Description
This paper presents and critically reflects on the implications of the artistic research project Displacements, which took place in Aalborg in October 2020 as a collaboration between two institutions: Kunsten, Museum of Modern Art and The Greenlandic House in Aalborg. Displacements set out to examine the close ties between Northern Jutland and Greenland, ties that are historically conditioned by the commerce of Jacob Severin in the 17th Century and later, during the modernization period, by the central position of Aalborg harbor for 50 years as a logistical node in the material infrastructure of moving supplies and commodities between Denmark and Greenland. Rather than taking an analytical stance on this problematic and complex relation, Displacements, in asking the question of: “How do we heal the wounds brought upon our bodies and minds by history?” set out to engage with the situated, everyday presence and implications of this heritage as it manifests itself to young citizens with Greenlandic background. Working from within these relations and experiences of displacement, the artist Amalia Fonfara, together with members of the project Arctic Street Food, developed a workshop that discussed and enacted issues of identity and embodied experience.Displacements has given rise to multiple questions around the possibility of healing and repairing broken relations originating from a colonial past. First of all, it posits the potential of artistic, embodied practices, such as performance, animist rituals, shamanism and conversation to instigate processes of healing relations. Secondly, it explores the condition of possibility for building a common ground in between artistic methodologies, a social platform for inclusion, and an art museum, and thirdly it opens up to the dimension of healing as an emerging ‘becoming common’ and ‘becoming visible in public’ of the embodied suffering effected by colonial relations. In the panel, and departing from our experiences with Displacements, we would like to discuss some of these questions. Departing from the project, we also ask if aesthetic relations can take on the form of bodily stored sensations of connectedness or - indeed - as disconnectednes. And further, does our project suggest that these aesthetic relations, stored in the body as sensations of “modes of being met by others”, are constitutive for our feeling of identity? Furthermore, can these aesthetic relations be remodeled in experimental art projects?
| Period | 21 Jan 2021 |
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| Held at | Art as Forum, University of Copenhagen, Denmark |