BRAZILIAN WOOD
2022-2023, Brazil/Germany. Video, color, sound, 23’18”.
2022-2023, Brazil/Germany. Video, color, sound, 23’18”.
"Pau-Brasil: from colour to sound" takes as its starting point the tree that lends its name to the country of Brazil, its first resource exploited by Portuguese colonisers in the Americas. Beginning in fifteenth-century Europe, the wood became widely used in the production of violin bows worldwide. Due to its historical and current overexploitation, it is a highly endangered species. The dependence of traditional violin bow production on the endangered species Pau-Brasil and the increasing mass production of bows have led to an international socio-environmental conflict. It seems to me that the case study of this specific material, as well as its history of circulation, use and risk of extinction, can raise important and poetic connections for the writing of an alternative history of the wood and some relations between Brazil and Germany. Moreover, the two year artistic research also proposes a critical dialogue with the centenary of Brazilian modernism from 1922, and one of its most famous manifestos: the Pau-Brasil manifesto.
The project was developed within the Berlin Artistic Research Programme, of which Barbara Marcel was a fellow between 2022 and 2023.
CONDOR
Work in progress, Chile. Video-installation.
Work in progress, Chile. Video-installation.
The work will consist of a video-installation filmed in November 2021 between the Chilean cities of Santiago and Talagante, taking as a starting point the inter-species relationship between humans and birds, their identifications and de-identifications, to observe old and new projections of freedom. From the heated political debates of the Chilean spring of 2021, Marcel establishes a connection between the old astronomical observatory of Santiago, situated in the Cerro Calán and built during the Cold War, and the machinic military control of space, through the production of drone images that simulate and incorporate one of the oldest perspectives of domination of territories: the bird's-eye view.
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.
