Project at ZK/U - Melissa Rodrigues
Melissa Rodrigues ( Portugal )
Wandering, collecting, mapping for an Afrofuturistic archaeology
The project that Melissa Rodrigues intends to develop in the Magic Carpets Residency relates to the research she is developing since 2016 around the representation of the black body in Western visual culture, thinking and rethinking these same representations and the whole construction of a visual discourse on black existences.
She intends to develop the research in a body-city-body perspective, in a circular and continuous movement from her place of existence as a black woman in relation to a city that is unknown to her and through other black narratives that exist and resist in the city.
From the performative and aesthetic act of walking, wandering, she intends to collect objects, appropriate images, mapping memories and produce her own images, her own discourses, listening to the different voices that inhabit the city. *
*Before COVID – 19
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- Update April 1st, 2020 -
Lockdown, rambling and funaná
Not a manifesto!
an essay on Afrofuturism and liberation
'After 4 days in Berlin and walking a 20 kilos suitcase through metro lines, buses, streets,stairs, an empty airport and a ghost plane, I return home, to the one where I live in the last years. Outside there is silence and the sound of sirens shapes the space once inhabited by a city. This is the place and the time where I exist today and from where I speak.'
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- Update May 4th, 2020 -
Being in artistic residency in the midst of a pandemic it’s a creative delirium and a constant attempt to connect with the surrounding reality. Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes! Out there the world revolves. The next great crisis approaches silently and cruelly devastating lives already marked by racial, gender and social inequality. Everything is connected. Between texts, books, articles, images, a performance is being materialized. It’s a poem, an essay. The images emerge on a dark background in contrast to the light that radiates from the Coronas pointed at the Sky, the finger stirs in the colonial wound, the power is questioned and she dances frenetically. Fragments of a poem performance in becoming. appropriate, chew and spit Future and space are no longer a foreign concept, but a way of life repetition and difference the algorithm has changed They agreed to kill us, we agreed not to die we celebrate the memory of our bodies Our encestrality and Resist as always as we have been doing for over 500 years Here we are now and we‘ve come to stay They agreed to kill us,
we agreed not to die
repetition and difference
the algorithm has changed
Coronas in the Sky
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This residency is made possible due to the funding by Magic Carpets and Creative Europe.
