Memories & Resistance

Current and former residents at PACT provide insights into artistic working processes. With Idylla Silmarovi, Edgar Kanakykõ Xakriabá, iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo, Roman Jungblut and Qusay Awad.

Bringing together artistic positions that engage in various ways with political struggles against land grabs, invisibilization, and appropriation, ›Memories & Resistance‹ gives voice to the absent, overlooked, and forgotten. Memory is experienced and embodied as a potential present, as opposed to a past manifested in architecture and monuments. In their artistic inquiries, they resist eviction and marginalization, search for queer ancestors and their own place within hegemonic historiography.

Free admission, please register at service@pact-zollverein.de

PROGRAMM

Fr. 21.06.

18 - 20 hiSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo & Roman Jungblut›Shelter‹Transformer house, open continuously

Sat, 22.06.

16 - 20 hiSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo & Roman Jungblut›Shelter‹Transformer house, open continuously

17 h (afterwards in the loop until 20 h)Qusay Awad›Visions In Monochrome‹Film screening / Small stage, Open continuously

18 hIdylla Silmarovi & Edgar Kanaykō Xakriabá›POVOAR‹Performative readingStudio 1

The Brazilian artist and activist Idylla Silmarovi explores in her project ›POVOAR‹ how personal memory can become a counter-narrative to the colonized collective consciousness through performance. Together with anthropologist and filmmaker Edgar Kanakykõ Xakriabá, she’s developed collaborative actions with people from Essen during a two-week workshop aiming to reclaim spaces, images, and bodies in the urban public sphere and amplify suppressed and unheard voices. The outcomes of this mapping will be presented here in the form of a performative reading.

Following her Sprungbrett Residency in 2023 as part of Memories & Resistance, iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo, is once again constructing a ›Shelter‹ at PACT. This project forms part of a broader transatlantic inquiry, where the artist engages with indigenous communities of the northern Andean region, examining the anti-colonial resistance practices that have emerged there, alongside exploring concepts of hospitality and embodied knowledge. The performative and inclusive installation ›Shelter‹, developed in collaboration with Roman Jungblut, endeavors to forge spaces for communal gathering and exchange. Its aim is to come closer to prevailing narratives and a reappropriation or reclamation of historical memory. It serves as a hybrid place of refuge that connects tangible and imaginary elements across temporal and geographical boundaries.

›Visions In Monochrome‹ is an audiovisual installation that explores the depths of the human psyche in displacement, where the body contends for survival amid a world confined within parallel lines. Led by inspiration from wheat-cultivating Saweel Al Qamh - صويل القمح‹), the multidisciplinary artist Qusay Awad composes experimental soundscapes and incorporates body performance within the language of »physical cinema«.By exploring the interplay between space, time, and the queer body, Qusay demonstrates how embodied memory serves as a catalyst for healing, recognizing it as an integral part of ancestral collective memory. Through this lens, viewers are invited to consider resistance through deliberate memory selection, highlighting the pursuit of personal narratives amid influences.This installation is part of a live performance and research project that began during the summer residency at PACT Zollverein in August 2023.