(GABON)
Last Barometz; Do Not Worry You Will Bleed Water
from the After Future series on harvesting blades with your feet
“I am a child of three countries. The water. The heat. The words.” – N. Waheed
Last Barometz; Do Not Worry You Will Bleed Water is based on a Fang tale on immigrant women who have been forced from their homes after being convicted of witchery. They are known as Mami Watas or Land Mermaids. These mermaids have formed refugee communities with new plantations, medicines, technologies and rituals of protection. Their refuge is inside a uranium quarry in south Gabon, which according to archaeological investigations would supply the world’s nuclear energy for over two billion years. Their home sits on natural fissure reactors, which have a direct affect on their diet, their labour and ritual processes.
This community has planted a variety of new crops on abandoned colonial plantations but uranium pollution affects both plants and people as they struggle to adapt to the debris of colonial settlement.
The Barometz is a mythical creature referring to the plantation growth of cotton in the body of the sheep. Its feet and organs are rooted to the earth – umbilical cords that both turn the soil and eat the flesh of animals.
Last Barometz is the after-future adaptation of both nature and mammal on land and a critical reminder to the less visible histories of forced migrations, colonial settlements and industrial exploitations. It is painful historical reminder that as a moving plant, migrating from one place to another, roots are continuously uprooted and seeds left from historical perpetrators must become mythical and magical: we are land mermaids.
Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro’s practice works on the functions of performing archives, contesting the nature of our cultures, histories and identity through de-colonial cannibal aesthetics. Her research is a time-machine, reacting to sense-memory and political landscapes and she creates Human Monuments to spaces and peoples across all nations – new memorials to celebrate post-colonial gestures of freedom.
She is Associate Lecturer in Philosophy and Arts History and Curator of Performance Programmes at Savvy Contemporary gallery in Berlin.
access to performance & installation by day ticket only: Wednesday 23 November, 19.00-22.00
SACRED: homelands festival 