2. My artistic practice is primarily focused
on collective technologies and practices
of remembering and how they influence
individualandgroupmemoryofpastevents.
Some of my recent projects research the
influences of history and storytelling
on the formation of autobiographical
and collective memory, and the reasons
why some narratives became part
of history while others are excluded.
I am interested on the different modes
of public commemorations, specially
mnemonicsignsandsystems,thatweengage
with on a daily basis, to embody, represent
and reenact specific narratives of the past.
A special focus is granted to mnemonic
signs and systems – monuments, statues,
books, films, photographies, photo-albums,
exhibits and other symbolic structures -
that commemorate the influences of history
on the formation of autobiographical and
collective memory. To complement my
work and research on collective memory
formation I am driven to understand the
influences of storytelling on our individual
and collective bodies. Some of my last works
have researched on different social groups -
such as my family - and through qualitative
interviews and collaborative videos and
performances, I have collected and act
upon their autobiographical memories of
different events, namely the experience
of colonization and displacement. Both
this latter processes try to examine and act
upon biological, social and political factors,
responsible for disrupting the formations
of individual and collective narratives.
Carvalho works with installation,
photography, video and performance
participating in exhibitions and festivals
in 4 different continents (Europe, North
America, Africa and Latin America).
He is the co-founder and curator of the
performance art program COLAB editions,
in Berlin, he was the founder and art director
of the artist residence program Hotel25
in Berlin and he initiated “The Powers
of Art”, the first international TV Show
dedicated to showcasing a crossing between
performing arts and paranormal activity.
Biography
3. If my grand-
mother were
historians
Some cultures believe that if an object is
not touched/used it looses all its power
and its potential for becoming. Taking
objects from their spaces of functionality,
bringing to other countries and contexts,
spraying Arsenic to kill all possible bugs
and bacteria that they might carry and
making them impossible to be touched
by human beings reinforces how we are
still involved in a play of power, in which
knowledge is overshadowed by old and
tired practices of “preserving” objects.
The three grandmothers and I, we were
involved in giving actions to some objects
we found in a market in Yaoundé (wood
statues). We used them together and
as well we showed/created different
angles to look at them, different stories
to embed on them through actions and
talks. In the end of the 2h performance
all 60 objects came back to the market
from where they were borrowed. Maybe
they came back different, maybe the
grandmothers went home differet,
maybe I came back to Berlin different..
RAVY Biennial, Yaoundé, Cameroon
4.
5. A meeting
in Turku in
2015/16/17
Project Background:
On November of 2015, inside the
framework of the New Performance Turku
Festival, Marcio Carvalho in collaboration
with several Turku citizens has presented
an art and research project called A
MeetinginTurku in2015that wasmadeby:
- A round table with Riina Lundman
(Research fellow at the University of
Turku, Department of Geography), Panu
Savolainen (Architect & a Research fellow
at the University of Turku, specialized in
History and Cityscape of Turku) and Tomi
Hongisto (Urban Designer working with
public space and outdoor architecture);
- A site/context specific live performance
in the public space, beside the
monument A Meeting in Turku in 1812.
The two events were followed by a
seminar on MAy 2016, at Aboa Vetus
& Ars Nova Museum in Turku ,
followed by a performance in the public
space beside Aura river. The next
event will be a one week project at
the New Performance Turku Festival
in October 2016, which will work as
preparation for the biennial in 2017.
Brief Project Proposal:
This project proposes to examine
the monument A Meeting in Turku
in 1812 (situated beside Aura river),
its implementation in 2012 and its
ability to commemorate, once again,
in the 21st century, the influence that
two powerful countries – Russia
and Sweden - had over their smaller
neighboring country – Finland. The
project proposes to create and install a
new, permanent, counter-monument
New Performance Turku Festival, Turku,
Finland
in the city of Turku, more precisely on
the other side of Aura River, facing the
monument A Meeting in Turku in 1812.
Abstract:
For centuries different opinion leaders,
meaning makers and memory makers of
different societies have tried to design,
fix and perpetuate linear narratives to
be eternally commemorated as history.
