- Am I Ancient, Or a Human-Made Machine? –Michelle-Marie Letelier
- Am I Ancient, Or a Human-Made Machine? –Michelle-Marie Letelier
- Am I Ancient, Or a Human-Made Machine? –Michelle-Marie Letelier
- Am I Ancient, Or a Human-Made Machine? –Michelle-Marie Letelier
Am I Ancient, Or a Human-Made Machine?
Michelle-Marie Letelier
28 August–
2 October 2021
Curated by: Paz Guevara
Michelle-Marie Letelier, Still from The Bone, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Am I Ancient, Or a Human-Made Machine?
Michelle-Marie Letelier
Curated by: Paz Guevara
This project is in collaboration with Goethe Institute and Blue Cabin Residency.
How do exhibitions have the capacity to create moments of communality rather than objectifying the beings that enter into its modern grid? How does the exhibition become permeable to life through orality, reciprocity and in connection with geopolitical trajectories, struggles and potential alliances? In a partly speculative and partly documentary manner, artist Michelle-Marie Letelier weaves a series of collaborations through virtual reality, song, crystal performances, conversations and in-situ actions. Against the grain of extractivism, this exhibition engages the poethics of a sovereign ocean through the consciousness and memory of our fellow being, the salmon: Am I ancient or a human-made machine?
Highlighting the transregional aspects of Michelle-Marie Letelier’s projects and themes are a series of online conversations entitled “Poethics of a Sovereign Ocean: Orality, Reciprocity and Geopolitical Trajectories (2021)” features conversations with Morgan Guerin, James Harry, David Alday and Ánde Somby. These conversations open Michelle-Marie’s project narratives to the crucial perspectives of Indigenous communities, specifically speakers from the Musqueam, Squamish, Yaghan, and Sámi, for whom the stewardship and viability of waterways and everything within them has been collective knowledge for generations.
- #1: Poetics of a Sovereign Ocean: Orality, Reciprocity, and Geopolitical Trajectories
With Michelle-Marie Letelier and Paz Guevara. - #2: Reciprocity
Featuring James(Nexw’Kalus-Xwalacktun)Harry, Morgan Guerin, and facilitated by Denise Ryner. - #3: Orality
Featuring Ánde Somby in conversation with Michelle-Marie Letelier and Paz Guevara. - #4: Geopolitical Trajectories
Featuring David Alday in conversation with Michelle-Marie Letelier and Paz Guevara. - #5: The Poetry (Matter)
Performance by Michelle-Marie Letelier, followed by a Curatorial conversation with Paz Guevara, Denise Ryner and Anthony Meza-Wilson (Blue Cabin Residency).
Exhibition Guide (206.05 KB)
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Artist Bio
Michelle-Marie Letelier
Michelle-Marie Letelier is an artist based in Berlin, Germany. Born in Rancagua, Chile, she studied Arts at the Universidad Católica de Chile. Her installations, photographs, videos and drawings encompass orchestrated transformations of natural resources, alongside extensive wide-ranging, interdisciplinary research into the landscapes where their exploitation and speculation take place, inciting works that enter into transformation processes beyond the extractive industry and its forms of control. Since establishing in Berlin in 2007, she has focused her research on coal, copper, saltpetre, wind and, more recently, salmon. Her work has been shown internationally, among others in: The Arctic Arts Festival 2021 (Harstad); Videonale.18 (Bonn); WE ARE OCEAN 2019-2020 (Berlin and Marseille); 5th Mercosur Biennial (Porto Alegre); Gropius-Bau (Berlin); Screen City Biennial 2019 (Stavanger); Bienal Sur 2017 (Buenos Aires); El Museo de Los Sures (New York); Kunsthall 3,14 (Bergen); Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Santiago); Errant Bodies (Berlin); Museum of Contemporary Art (Santiago); East Asia Contemporary Art Space (Shanghai); Museo de Bellas Artes (Santiago) and Kommunale Galerie Charlottenburg (Berlin). She has been artist in residency at ISCP (NYC, 2014), USF (Bergen, 2017), Kunstnerhuset (Svolvær, 2018), Magallanes2020 (Punta Arenas, 2018), ISLA (Antofagasta, 2018) and Troms fylkeskultursenter (Tromsø, 2019).
Michelle-Marie Letelier’s website.
Curator Bio
Paz Guevara
Paz Guevara is a curator, researcher and author based in Berlin, Germany. She was born in Santiago, Chile. There, she studied Literature and began working at the Theory Department at the Universidad de Chile. Since 2015, she is associate curator at Haus der Kulturen der Welt – HKW in Berlin, where she contributes to the long-term project Kanon-Fragen that questions dominant cultural narratives. In this context, she has curated Afro-Sonic Mapping (2019) and co-curated Parapolitics (2017-18). There, she has also contributed to the exhibition Past Disquiet, with research on South American artists, museums and networks involved in the Solidarity Movement. Guevara has been co-curator of the Latin American Pavilion at the 55th and 54th Venice Biennial (2013 and 2011). Along her engagement, she has conducted several conversations with cultural practitioners; most recently, she has published a conversation with Mapuche oralitor Elicura Chihuailaf at the NIRIN NGAAY Manuel of the Biennale of Sydney (2020). Guevara lectures on Exhibitions Histories at the MA on Raumstrategien at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule in Berlin. Recently, she joined Archive independent publishing house and art space as curator.