LETTERS FROM SPIRAL TIME
Project being developed by Barbara Marcel as a fellow of the DRESDEN_Zukünftigkeiten/Futurities Transcultural Academy 2023 Dresden.
Project being developed by Barbara Marcel as a fellow of the DRESDEN_Zukünftigkeiten/Futurities Transcultural Academy 2023 Dresden.
LETTERS FROM SPIRAL TIME is an artistic project that emerges from the correspondence between the Brazilian artist based in Berlin, Barbara Marcel, and Vândria Borari, Indigenous/Brazilian artist based in Alter do Chão, Pará - Brazilian Amazon. Based on fragments of pre-Columbian ceramics from the Amazon collected by German ethnologist Curt Nimuendajú and in his correspondence with European museum directors between 1913 and 1945, the project connects seemingly distant beings, such as the Elbe and the Tapajós River (Pará, Brazil). The letters gathered during the period of the artistic research will be transformed into a film, inviting us to the listening of a dialogue with the ethnographic collection of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) and its possible animations.
The project is being developed within the Transcultural Academy 2023 "Futurities" grant.
The Transcultural Academy “Futurities” 2023 focuses on museum objects of the SKD as material research repositories that enable collaborative explorations of futurities and new narratives. Futurities describe imaginations of perspectives, for example in dealing with sensitive objects in upcoming exhibitions. These are discussed with significant relevance of the past and present. This is because possible futures are fed by rhythms of the past: material and archive studies are just as much a part of this as losses, violence, absence, potentials and the uncategorizable. Mobilized by the positioning of researchers, curators, visitors or artists, a spectrum of futurities can be activated that exist processually alongside and with one another. The Transcultural Academy is a project of cross-collection research at the SKD in conversation with all SKD collections, artists, academic partners, art academies and friends.