Differentregimesandtheirrepresentatives
have populated our public and private
spaces with statues, monuments, books,
exhibits, museums and other symbolic
structures, and forms of commemoration,
many a times, to perpetuate themselves
as visionaries and hero’s of our past.
But who owns the job of deciding who
stays for history and the ones who
will be excluded? Who’s responsible
for deciding the ways we should
Round Table about “A Meeting in Turku in 2015” project,
with Marcio Carvalho, Riina Lundman, Tomi Hongisto and Panu Savolainen
6. 1
Performance “A Meeting in Turku in 2015”.
In the framework of the New Performance Turku Festival, October, 2015
7. remember about our collective past?
Whoownsthejobofdecidingwhichstories
to remember and which stories to forget?
Canwebeinvolvedinthisdecisionmaking?
* “we” being us all, people from different
places but as well people that doesn’t
necessarily work in a state institution.
Statues and monuments have been for a
long time the temples of our memories.
They are symbolic spaces of remembering
and forgetting in which the time orders
of past and present are continuously
recombined. These mnemonic signs they
represent a system of past experience
(that we usually call memory) and present
experience (that includes the process of
remembering our collective past). They
are spaces of remembrance and historical
self-reflection, sites of power in which
stories are embedded and legitimized
once again in the public arena. As we
walk by them we tend to embody their
stories and believe that they constitute
the criteria to experience and measure
our collective past and present realities.
As individuals we all share a biologic
capacity to retrieve our past experiences.
Thus we are able to learn from it and to
project our futures. The trouble arrives
when objects and other mnemonic signs
and systems are inscribed in our public
spaces as preconditions to retrieve and
commemorate the past. Trouble because
those forms of commemorations, normally
installed and performed by specialized
professions and institutions, they narrow
whatwecallhistory,andmanyatimesthey
glorify certain events and individuals that
might be involved with abuse of power.
We commemorate history as a collective,
and as a collective we should be able
to contest it, to re-write it and to re-
print alternative memories on it.
Does the official, social, cultural
and political systems behind the
implementation of these objects,
welcome any form of debate about
their role in the making of memory?
Can non-institutional groups or
individuals propose counter-memories
to add permanently to those monuments
and the stories they legitimize?
A MEETING IN TURKU IN 2015/16/17
Project Outline
When the Russian Emperor Alexander the
1st and the Prince Carl Johan of Sweden
met in 1812, here in Turku, their objective
was to create a treaty of alliance that could
fulfill the interests of both realms, specially
in relation to the war with Napoleon.
Finland was just a place they set to meet.
At that time Finland was an object of
trade and agreement between themselves.
When the monument was implemented
in 2012, it aimed to commemorate
the 200th anniversary of the
meeting between the two monarchs.
A Meeting in Turku in 1812 have 2 royal
chairs,oneforTheRussianCzarAlexander
I and a second one for Prince Carl Johan of
Sweden. When we first saw this historical
moment, portrayed by this monument,
here in the city of Turku, the first thing it
came into our minds was – There is a 3rd
chair missing in this historical meeting.
A chair that might allow a Finnish
citizen to be part of this conversation.
Performance “A Meeting in Turku in 2015”.
In the framework of the New Performance Turku Festival, October, 2015
8. 5
Implementing such monument in 2012,
that commemorates an event, that by
extend, refers again to Finland and
Finnish policies as strongly influenced
by other countries, made us believe
that the monument “A Meeting in
Turku in 1812”, might represent a
subliminal resurrection of a well known
concept called Finlandization. This
monument creates a reenactment of a
past in which Finland was an object
of trade between Russia and Sweden.
Many Turku citizens are against this
statue. So how can they manifest their
opinions towards it? The idea is to
continue this collaboration work that has
been taking place since October 2015,
and to create counter-memories; to build
new memories about the event that A
Meeting in Turku in 1812 monument
tries to perpetuate. New memories to be
discussedpermanentlyinthepresenttime.
To help us looking at the our collective
past, while we look forward on time.
