Premiere of Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor’s multi-voice video project

Video screening

in collaboration with Astrid Gleichmann featuring Camalo Gaskin, Tobi Ayedadjou, Niv Acosta, Natalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Margaux Coker and Fannie Sosa

14 December 2017, 6 – 10 pm

Muttererde calls for femme forms of ancestral history in the face of the often interrupted historical knowledge of the African diaspora in Europe and elsewhere. What are rituals, teachings and abilities passed on from our matriarchs? How do these inherited skills serve us or inhibit us today? The conversations with six black femmes on the knowledge and non-knowledge of their mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers and as far back as memory carries them create a rich and powerful archive.

Supported by the Decentralized Cultural Work Tempelhof-Schönebergand A Prima Vista Filmproduktion.

The video premiere takes place as part of the collective’s The Many Headed Hydra second project. WHEN THE SEA LOOKS BACK (A Serpent’s Tale) is a polyphonic oracle curated by Emma Haugh and Suza Husse that engages the sea as a mirror and the serpent as a trickster to weave tales from the crossings of landscape and body, technology and power. Looking back with the sea, The Many Headed Hydra fabulates a connection between the desert landscapes of South and North, of the parched Aral Sea and the Curonian ‘dead’ dunes that reaches across the aftershocks of an ecological modernity formed by colonial land use. Through practices from the fields of visual arts, performance, writing, music and philosophy, the oracles in WHEN THE SEA LOOKS BACK tell of diaspora and border cultures in deep time ecologies and of post-imperial interspecies transformations. Following serpentine markings of future, past and present coastlines by way of imagination, memory, oral and visual modes of transmission, WHEN THE SEA LOOKS BACK approaches the waters as historical topographies and political collectivities.

A project by Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts and District Berlin. Supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture & the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, Goethe Institute Lithuania, the Arts Council of Ireland and the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme