We Built The Kilimanjaro
In We Built The Kilimanjaro, women of Berlin testify their presence at the Siegessäule to demount the monument and its imperial claims of the past and the present. In the film Carl Peters the Siegessäule is used as key visual narrative to affirm Germany’s colonial Empire after the 1885 Berlin-Kongo Conference. The women disturb and re-tell the history with their own narratives & personal impressions of the monument.
According to newspaper article from Tempelhof-Schöneberg archives, the « Africa scenes » of the Nazi movie Carl Peters (Herbert Selpin 1942) had been partly shot on today’s Trümmerberg Marienhöhe, together with a painted décor of a Kilimanjaro as its background. With selected archive sources from Museen Tempelhof-Schöneberg Archiv, Trümmerberg Kilimanjaro insists on re-creating a socio-political foretelling of events of fictional and factual histories in particular allowing visibility of the voices of African women anti-colonial resistance movements notably organised between Berlin, Namibia and Cameroon between 1885-1945. The artist dematerialise anthropological records and archives to constitute a decolonial narrative and memory through performative propositions re-enforcing poetry as an activist format. The artists denounce and transform urban spaces to trigger a process of decolonial archives and memory as a way to build an alternative monument, in which the community is a key function of cultural production and knowledge. In dematerialising anthropological records[1] and enforcing poetry to make contest the post-colonial myth[2], the artists lay particular focus on the voices of African women in anti-colonial resistance movements organized between Berlin, Namibia and Cameroon from 1885 to 1945. By establishing an alternative monument in which the community is key to cultural production and decolonial memory, Squat Monument triggers transformation in the identity of German's colonial history and in its impact on contemporary urban movements. Portraits of Namibian women leaders in the Human Rights and anti-colonial resistance movements were released into the skies.
According to newspaper article from Tempelhof-Schöneberg archives, the « Africa scenes » of the Nazi movie Carl Peters (Herbert Selpin 1942) had been partly shot on today’s Trümmerberg Marienhöhe, together with a painted décor of a Kilimanjaro as its background. With selected archive sources from Museen Tempelhof-Schöneberg Archiv, Trümmerberg Kilimanjaro insists on re-creating a socio-political foretelling of events of fictional and factual histories in particular allowing visibility of the voices of African women anti-colonial resistance movements notably organised between Berlin, Namibia and Cameroon between 1885-1945. The artist dematerialise anthropological records and archives to constitute a decolonial narrative and memory through performative propositions re-enforcing poetry as an activist format. The artists denounce and transform urban spaces to trigger a process of decolonial archives and memory as a way to build an alternative monument, in which the community is a key function of cultural production and knowledge. In dematerialising anthropological records[1] and enforcing poetry to make contest the post-colonial myth[2], the artists lay particular focus on the voices of African women in anti-colonial resistance movements organized between Berlin, Namibia and Cameroon from 1885 to 1945. By establishing an alternative monument in which the community is key to cultural production and decolonial memory, Squat Monument triggers transformation in the identity of German's colonial history and in its impact on contemporary urban movements. Portraits of Namibian women leaders in the Human Rights and anti-colonial resistance movements were released into the skies.
We Built The Kilimanjaro from Bikoro on Vimeo.