Implementing this new, permanent
counter-monumentinthecityofTurkuwill
allow the creation of counter-memories
that can permanently tell another
version of the same story, seen from a
different angle. This object can create a
disagreement about the history displayed
at the monument A Meeting in Turku in
1812 and set a ground for a permanent
discussion and other forms of retrieving,
actively and collectively, the past.
A counter monument is an object that
doesn’t aspire to fix, or perpetuate
a specific story as truth. A counter-
monument is an object that aims to
invade the place of history, its hegemonic
narratives and forms of commemoration.
A counter-monument is an object that
asks for new memories and opens a
permanent debate while we move
forward in time. Is an object that is rooted
in the present time that allow ourselves,
as a community, to be actively part of
the construction of our collective stories.
A counter-monument is involved with
a counter-commemoration. A counter-
monument is involved with permanence.
The counter-monument A Meeting in
Turku in 2015/16/17 will be made of the
same bronze, with the same stone pedestal
and the same writing fonts used in A
Meeting in Turku in 1812 monument. The
objective is to implement permanently
what we consider to be a second half of this
monument in the other side of Aura River.
This second half of the monument can be
a form to commemorate our ability and
interest in taking part of the formation of
our collective memory and consequently
the formation of history itself.
In this case a 3rd chair (not a 3rd royal
chair, but a wooden chair cast in bronze
– wooden chair because anyone of us
have at least sited once in one of those
wooden chairs, is something we can
actually recognize). A Third chair can
be a symbol of the recognition that
Finlandization actually happened but
it doesn’t need to happen again, and
that the power over our memories
is worth being claimed by all of us.
Sharing power over our collective stories
and collective past through implementing
counter-monuments can only be made
through collaborations between different
people. By setting in motion the project
A Meeting in Turku in 2015,/16/17 we
provide a collaboration project between
many people in Turku. So, for example, all
names from all the people involved will be
carved on the counter-monument pedestal
in alphabetic order. If our project is choose
to be presented at Turku Biennial it will
be a new public project that facilitated a
collaboration between Turku citizens,
coming from different backgrounds and
generations, while granting them power
to discuss about their collective past and
how to represent it in our present times.
Seminar “A Meeting in Turku in 2015/16”.
In the framework of Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova Museum, May, 2016
9. RECONSOLIDA-
TION MACHINE
Reconsolidation Machine was an art and
research project by the Neurologist and
Neuroscientist Dr. Christoph Ploner and
the artist and independent curator Márcio
Carvalho. The project investigates how
technologies and practices of remembering
have been influencing individuals and
groups to remember and/or forget past
events; more specifically the ways by which
individual or collective memory have been
reconsolidated by biological, social or
political memory disruptions.
Consolidation is a neurological process that
involves gradually converting information
from short-term memory into long-term
memory. Classical views proposed that
once consolidated, memories are stable and
resilient to disruption. However, this view
has been challenged by the findings that
established memories become labile when
recalled and then require another phase of
protein synthesis in order to be maintained.
Therefore, it has been proposed that each
time a memory is reactivated it again
undergoes a process of stabilization, named
reconsolidation.
The first phase of the project was presented
at the We presented 3 confessional
sculptures each one with 4 audio tracks
(“confessions”) - a confession of a murderer,
Project collaboration between the
neuroscientist Christoph Ploner and the
artist Márcio Carvalho
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Germany
Giving Contours to Shadows Project
a excerpt from the movie I Confess from
Hitchcock, a perspective of a psychiatrist
on a confession of a sociopath and an exerpt
of an interview of the famous HM patient.
The aim was to challenge scientists to listen
the audio tracks and to give feedback on
questions such as: 1. Is guilt a memory
problem? 2. Is confession a reconsolidation
technique? 3. Is salvation a cerebral
process?
The second phase of the project proposed
to think about memory reconsolidation by
combining the confessional as a ritualistic
and religious object and Bruegel’s Topsy
Turvy World painting, situated at the
1
10. Photos
1. 2. and 3. Performance, Gemäldegalerie
4. Instalation, Congress Center Hamburg
Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. The act of
confession exist in people’s everyday
life, between friends, family, etc. Yet,
religion ritualized confession, becoming a
performative/narrative behavior, in which
the person acknowledges thoughts or
actions considered sinful or morally wrong
within the confines of it’s own religion. The
confessional can be considered a technology
that gives a performative dimension to
remembering and forgetting. Memories
they don’t disappear through the action
of confession. Instead they change. By
designing the confessional, church created
a way to re-consolidate the memories of a
believer by erasing guilt and regret.
Bruegel’s Topsy Turvy World painting
contains a literal illustration of idioms and
aphorisms of 16th century Flemish life.
There are approximately 112 identifiable
proverbs and idioms in the scene, that
were meant to illustrate human stupidity
and foolishness; although Bruegel may
have included others which cannot be
determined. Ploner and Carvalho are
interested in working with some of
Bruegel’s illustrations of such proverbs,
specially the ones that can be related to the
exhibition concept of Giving Contours to
Shadows exhibition and its will to “activate
a long-term dialogue and discourse on
the possibilities of deliberating on history,
pre-writing history and even sequestrate
history”.
One shears sheep, the other shears pigs;
Shear them but do not skin them; What can
smoke do to iron?; To always gnaw on a
single bone; The die is cast; To look through
one’s fingers or To confess to the Devil
are some of the proverbs that Ploner and
Carvalho are planning to work with.
5. and 6. 16 channel sound Instalation,
Gemäldegalerie
2 3
4 5 6
11. Power Over
Memory - A
case study
The Memory is a Muscle
Review by Stacey Ho
In 1985, musician and scholar Clive Wearing
contracts a virus that attacks his brain. In
the decades following this neurological
damage, Wearing perpetually ‘wakes up’
every seven to thirty seconds with no
recollection of the previous moment.
Desperate to hold on to something, to gain
some purchase, Clive started to keep a
journal, first on scraps of paper, then in a
notebook. But his journal entries consisted,
essentially, of the statements “I am awake”
or “I am conscious,” entered again and
again every few minutes. He would write:
“2:10 P.M: This time properly awake. . . .
2:14 P.M: this time finally awake. . . . 2:35
P.M: this time completely awake,” along
with negations of these statements: “At 9:40
P.M. I awoke for the first time, despite my
previous claims.” This in turn was crossed
out, followed by “I was fully conscious
at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time
in many, many weeks.” This in turn was
cancelled out by the next entry.¹
Power Over Memory, a performance
piece by Márcio Carvalho, imaginatively
Live Biennale, Vancouver, Canada
Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin, Germany
considers Wearing’s state of amnesia and
compares this to the case of John Rambo,
star of First Blood, Rambo: First Blood Part
II, Rambo III, and the most recent Rambo.
Watching First Blood, we see that Rambo,
like Wearing, has trouble with memory.
Suffering from what looks to be a severe
case of PTSD, he is trapped in his traumatic
memories of the Vietnam War while being
hunted in the film’s present setting of Hope,
Washington. Though Rambo’s problems
cannot be as easily linked to a physical
ailment as in the case of Wearing, this is
almost fitting, as Rambo himself is not
really physical, real. He’s a fiction. The
12. questions brought up by comparing him, an
imaginary figure, with a well-documented
medical case not only draws analogies
between kinds of memory and the nature
of remembrance, but also asks how fictions
such as cinema and media images act upon
the mind. The resulting performance is a
playful examination of memory, biology,
history, fantasy, and politics, emphasizing
the complexities that occur at the interstices
of these subjects.
Memories seem intangible. However,
Carvalho approaches the mind as matter,
a brain that is a part of a body. Certainly,
Power Over Memory addresses the body, as
this is the primary material of performance
art. Less common, it also approaches the
subject from the perspective of not only art,
but also biological science: a field where
what remains to be discovered lies largely
in the mind. Borrowing from neurology to
approach his chosen ‘case studies’, Power
Over Memory specifically examines how
memories are consolidated in the human
brain through the hippocampus. Memory-
making is presented as a physiological
process happening within the body, real as
the beating of the heart. Any disruption,
as seen by Carvalho’s examples, produces
seemingly bizarre behaviors—amnesia,
blood-soaked action-packed death
rampages. These precarious connections
between mind, body, and environment were
already intuited by Henri Bergson in his
1896 publication of Matter and Memory.
