Martha Hincapié Charry
Earth Emotions / Environmental Grief - Or how to embody decoloniality and unlearn the white gaze, while reflecting about climate breakdown, through the lens of indigenous perspectives
Block seminar, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
8.-10.12.2023 and 19.-21.1.2024 in Hardenbergstr. 33, schedule details and rooms:
Friday, 8.12., 14-18 h, Sat./Sun., 9./10.12.2023, 10-16 h, room 110
Friday, 19.1., 15-20 h, Sat./Sun., 20./21.1.2024, 10-16 h, ALL in room 004 (NEW!)

EXCURSION: Saturday, 20.1.2024, 10-16 h to Spore Neukölln https://spore-initiative.org/de/

GUESTS:
19.1.2024: Edgar Calel, https://artreview.com/artist/edgar-calel/?year=2022 (Bildende Kunst/Performance)
21.1.2024: Julieth Morales, https://bienaldeartepaiz.org/en/artistas/julieth-morales/ (Bildende Kunst/Performance)
They talk about their work as visual artists and performers, their biography and their indigenous view of the body, art, nature and decolonization.

When we forgot that we are one with nature?
Earth Emotions / Environmental Grief (WT) is a live and online intersectional meeting on climate, art and activism, together with special guests. The seminar opens spaces of dialogue that aim to cultivate a reciprocal relationship with the earth and no longer separate ourselves from nature, which is caused by induced ancestral amnesia (aka colonial amnesia).
The encounter revolves around more-than-human ecologies and coexistences: from ancestral memories, cosmovisions of the jungle to performance art and eco-politics/poetics, we will examine a constellation of texts and art-works that mobilises to avoid anthropocentrism while allowing to remember forgotten knowledge.
Have you ever felt sadness and grief due to climate change, ecocide or a human-made disaster? Without a doubt those are feelings already expressed by BIPoC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) communities around the globe. This Seminar bring attention to selected amnesia, acknowledging their environmental grief experiences and struggles regarding earth’s fabric: our shared home.

We will engage our bodies as well as natural, urban and virtual spaces. Somatic practice will include listening, walking, body undulations, contact with the earth element or journal writing. One of the sessions is planned to take place at open air.
In closing, participants individually or collectively develop a draft idea, a sketch proposal or a short intervention inside or outside the building that explores the current state of climate chaos and reflects on the Emotions of the Earth and the forgotten links on the relationship between humans and the more-than-human.

Online lecture guests are the first nation leaders:
Celia Xakirabá (requested)
Ailton Kreanak (requested)
Shane Weeks (requested)

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credit points: Regular and active participation and contribution; engagement with the topic. The students are expected to document their individual creative processes by writing a journal, to finalize their studies by writing a short paper (which they will also present to the seminar), and to give each other feedback.

Martha Hincapié Charry is a BIPoC Colombian artist, decolonial curator, choreographer, performer and researcher. Martha completed her master's in fine arts at the Berlin University of the Arts. She studied dance in her home country and completed her dance theatre and solo dance studies under Pina Bausch at Folkwang-Hochschule Essen. In 2019, she was a Pina Bausch scholarship holder. Her own pieces have been invited to festivals and venues in Europe, Asia and the so-called Americas.
She is the artistic director of the Plataforma/SurReal Berlin festival. In her curatorial work, she reflects on (de)colonial processes and forms of survival that artists have experienced during their migration to Europe or as part of local utopias. In 2021/2022 she was an associate curator of the ENCOUNTERS program at Radialsystem Berlin. Hincapié Charry has created various unlearning spaces that deal with forms of expressions and the struggles of underrepresented and exluded BIPoC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color). Through a intersectional reflection on the human body, she has created a space for dialogue between the continents in which the themes of climate chaos, the relationship between the arts, human/more-than-human and the visible with the invisible world find a platform.