Practices of connection

Collective ritualist gathering, 2019.


Artistic political spiritual gathering on Indigenous Resistance Day at Columbusplatz organized by the collective Antikolonialer Interventionen in Wien and supported by Maracatu Nossa Luz, and several other artists. The work I do with the collectives I am part of in Vienna is in affective continuity with my personal artistic practice.

Intervention to Columbus in Vienna



Anticolonial Intervention by the Trenza Collective, 2018


On the date of the 'discovery of America', TRENZA intervened a Columbus statue in front of the Vienna Business School. This statue is one of the several places, companies and products (from columbusplatz, to the beer Stiegl-Columbus 1492) that commemorate the processes of exploitation and death of colonized peoples and racialized communities. In their multiplied repetition, these spaces reaffirm and sustain the structures at present -where racism towards migrants running from the sequels of inequality is used as a scare facade by many political parties across Europe.
TRENZA is a feminist collective marked by a Latin American migratory experience where several of us are active since 2014. The collective is a braiding of different marginalized knowledges, ideas, desires, and needs; a space for crossing memories where we reflect about the structures that affect us. This with the aim to heal by be-coming together.

Photos: Verena Melgarejo Weinandt from TRENZA.

Autohistorias

Between the Interstices. A performative lecture that is a weaving of desires and a crossing of experiences, on feminist artistic and curatorial actions. In collaboration with Verena Melgarejo Weinandt. Part of Unsettling Feminist Curating: Feminist and Queer feminist curating praxis in exhibitions and museums in migration society.

"A common feminist tale says that the history of feminism began in the north of the world. That the first wave feminism occurred in Europe and in Euro-America. And so did the second wave. The third wave came with queer, third world, racialized excolonized women and corrected previous voids and erasures. Feminism is then like a sea, that bathes the world in waves, one wave, another wave. Each wave is another layer of progress for women and for the world, and adds to the history of those first northern waves."

Trenza


Changing the lyrics of famous Latinamerican songs and singing them together at a performance of Trenza at Cantina Corazon. 2018.

A Look Back Into the Museum

 
Text of the lecture performance here. Photo: Sofi Utikal.


What tools should be produced to reflect on the museum as a Eurocentric space which is connected to histories of dehumanization, supremacism and multilayered violence? where a group of racialized subjects is analyzed and discussed as objects and where this cultural- production is the basis for the very hierarchic system that we face today? In our performative lecture we reflect from decolonial, queer, Third-world, Latin American intersectional identities on the role of the museum, its relation to historical wounds, and the role that the art education institution could have in breaking with historical continuities.

Performed by: Verena Melgarejo Weinandt and Imayna Caceres. Written by Imayna Caceres. Part of Unheimliche Materialien. Gründungsmomente der Kunsterziehung. At a[ -xhibit - Akademie der bildenden Künste. Curated by Elke Krasny and Barbara Mahlknecht.

Commemorations to Columbus in Vienna


This is an ongoing research of the commemorations to Columbus in Vienna which started on the 12 of October of 2014. In Vienna there are several places where Christopher Columbus is commemorated. In fact, Columbus is a figure of present relevance in Austria, that continues to be used in order to connote a positive image –as the many companies carrying his name testify.
The first monument erected to Columbus in Vienna was set in 1862, being Vienna one of the first European cities outside of Italy and Spain to erect a statue in his name. By 1862, Spain had two of its now (around) 98 commemorative places and statues. Salamanca is recorded as the first city with a monument/plaque and Barcelona the second with a portrait medallion. The main monument to Columbus in Madrid was built between 1881-1885. The one in Barcelona was built between 1881-1888. A chronology of hommages to Columbus around the world per year can be found in the following link, although for Vienna only 4 are mentioned: https://www.vanderkrogt.net/statues/chronologie.php?webpage=CO


*List of places where Columbus is commemorated:
Read more »

Wahlwexel



Wahlwexel was a project addressing the strict Austrian laws in regards to voting and citizenship that is creating a growing number of inhabitants who work and live in Vienna permanently, but are excluded from voting. 



 

Nearly one million people who live, work and were born in Austria are not able to vote. Only people in possession of the Austrian citizenship who are over 16 years of age and who aren't serving a prison sentence longer than 5 years are allowed to vote. 11.2% of the estimated 8.5 million inhabitants of Austria do not hold Austrian citizenship and in Vienna that means that 21.7% of inhabitants are excluded from political participation. Through Wahlwexel, people who are excluded by the electoral law could cast their vote in the 2013 national elections. In the workshops and discussions that preceded the voting action crucial questions about democracy were collectively discussed: is the concept of citizenship as tied to electoral rights still appropriate? What's the relation between democracy and work? Does democracy merely consist in voting? What else does the right to democratic participation imply? These questions opened a broader debate about forms of inclusion and exclusion, co-determination and democracy. In parallel we engaged the campaigning parties to answer a questionary about voting rights and citizenship, the results of which can be seen here. The voting action was contested by representants from the FPÖ party who then brought into question the legality of it to the parlament. With Martin Birkner, Clifford Erinmwionghae, Hansel Sato, Fanny Müller-Uri, Manuela Power und Kurto Wendt.

