Barter Zone, Zone de Troc

September 05, 2021 - November 01, 2021

11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art The Crack Begins Within 5 September - 1 November 2020

Curators:
María Berríos, Renata Cervetto, Lisette Lagnado, Agustín Pérez Rubio

Installation Barter Zone 2020

98 drawings from new series Care, colored pencils, dry pastel and wool on paper; embroidery on tarpaulin from Congo and flour sack from Morocco ( Residency Ifitry, Morocco/artist’s studio, Belgium); taxidermied hyena Crocuta Crocuta ; taxidermied Barbary sheep Ammotragus lervia ; shipping wooden crates “Mandeveille , Poste de pêche Kingabwa” and “Musée Ethnographique” sound Sound Xù  ( sea fongbe) with Mikatsiu and Pelagie Gbaguidi Architectural consulting Lydia Antoniou Poem Translation Sofia Dati  Dimensions variable Taxidermied animals and shipping crates Collection Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), Tervuren Commissioned and coproduced by the 11th Berlin Biennial for contemporary Art with the support of Flanders State of the Art; Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), Tervuren Christine Bluard Patricia Hermand Garin Cael Emmanuel Gilissen Annick Swinnen Assistant Project Clara Guixer Borell Team Berlin Biennial among Edwige Baron Bryn Veditz Linnéa Bake Olivia Fert Antje Weitzel Isabell Ertl Nicole Tanzini di Bella Curator Lisette Lagnado and Associated Curators María Berríos, Renata Cervetto, Agustín Pérez Rubio Courtesy Pelagie Gbaguidi 

Installation Barter Zone 2020 Berlin Biennale is a collective and human excavation carried out through multiple conversations with a sensitive team on the question of Restitution in a holistic, critical and poetic approach. In the continuity of my reflections on art and collective trauma, Barter Zone is a point of connection - "alive" in the space where the world casts its shadow to react, to question human and natural exploitation. It is the place where the economy of wisdom, the economy of maturity passes through the awareness of a rupture and the need to act against the systems of predation of natural, human and cultural resources. This place initiates an urgent and necessary dialogue on the process of restitution of African Cultural Entities by museums. The space speaks of a time when we need to reconsider our relationship to the living, to learn from the violence that dominant systems produce on the commercial, urban, capitalized, displaced, digitized bodies. How do institutions position themselves in the face of this violence of everyday life, yesterday and today? Everything is there, it's a fragment of the world. all the pieces of the installation are part of a care approach.

Thank you to the curatorial team for allowing this work to exist, thank you to the Berlin Biennale team for allowing this biennial to take place physically, thank you to the partners who want to engage in this essential quest.