Drums & Bones

In the organizer's words:

The evening is the presentation of the results of a week-long workshop of the participating artists.

The starting point of this German-Namibian artistic-research collaboration is a drum from Namibia, which is now in the Ethnological Museum MARKK in Hamburg - a highly symbolic looted art object with special significance in German-Namibian colonial history.

The Hamburg performance artist and curator Claude Jansen has been working with the media conceptof liminal spaces since her studies in Applied Theater Studies. She is currently devoting her attention to so-called African looted art objects, including in particular the 'spiritual media', the mediators who create the complex connections between human and non-human, visible and invisible actors. She follows the virtual actors in ritual mediality - the "forces beyond human 'will'".

In a German-Namibian team with Norbert Pape (augmented reality), Fabrice Mazliah (performance) and Tuli Mekondjo (performance / visual arts), Claude Jansen plans to further develop an artistic research project with the Dortmunder Theater im Depot as part of the fellowship, in which analog, spiritual and digital media are interwoven simultaneously. This joint artistic research work began with a joint research stay in Namibia in 2024.

The process-based research project operates at the interface between Africa and Europe, science and speculation, performance and ritual, analog practices and digital spaces of possibility.

The idea is to playfully confront the concept of media and to make virtual actors from ritual mediality dance with virtual actors from digital mediality.

The aim is to decolonize the colonial attributions and Eurocentric interpretations of looted art objects, i.e. to take a new look at the complexity of pre-colonial practices and world views from a variety of media perspectives and to convey them artistically.