Walking along the rocky coast of Greenland, identifying the sources that has battled through the geo-political issues surfacing over centuries. An environment where attempts by human agents to stabilise, exploit, move through, and appropriate a land composed of ice, sea, rock, animals, architecture, landforms and people occurred through various degrees of success. This has profound implications for the scale, scope and intensity of human interventions from pursuing whales and seals, excavating coals and minerals, traversing across and through ice, and establishing routes of aviation. The relational understanding of the world attentive to the connections between human and non-human elements as we scramble through these elements representing knowledge, appropriation of territory, colonisation of people, administration, resources and transportation.
A group exploring the tangents of existence re-visiting identity and embodied memory. They drift apart and collide again as their narratives change courses through the rocky coasts of Greenland. In their journey, they reclaim their body through the indigenous art form of Uuajeerneq. It is through these movements and colors situating these conflicted identities to collide and converse with each other in times of crisis.
What does it mean to come from somewhere and how does it feel to belong to somewhere?
With these questions, the movement artists, activists, and youngsters of Greenland anc Denmark get into convoluted conversations. Navigating between land, memory, and body, it attempts to raise questions of belonging and embodied memories. Sonic incantations, audio-visual installations, performance, and participatory corners traverse through diverse temporalities investigating embodied indigenous knowledge. Memories, dreams, and shaping one another through the cultural exchange will shift parallel through the construction and deconstruction of these colliding worlds inviting each to take their own step to face the questions in the isolation box. The isolated case would be one’s own world mirroring oneself with the same questions investigated through our journey
Among one them is Hans Peter Peterson, born and raised in Greenland struggling to sustain his inherited traditional practice of Inuit mask dance and on a parallel journey, a shamanic practitioner who was born in Greenland but raised in Denmark. We, together on the quest of understanding the ritualistic aspect of different artistic practices coming back in contemporary art today.
Through conversations, storytelling, and performative workshops, came negotiations of territory, language, and embodied memory, while we listen to many voices that encompass the conceptions of identity and belonging. Few of them contemplated through their own experiences while some of them bring forward their situated confusion and understanding to look within ourselves. The research archive and healing conversation are distributed through distinct sources creating a hypothesis of proposed questions and findings. Interpreting the past and investigating the present through the myriad of forms will inquire into the reflexive understanding of one’s own bodily practices inviting a collective sensorial experience.
The project was developed with youth in Nanortalik, Greenland in July 2019 and was made possible through collaboration with Foreningen Grønlandske Børn (DK) and the youth club Alummiu in Nanortalik (GL)