If, moreover, we cast a glance at the minute
structure of the nervous system as recent
discoveries have revealed it to us, we see
everywhere conducting lines, nowhere
any centers. Threads placed end to end, of
which the extremities probably touch when
the current passes: this is all that is seen.
And perhaps this is all there is, if it is true
13. that the body is only a place of meeting
and transfer, where stimulations received
result in movements accomplished, as we
have supposed it to be throughout this
work. But these threads, which receive
disturbances or stimulations from the
external world and return them to it in
the form of appropriate reactions, these
threads so beautifully stretched from the
periphery to the periphery, are just what
ensure by the solidity of these connections
and the precision of their interweaving
the sensori-motor equilibrium of the body,
that is to say, its adaptation to the present
circumstances. Relax this tension or destroy
this equilibrium: everything happens as if
attention detached itself from life. Dreams
and insanity appear to be little else than
this.²
From this same text, Bergson describes
two kinds of memory, juxtaposing “true
memory” with memory that is “fixed in the
organism”. For some reason, this latter form
of memory is of less interest to Bergson.
“Habit rather than memory, it acts on our
past experience, but does not call up its
image.”³ Formally, this ‘habit’ could today
be termed non-declarative or procedural
memory and despite their difficulties with
memory consolidation, both Wearing
and Rambo appear to retain robust and
functional non-declarative memories.
Riding a bike, speaking a language,
adding and subtracting numbers—non-
declarative memory runs deep and plays
out unconsciously. Clive Wearing still
plays the piano. Rambo can still take out a
helicopter. Although they have no memory
of the present, both figures still draw upon
their habituated knowledge, realized not in
their consciousnesses, but in their actions.
This, perhaps, is the secret to Power Over
Memory. As a performance, it illuminates
not through discourse, but actions. The
immediacy of doing, of movements,
gestures, and actions, engages us with the
present even when the experiences and
perceptions associated with “true memory”
are lost.
In Power Over Memory, Carvalho reenacts
the games of boyhood. Wielding a toy
gun, he shoots at video game caricatures
projected on the wall—interchangeable
terrorists, Communists, aliens, Indians,
Jews. “Shoot me.” He hands someone the
gun. It chirps and flashes, and Carvalho
flails and falls, faking death. Despite the
underlying violence of these familiar
motions, the gut reaction is laughter.
Through play, notions of war are taught
and embodied, shift from tragic to joyful,
are entwined with the construction of
masculinity. This is the stuff of earliest
memory, ingrained at the level of the non-
declarative, the unconscious. Carvalho
plays hero, diving across the room to
save a gang of stuffed animals as a
battlefield of firecrackers pop around him.
Army figurines, teddy bears, wind-up
dolls, waterballoons. That toy gun. Such
ephemera persists within us by colouring
the imagination. Ultimately, the violence
latent in this playfulness is revived and
perpetuated in the new myths and artifacts
that we desire, dream, envision, and create.
In his book The Head Trip, Jeff Warren
sketches out several theories on the
function of dreams, which include memory
consolidation, emotional processing,
and prepping the brain for wakefulness.⁴
Another idea is that dreaming is an
evolutionary tactic developed to rehearse
fight-or-flight survival skills. Called threat
simulation theory, it is partially based on
observations of the theta rhythm, a neural
oscillation with a frequency of 4–7 Hz, as it
relates to sleep. Theta rhythms occur during
behaviors that are crucial to survival and its
elimination in test subjects results in severe
long-term memory deficits. Theoretically,
as theta rhythms spike during REM sleep,
nightmares of fleeing monsters and battling
bad guys are stored as lessons in our non-
declarative memory. Warren posits that
Hollywood movies such as Rambo, with
their “mad kinetic action and chase scenes
and slathering monsters”, are modern
manifestations of these primal fantasies.