Refugee Protest Vienna

Graphic work collaboration and icon vocabulary with the organized movement of the Refugee Protest Vienna, and along Katarzyna Winiecka, and Katrine Ball. The 28 December of 2012 the refugees who had marched all the way from the Traiskirchen detention center and had occupied the Sigmund Freud park for over a month, were evicted by the government and all their tents and belongings were destroyed. The Re-emphasis project, initiated by Katarzyna Winiecka and Kin Chui, took over a billboard to bring the story of the refugee movement in Vienna in the same place it had started: the Sigmund Freud park. The billboard displays a vocabulary of icons made to denounce and demand, as well as a poem that having been created by the refugees, told the story of their struggle. The project organized a transnational forum for refugee activists from Europe to network closer together, to exchange knowledge and bring their concerns to broader parts of the Austrian public.



Visual Vocabulary for Refugee Protest Vienna
Orange: Dangers refugees face: Why they left and what they will face if they are deported
Yellow: Deficiencies within the Austrian and EU asylum systems
Blue: Demands of Refugee Protest Vienna

re-emphasis.blogspot
wienwoche.org/2013/re-emphasis

A guide to stay for migrants




A guide to make visible the network of support towards migrants and asylum seekers, by gathering local, political, and cultural spaces. This along testimonies on how to deal with social workers, police harassment or any other forms of institutionalized racism. Places where to sleep, legal and asylum support, governmental institutions, antiracist work organizations, counseling for women, queer spaces, healthcare centers for migrants, political organization, possibilities for mobility, for education, locals and events for children, cultural spaces.

Bleibeführer_in Wien: Guide for refugees and asylum seekers who stay to live in Vienna, September 2012. Initiated by Erinmwionghae Clifford and Hansel Sato. Authors: Naser Abuhelou, Xiao Qin Lin, Nebojsa Mladenovic, Imayna Caceres, Ezgi Erol, Angela Puis, Bankole Seyi, Retha.
First edition: 1000 copies. Second edition: 1500 copies. Thanks to Hansel Sato who invited me to participate.

The guide can be downloaded here and a search by districts can be made here.
http://www.wienwoche.org/de/121/

The first auction of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna 2012 / 2013


AAAAR 20.01.2012       



               




AAAR Artists Activists Against Racism was the first auction at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna that had as its goal to support migrant students that were facing deportation due to a change in the law. In 2011, a change in migration laws made it very difficult for students from third countries (countries outside the European Union) to continue their studies in Austria. Students from third countries were required to prove they had a minimum of 8,000 euros in their bank accounts two months prior to the extension of their student visa. Our project, carried out on the axis of art and activism, sought to legally trick the requirement of proving financial solvency. The aim was to realize a performative a(u)ction that would make evident the persecution of migrant bodies, including a critique of the history of the auction in slavery and the history of colonized bodies, which endure the prohibition to move across borders when holding the passports of the ex-colonies.

In this aim, we wrote emails, knocked on doors, studios, classrooms, and houses, and organized the voluntary donations of over 70 artists. We organized storage, recollection, packaging, and produced proofs of donation. We produced the podiums for 'the bureaucrats'. We produced a catalog and installed an exhibition at the Aula of the Academy of Fine Arts. We had graphic slogans and posters that were put on display on the day of the performance. We had self-made bid cards, a professional auctioneer, a photographer, a sound person, and a video person.

In our performance, we filled out immigration papers one after another, and every time an artwork got sold, we planted a stamp of approval on the papers. Eventually, the hanging documents revealed the sentence, "If law becomes violence, resistance becomes an obligation." At the end, we called for an institutional response by the Academy, and we reflected on our position as migrant-artists in the current political circumstances.
The event took place in the main auditorium of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in Schillerplatz, and the collected money went to a fund to support students. It was administered by a referat at the ÖH. The success of the a(u)ction of 2012 led the academy to invite us to produce a second auction during the rundgang of 2013.

AAAAR Auction 25.01.2013



'Your Comfort is My Silence' (2013), took place in the auctioneer is taken over by a sickness that makes her incapable to restrain herself. This spreads onto a group of sans papiers, and refugee and asylum seekers and lasts all night as the auctioneer sells artworks.
The Academy invited us to organize the auction a third time but the amount of overworking it involved made us decline. The 2014 auction was organized organized by professors aiming to support the refugee protest. For this purpose I gave them all the organizing files and the learnings we had made in 2012 and 2013. Since 2015 the auction is carried out by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in order to fund their Artist in Residence Program that is addressed to students from third-countries (the name the EU gives to non-EU countries).

The discussion of the need for such an action was brought by artists-activists that attended the class of postconceptual art practices in the winter semester of 2011. The project was carried out by three female students, first and second generation migrants, Imayna Caceres, Joanna Wilk, and Miriam Raggam. And in every step it was supported by several students, professors, migrants, administrative staff and upcoming and established artists with similar concerns. The organization of the performance was supported by Marissa Lobo and Verena Melgarejo Weinandt. The general intensive organization was supported by Seraina Renz, and Ekoj. Jul Tirler, Daria Kirillova, and Claudia Tomasseti picked and delivered works. Paula Pfoser, Vasilena Gankovska and Claudia Tomasetti were backstrage refilling food and drinks. Tatiana Kai-Browne, Konrad Wolf and Verena Melgarejo Weinandt registered people. Iris Borovnic and Eduard Freudmann installed the exhibition. Niki Kubaczek, Georg Oberlechener hand over and carried works.


The project was preceded by other self-organized student initiatives that ended up in institutional changes, such as The Darker Side of the Academy, which also addressed institutional issues of the art school.