lumbung konteks: Pacific entanglements by FAFSWAG, Más Arte Más Acción

lumbung konteks is a seven-part series of online conversations, taking place once every month until June 2022. Each session invites two documenta fifteen lumbung members to introduce their practices and wider ecosystems and to expand and reflect on each other’s work.  Through sharing stories, songs, and tools for living and working in community, the lumbung members discuss the differences and affinities between their contexts. lumbung konteks addresses the importance of the localities within which we all work, the conditions that inform and ground our practices, and the ways we can learn from each other’s models of education, ecology, and economy.

In the seventh and final episode of the series, lumbung members FAFSWAG and Más Arte Más Acción, invite Fundación Mareia and Miguel Mendoza, for a conversation about their disparate art practices and connections with indigeneity, gender, and the territory. The two collectives FAFSWAG and Fundación Mareia speak with each other  across the Pacific Ocean as a space of memory and ancestry.

In conversation

FAFSWAG is a Moana Oceanic arts collective founded in Aotearoa in 2013. They aim to challenge the lack of representation of Queer and Indigenous people in the creative industries by evading heteronormativity and establishing multicultural identities and an interdisciplinary practice. Operating across a multitude of art forms and genres, FAFSWAG’s artists work collaboratively to activate public and digital space. They celebrate Queer Brown bodies, contemporary Pacific arts, and cultural restoration. Their online platform documents in an artistic manner the cultural connectivity of Queer Pacific People of Color navigating their unique identities within New Zealand’s urban landscapes. The collective develops site specific cultural experiences and arts engagements that speak to their unique and diverse contexts as LGBTQ people from Oceania.

Fundación Mareia are an Afro-centered non-profit organization, created in 2016 in Quibdó, Colombia. Fundación Mareia is an artivist, educational, therapeutic, and anti-racist organization led by Chocoan women and diverse people from the territory. The organization focuses on strengthening Black and Indigenous cultural identity, rights, and self-recognition, in order to build models of ethno-education and ethno-development. Fundación Mareia projects include collaborations with different organizations to address the gender and land ownership dimension from the perspective of the women of the river, as well as projects focused on the arts of the Pacific, with the purpose of continuing to promote spaces of living ancestry, artistic residencies, creating and strengthening artistic groups, and heritage actions. All these experimentations pave the way to create the Itinerant University of Arts, Ancestry and Nature of the African Diaspora, with a focus on gender and peace.

Miguel Mendoza is a 30-year-old Afrocolombian cultural and music journalist. He has lived between the cities of Santa Marta and Cartagena on Colombia’s Atlantic coast where his family is from, and Bogotá, the country’s capital . He has also spent some time  in the United States and Argentina. He has worked in radio and podcasting, conducting interviews and written pieces for both digital and printed  media.

Más Arte Más Acción (MAMA) is a nonprofit cultural foundation that generates critical thinking through art. The foundation’s base on Colombia’s Pacific Coast is a source of inspiration for artists, scientists, activists, and writers, who are invited to explore wide-ranging social and environmental issues and consider the construction of other possible worlds. MAMA builds networks with funders, universities, festivals, art institutions, and local communities to sustain the ideas and processes of critical thinking in the framework of territorial struggles. About their present situation MAMA says, “we are currently on a journey to evaluate our processes, narratives, and ways of organizing in the coming years. The journey is uncertain, and this uncertainty encourages us to resist results-oriented productivity.”

Tupac Cruz is a translator and interpreter based in Bogotá.

Lilian Astrid Geese is a conference interpreter based in Berlin.

Undine Schäfer is a sign interpreter based in Göttingen.

Directions