Reenactments and the Politics of Remembrance

A Tribute to Ana Mendieta, 40 Years after Her Death

1_Introduction On September 8th, 2025, I invited a group of friends to join me in a private tribute. They were told to meet me in a laboratory room at the theater department of the University of Giessen, Germany. An empty chair was placed at the center of the space, lit with dimmed lights. In the back, a wooden board leaned against the wall. The board had a long white sheet of paper attached to it. Beside it, some painting supplies were lying on the floor. A candle was lit next to a white rose in the foreground. I greeted my friends who had joined. I told them that, that night, I would present a tribute. Not a lecture, not a performance, but a tribute to Ana Mendieta, 40 years after her death. [1] Born in Havana and exiled to the U.S. at the age of twelve, Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) became a prominent voice of the 1970s feminist art movement. Her ‘earth-body art’ combined elements of ‘land art’ and ‘body art,’ transforming her experience as a woman into the central theme of her work. [2] In so doing, she challenged Western conceptions of both ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ as she described in a notorious statement about her work: For the last 12 years I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast out of the womb (Nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source. Through the making of earth/body works I become one with the earth. It is like being encompassed by nature, an afterimage of the original shelter within the womb. [3] Mendieta’s art speaks of her desire to reunite with the universe, return to the maternal source, and, finally, find shelter within the earth. Her rhetoric on nature combines elements of an early ecofeminist discourse with ideas of the so-called ‘goddess art movement’ of the 1970s. [4] At the same time, her method of exploring earth as a female body foreshadows a pluriversal approach to nature, drawing on pre-Hispanic cultures in Mexico and Cuba, and asserting her identity as Other within the predominantly white feminist movement of her time. For all these reasons, Mendieta’s oeuvre remains an important body…

Perrear hasta el piso or How to Dance Reggaetón in Germany

_Introduction: We Are Going to La Casa del Perreo Before any farra [Spanish for ‘party’], I avoid listening to the music that will be played that night. Like a cabala [rituals and superstitions for good luck], I feel it is better to listen later. Los temas, the song’s hits, are to be enjoyed at the momento and not before. Instead, on the night of the party, I was listening to a podcast. The time was 21:04 and the train from Giessen to Frankfurt departed with a ten-minute delay. After fifteen minutes, I heard someone speaking Spanish. I turned to my left. A woman appeared to be talking on the phone. I could not identify her accent, but I was sure she was Latina. She ended the call and returned to her seat. She might be going to the farra, I thought. The party tonight would be my second time in La Casa del Perreo, a Latin event created by a community of DJs (Mexicans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, sometimes German DJs are invited). I have been following them for two years before I came to Germany. My first time at this farra was in winter, in early January. It was my first party after I arrived in Germany, and after seven months without celebrations. Then I wanted to dance. I was excited to see how Latin American people dance far from home, in the German winter. Inside, a crowd contrasted with the empty streets. Now, summer had come, and I had high expectations. I noticed how people change in summer. They seem more free and relaxed to me. What is more, the warm weather reminds me of the tropical mode of the Latin American Caribbean. The event was promoted on the collective’s social media as the best Latin party in the country, and hundreds of comments on Instagram concurred with this statement. [38] Fig. 1: Instagram post of an event in Munich, February 26, 2026, @lacasadelperreo.eu, © La Casa del Perreo The venue, Fortuna Irgendwo, is situated in the heart of Frankfurt Ostend. The building used to be a boiler house built in 1906. From 1999 to 2013, it was the prestigious King Kamehameha Club, which won several awards in its heyday, such as “Bar of the Year.” After the pandemic, this venue became a disco. Instead of live music, it started to host various music events throughout the year,…

Black Joy as Cultural Resistance

On Celebration and Visibility in When We See Us

The exhibition When We See Us at the Kunstmuseum Basel celebrates a century of Black figurative painting, offering a sweeping homage to Black Joy, positioned far beyond the aestheticized trauma and stereotyped suffering so often imposed upon Black subjects in European cultural institutions. More than a collection of artworks, the exhibition offers a curatorial and affective experience: an invitation to encounter joy as a force of resistance, intimacy, and self-definition. The title, When We See Us, a deliberate echo of Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, already signals a reversal of gaze. Where they cast their vision upon Black life, this exhibition turns the lens inward: when we see us is both an epistemic act and a political claim. It is a reorientation of visual sovereignty. Curated by Tandazani Dhlakama and Koyo Kouoh, the exhibition brings together over 200 works by artists from across the Pan-African and diasporic spectrum, mapping 100 years of Black figuration through scenes of leisure, love, spirituality, domesticity, and collective rest. The exhibition is not the representation of Blackness as absence, brokenness, or spectacle. Rather, it is what Stuart Hall would call a “politics of representation” that insists on multiplicity, affect, and self-making. [74] Black Joy, in this exhibition, is not treated as an emotion alone but as a methodology, a visual grammar of presence, survival, and imagination. Drawing on Hall, we might say this is not about “finding the real” but about showing how identity is constructed, felt, and claimed in the act of celebration itself. [75] The exhibition’s refusal to center trauma resonates deeply with bell hooks’ call for an “oppositional gaze:” a way of seeing that resists dominance and reclaims the terms of looking. [76] Here, the gaze is not merely returned, it is shared. One sees and is seen. This mutuality is enacted not just through portraiture but through the spatial choreography of the exhibition: vibrant color palettes, layered listening zones, moments of stillness, and warmth. In such an environment, joy is not a frivolous affect but a quiet demand, a mode of staying alive and staying seen. As a biracial cultural researcher working at the intersection of visual studies, digital ethnography, and urban Black cultural spaces, I approached the show not only as an observer but also as someone deeply attuned to the textures and politics of Black self-representation. My viewing was not neutral. It was embodied, relational, charged. Moving through…