The appeal is universal, biologically
ingrained into our will to live.
Pondering the state of dreaming, Warren
writes,
In dreaming we seem unable to access
certain important components of waking
memory—we may have access to certain
content details from waking, but we have
forgotten the context. This gives rise to
what is probably the primary common
characteristic of dream thinking: our utter
credulity […] We are capable of thinking
and making decisions, but there is a
shallow single-mindedness to our cognitive
capacities.⁵
Going by this description, the lived
experiences of Clive Wearing and Rambo
seem dream-like, inhabiting a context-
less state as described by Warren. They
either cannot draw on their memories
or are consumed by them, and are thus
unable to adequately address what is
happening in the moment. Likewise our
capacity to collectively contextualize the
crippling number of threats, minutia, and
catastrophes that make up the present
is analogous to Warren’s conception of
dreaming. Unable to access and shape
our shared memory, history is instead
determined by power and by production—
the forces that control the dreams of
cinema, the materials of childhood. The
question becomes how to awaken, how to
consciously shape our collective memories
and maneuver them back into the hands of
the sleepers.
More thoughts on action and memory:
Agamben writes on how the invention of
cinema taught the European bourgeoisie
how to move. Implied in this shift in
movement was a irrevocable change in
the way that bodies function and relate to
one another. A darkened room, a moving
image, and a soundtrack work together
to absorb the viewer, affecting them on a
basic level that is not just cognitive, but also
unconscious, physical, and emotive. Film
is the “dream of a gesture”, another way
of describing movie magic.⁶ The stories
told through mass media affect the body,
and through the body, memory. While
previously, my memories would have
consisted of direct experiences of say, my
home and family, now more than ever, my
memories are shared with others, taught by
a lexicon of commodified images. Movies
become as much a part of our history as
real events. Fictions slowly merge into
belief. Democratically, alarmingly, the body
remembers all experiences in the same way,
whether they be truth or construct.
First Blood was shot in Hope, a small town
of six thousand found not in the state of
Washington, but rather the province of
British Columbia. The popularity of the
Rambo movies made the series an emblem
of the town’s identity as well as a resource
for its modest tourist industry. Gracing the
opening scenes of First Blood, the Kawkawa
Bridge, informally known as Rambo Bridge,
was the pinnacle of this hometown pride.
In 2011, the bridge was demolished to
much protest and fanfare, with locals, fans,
and minor celebrities gathering to observe
the demise of this landmark with a BBQ,
limited-edition t-shirts, and a John Rambo
look-alike contest. Children, grandmothers,
and even dogs came to the event, dressed
with bandanas, machetes, and mullets of
black hair. This curious incident hints at
how even though Rambo is make-believe,
even when the bridge that spuriously
links the fiction of that film to the material
14. world is destroyed, his memory, fixed in
the bodies of movie-goers, propagates into
reality. I imagine this memory working on
the body, manifesting into its own animal.
Half-real, half-fantasy, this new beast
gestates, mutates, and multiplies until
there is an army of John Rambo look-alikes
wandering the forests of British Columbia,
Washington state, creeping guerrilla-style
along the threads of our nervous system. A
renegade thought virus, intent on hijacking
our dreams to infiltrate reality.
Two unsettling moments in Power Over
Memory exemplify the problematic
relationship between memory and
experience. Carvalho holds a camera up in
the air and masks the lens with his hands.
Snapping two Polaroid pictures, he presses
the photographs over his eyes. A blank
image of the past clings precariously to
his face, blinding his body as it stands in
the present. An equivalent to this gesture
is projected on a wall: Clive Wearing is
being pressed to describe the experience
of his unique state of amnesia. “I have
nothing to say about it. It’s like death. No
thoughts, nothing. No dreams, nothing
at all.” Wearing stares into the air with
an expression of utter bafflement. The
photographs fall from Márcio’s eyes to the
floor.
1. Sacks, Oliver. “The Abyss.” The New Yorker
September 2007: 110-112.
2. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. New York:
Zone Books, 1991. 173.
3. Ibid., 151.
4. Warren, Jeff. The Head Trip. New York: Random
House Canada, 2007. 107.
5. Ibid., 104.
6. Agamben, Giorgio. “Notes on Gesture.” Means
Without End: Notes on Politics. University of
Minnesota Press, 2000. 55.
15. How To
Escape From
History
How To Escape From History was a
performance that tried to deal with Édouard
Glissant comment on the ways history is
produced and teached to us as a collective:
“History (with a capital H) ends where the
histories of those peoples once reputed to
be without history come together. History
is a highly functional fantasy of the West,
originating at precisely that time when it
alone ‘made’ the history of the world.”
The performance was made in the old
prison of Bergen, bringing together
individual and collective memory through
autobiographical events, my grandmother
memories and tstories of my family while
living in angola since 1 century.
Bergen Performance Art Festival, Bergen,
Norway
16.
17. EDUCATION
Feb 2011 - Mar 2013
Master Degree – SODA Performing Arts
UDK/HZT, Berlin, Germany
Sep 2004 - Jun 2006
Master Degree – Visual Arts University of
art and design (ESAD) Caldas da Rainha,
Portugal
Sep 2001 - Jun 2003
Bachelor Degree – Visual Arts University of
art and design (ESAD) Caldas da Rainha,
Portugal
GRANTS & RESIDENCIES
2016
Goethe Institute, Yaoundé, Cameroon
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon,
Portugal
2014
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon,
Portugal
2013
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon,
Portugal
2012
RAVY Biennial, Yaoundé, Cameroon
HAU - Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, Germany
2010
Buda Kunstcentrum, Kortrijk, Belgium
Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Ireland
Mousonturm, Frankfurt Main, Germany
2009
INOV Arte, DG Artes, Lisbon, Portugal
E.R.M. Wittemberg, Germany
2008
Avan’t Rue, Paris, France
CV
WORK (selection)
2016
A Meeting in turku in 2016, aboa vetus &
ars nova MuseuM turku, Finland
Borderline club Festival, tehdas theater,
turku, Finland
Ravy biennial, supported by goethe institue,
yaoundé, caMeroon
Blind spot project, berlin, beirut, tokyo,
bucharest, bergen, Fredrikstad
2015
Solo show, If My Grandmother Was A
Historian, Atelierhof Kreuzberg, Berlin,
Germany
Thessaloniki Biennial, Thessaloniki, Greece
Curitiba Biennial, Curitiba, Brazil
Verbo Festival, Galeria Vermelho, Sao
Paulo, Brazil
Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz, Austria
New Performance Turku Festival, Turku,
Finland
Peninsula Project, Embassy of Italy, Berlin,
Germany
Floating Platforms, Art and Science project,
Turku, Finland
2014
Individual Exhibition and performance,
GEMÄLDEGALERIE, part of Giving
Contours to Shadows project by NBK and
Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, Germany
Giving Contours to Shadows, Maxim Gorki
Theater, Berlin, Germany
ACCUMULATION project, Boston
University’s 808 Gallery, Boston, United
States
Organization for Human Brain Mapping
Annual Congress, CCH - Congress Center
Hamburg, Germany
THE BODIES WE TELL - Collective
exhibition, National Gallery for
Contemporary Art Yaoundé, Cameroon
Bergen International Performance Festival,
Bergen, Norway
LIVE ACTION GÖTEBORG Festival,
Gothenburg, Sweden
Live Art for Born Festival, Copenhagen,
Denmark
2013
Miami Performance International Festival,
Miami Beach, United States
Uprooted/Fake Nations Festival, Helsinki,
