December 7. Luiza Prado de O. Martins: In Weaving Shared Soil. Hosting: Milena Bonilla

Online – Monday, December 7, 19:00
Luiza Prado de O. Martins: In Weaving Shared Soil
Hosting: Milena Bonilla
Watch here: https://youtu.be/umDdGMYUGxI

The second iteration of In Weaving Shared Soil – a project initiated this summer by artist Luiza Prado – will now move indoors at TIER, taking the shape of a living installation featuring plants and flowers associated with the works of the writers and poets Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Goodison, and Layli Long Soldier. By promoting this symbolic encounter between the works of women whose lives and works engage with the effects of patriarchal and colonial power structures, the garden aims to discuss issues of decolonization, care and affection, reproductive and domestic work, and community building in times of extreme political instability.

The installation will be activated through a series of conversations with invited guests; in December, Luiza will be joined by artist Milena Bonilla. The conversation will touch upon Milena’s work with plants that were collected by Rosa Luxemburg during her years in prison and whose particularities rely on their medicinal capacities in connection with mental health.

In Weaving Shared Soil will continue throughout the winter of 2020 and spring of 2021 with other guests. The project is being developed as part of the transdisciplinary project Somatic Charting, initiated by choreographer and curator Elena Basteri in collaboration with Lorenzo Sandoval and Benjamin Busch of TIER.

Milena Bonilla’s research-based practice is currently invested in epistemological colonialism and the different ways it affects organisms, language and social structures. By identifying patterns, gaps and silences within specific historical narratives, the artist draws tensions between predetermined political templates and uses of cognition. These conceptual and perceptual exercises appear weaved across the manifold manifestations of her work.⁣
Recent venues where her work has been shown include: A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam; Museo d’arte Contemporanea MACRO, Rome; Kadist Paris and San Francisco; Framer Framed, Amsterdam; The Mistake Room, Los Angeles; The Jewish Museum, New York; Claustro de San Agustín, Bogota; MHKA, Antwerp; Temporary Gallery, Cologne and Konsthall C, Stockholm among others.

Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist and researcher whose work engages with material and visual culture through the lenses of decolonial and queer theories. She is particularly interested in technologies and practices related to fertility and contraception, and their entanglements with colonial hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality. Her current artistic research project, titled “A Topography of Excesses,” examines the transmission of indigenous and folk knowledges about herbal reproductive medicine in Brazil as a decolonising practice of radical care.

Somatic Charting. The House is the Body is supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, with additional support from Between Bridges.