Jerūiyq

Journey Beyond the Horizon

Fig. 1: Sketch for the Kazakhstan Pavilion 2024, exhibition model by Konstantin Petruk, © Kazakhstan Pavilion 2024 1_Decolonial Futurism as Creative Disruption Fiction Making Future Geographies It is believed that this socio-utopian legend reflects a specific historical situation in the mid-15th century, when the decline of the Golden and White Hordes led to the migration of several tribes to Moghulistan under the leadership of the khans Kerey and Janibek, and the founding of the Kazakh Khanate. [89] According to Danagul Tolepbay, these aspirations resonate not only with the current global situation, in which every person is searching for their place, but also with the main project of the 2024 Venice Biennale, Strangers Everywhere, as set by the curator Adriano Pedrosa. [90] Thus, geographical imagination finds itself at the center of the project. It connects the question of identity with decoloniality through spatialization. Like the fiction of Wakanda [91], it consciously strives to go beyond the horizon of existing social systems and corresponding systems of knowledge, engaging utopian imagination and science fiction. However, the elements of fiction are not arbitrary: they are based on deeper and more fundamental components of identity, necessarily including presumably pre-modern non-Western and non-capitalist elements. The effectiveness of decolonial futurisms—from Afrofuturism, Sinofuturism, and Ethnofuturism to certain readings of Russian Cosmism and endeavors to establish “comparative futurism” as a research field—is rooted in this combination. [92] Decolonial futurism is an attempt at a creative disruption, a transgression beyond the existing social and imaginary systems. Artistic decolonial futurisms often strengthen the mutual penetration of art and geography. Researchers have already elaborated on the concept of artful or experimental geography, as well as on art as geographical practice. [93] The opposite is also true: “the ‘expanded field’ of geographic knowledge-making now includes creative practitioners, who see their creative practices as part of the ‘doing’ of geography.” [94] Furthermore, “we could perhaps claim that geography is an emerging exhibitionary discipline, the focus of which is the geographical research exhibition.” [95] Geographer Denis Cosgrove wrote at the beginning of the 1980s that “geography takes over landscape from the hands of the painter.” [96] Today it can take over from the hands of artists decolonial futurism as the practice of making future geographies. [97] Forging new spatial identities and future geographies can happen with speculative artistic imagination or Störungsfiktionen (‘disruption fictions’)—“experimental drillings into the discursive subsurface of reality.” [98] But how exactly do…

Stickering through Grief

Subverting Normative Practices Through Mourning and Memorial

In 2021, my friends and family experienced the sudden loss of our dear friend Justin. Justin was essentially my older brother; a childhood friend to my older sister who spent many nights at our dinner table discussing music, art, and all things culture. Justin was a rebel through and through, and following his creative nature, he discovered graffiti as an outlet for expression and subversion. With his deep intellect and equal appreciation for everything unpretentious, Justin taught me everything about being cool. In the weeks after his passing, a mutual friend and artist, Michael Vickers, had the idea to print copies of a sticker Justin had made with his tag on it and distribute it among friends, a way to ensure we could all share in this altar building. I agreed to scan the sticker, and together we printed thousands of copies. A mailing list of familiar and new names was built across Canada. Through mailing envelopes and distributing Justin’s work, a community art practice was initiated. Calling on the histories of mail art, graffiti, relational aesthetics, and social art, we spread the stickers across the country and then the world. Justin unwittingly brought together everyone from mothers to school teachers to coworkers to commit petty crimes in the name of grief and memory. In this paper, I frame the collective sticker project as an example of communal grief, affective mapping, and anti-temporal mourning, combining concepts from the scholarship of Dominick LaCapra, Kelly Oliver, Judith Butler, Leigh Gilmore and Shelley Hornstein. By reflecting on the project, I aim to expand our current understanding of the legibility of mourning in public spaces and remembrance practices through graffiti. I will explore how the collective initiative speaks to the tensions between past and present, embodied and empirical ways of knowing, and the ephemeral qualities of graffiti and human life, as well as the tensions surrounding who can (or should) participate in such a particular subcultural experience. The stickering project exemplifies how creative practice can bear witness to the autobiographical nature of graffiti, while also expanding the form into a communal grief practice that subverts expectations of the cultural context in which it was produced while acknowledging the difficulty of time, distance, and logistics. Fig. 1: Justin’s original sticker, scanned Grief is terribly absurd; it weighs down as much as it reorients, making navigation seem impossible. Socially, it is commonly understood that grief unfolds…