Finland
LIVE Bienale of Performance Art,
Vancouver, Canada
Intermedia Festival, Gdansk, Poland
Artist in Residence, Palácio das Artes,
Porto, Portugal
Rapid Pulse Festival, Chicago, US
Point in Time Collective Exhibition, Aqua
Carré, Berlin, Germany
Collective exhibition, Time to Pretend,
Harare, Zimbabwe
18. 2012
7a11d festival of performance art, Toronto,
Canada
The Pornography of Everyday Life, 7th
Berlin Biennial, Berlin, Germany
X-Choreographers, Tanz im August, Berlin,
Germany
RAVY Biennial - Rencontres d’Arts Visuels
de Youndé, Cameroon
Blauverschiebung 5, Kub Galerie, Leipzig,
Germany
Paersche, performance art event, Cologne/
Bonn, Germany
Extension Extra, Kunsthalle am Hamburger
Platz, Berlin, Germany
Go West Festival, Frankfurt, Germany
2011
Nomadic Settlers, Kunstlerhaus Bethania,
Berlin, Germany
Infraction Festival, Sete, France
Kontrapunkt Festival, Szczecin, Poland
24h Festival, Szczecin, Poland
Infraction festival, Venice, Italy
Colab Editions 3, Savvy Contemporary,
Berlin, Germany
Blauverschiebung 4, Kub Galerie, Leipzig,
Germany
Oh My god, Gallery 5 people, Berlin,
Germany
Performer Stammtisch, Berlin, Germany
From me to you Festival, Berlin, Germany
Verão Azul Festival, CCL, Lagos, Portugal
2010
Project Brand New, Project Arts Centre,
Dublin, Ireland
Home Sweet Home Festival, Werkstatt der
Kulturen, Berlin, Germany
ExtensionSeries 5, Grimmuseum, Berlin,
Germany
Appointment, Performance project with the
collaboration of Yingmei Duan, Hotel25,
Berlin, Germany
M5-Differential Festival, Galerie Nord,
Berlin, Germany
Plot in Situ Festival, Acud Theater, Berlin,
Germany
Men Only, Kunst Fabrik, Berlin, Germany
‘The Powers of Art’, Alex TV, Berlin,
Germany
CURATING
2012 - 2016
WHILE MOVING FORWARD ON TIME
Film Documentary
http://whilemovingforwardontime.
blogspot.de/
2016
CO-LAB Copenhagen
In collaboration with Liveart.DK
Copenhagen, Denmark
2014
Colab Editions – The Publication,
Retrospective and book launch – supported
by FRAME Finland, OCA Norway, Embassy
of Norway Berlin and Pro Helvetia
Switzerland, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin,
Germany
IPAC – International Performance Art
Convention, Glogauair artist-in-residence
program, Berlin, Germany
2012
Colab Editions 7:
Mind Pirates gallery
Invited artists: Olivier Foukua (Cameroon),
Mark Patrick Tchambou (Cameroon),
Nathalie Bikoro (Gabon), Willem Wilhelmus
(Netherlands)
Colab Editions 8:
Freies Museum, Berlin
Leena Kela (Finland), Tomasz Szrama
(Poland), Juha Valkeapää (Finland), Kimmo
Modig (Finland)
Colab Editions 9 and 10:
SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin
Jacques Van Poppel (Netherlands), Ieke
Trinks (Netherlands), Jelili Atiku (Nigeria)
and Lan Hungh (Taiwan)
TV Show, The Powers of Art 3 and 4, ALEX
TV, Berlin
2011
Colab Editions 1-6:
SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin
Invited artists: Alastair Maclennan
(Scotland), Nezaket Ekici (Turkey), Kurt
Johannessen (Norway), Ruth Feukoua
(Cameroon), Serge Olivier Fokoua
(Cameroon), Antoni Karwowski (Poland),
Andrés Galeano (Spain), Essi Kausalainen
(Finland), Magnus Logi Kristinsson
(Iceland), Márcio Carvalho (Portugal),
Maurice Blok (Netherlands), Stefan Riebel
(Deutschland)
2010
Founder adn Curator of the artist residence
Hotel 25, Berlin, Germany
Director and Curator of PLOT IN SITU,
Live art festival, ACUD Theater, Berlin,
Germany
Founder and Curator of the TV show ‘The
Powers of Art’, AlexTV Studios, Berlin,
Germany
