resistance inherent to its materiality that went from technical problems related with the transposition of video formats made with my mobile phone (which forced me to re-shoot them from my laptop’s screen), to the 16mm film rolls that ‘stubbornly decided’ to roll themselves up in unexpected ways inside the projector.
Any work from an archive is a new interpretative layer added to its precedent layers that were themselves at the core of its formation. Much like tiles added up in the construction of a rooftop.
The impossibility of a revival after death, in what should be treated as transformation, is a primary rule of nature.
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Iwa = A state of Being in Existence
It’s like opening a Present
That resists being Past
A Cultural Revival?[1]
Mbari Mbayo
Were I to see, I would rejoice
When we see it we shall be happy
Footnotes
- ^ 16mm projected film: Gogodala: A Cultural Revival? by Chris Owen, 1983, Papua New Guinea.