Nathalie Mba Bikoro
Last Barometz Collection (Hydra Plantation Radio).
Wie können lebendige Erinnerungen in Klängen zu Zeugnissen einer sich verändernden Umgebung werden? Was erzählen diese Klänge und Stimmen über die wachsende Vielfalt und auch über die Einwanderungsgeschichte? Nathalie Mba Bikoro begibt sich auf Spurensuche vergessener oder nicht wahrgenommener kolonialer Geschichte(n) im Wedding, indem sie einst zu Filmzwecken aus den Kolonien importierte Pflanzen in der Nachbarschaft recherchiert. Die Pflanzen fungieren als Metapher für die Evolution und die historischen Trümmer der Bewegung im Bezirk und erzählen im Hydra Plantation Radio ihre eigene, von ständigen Prozessen urbanen Wandels beeinflusste, postkoloniale Entwurzelungsgeschichte. Sie werden zu lebenden Monumenten.
english version:
Last Barometz Collection (Hydra Plantation Radio). Nathalie Mba Bikoro goes looking for traces of forgotten or ignored colonial history in Wedding. She searches the neighbourhood for plants that were originally imported from the German colonies for use as movie-props. The plants act as a metaphor for the evolution and the historic remnants of displacement in the area and tell their own post-colonial history of uprooting, influenced by the incessant processes of urban change, on Hydra Plantation Radio. They become living monuments. How can living memories appearing as sounds become records of a changing environment? What do these sounds and voices tell us of growing diversity and the history of immigration?
Nathalie Mba Bikoro CV (english/ deutsch)
»We always believed that testimonies should come from the dead, but what about the living? are their testimonies not part of forming visible monuments? Are our voices signs of cannibalist processions of the fauna we are ingesting into our bodies? How do we apply these memories of sounds as testimonies of a changing neighbourhood? what do these sounds reveal about our diversity and immigration? Last Barometz collection form a station of live feeds collecting the diversity of the elastic histories tied to colonial debris for over a century. They form part of an uprooted plantation whose debris is an archival memory of digital sounds performed as a radio station. they are urban myths of all the histories they have collected becoming fractal seeds splitting into different embryos. for every time these plants would get uprooted, the plants would regrow by mixed pollination and human alterations.« Nathalie Mba Bikoro
Nathalie Mba Bikoro The Burial_Performace credits Luis Lujín, Mexico 2015
Nathalie Mba Bikoro When The Heroe Disrobes her Armour, Giving Birth to Quiet Revolutions Performance. credits: Joe Kniesek_ 2016
