photos:Anna Agliardi
Tribal tattoos are kind of an atrocious relict of the 90s that we can’t really get rid of in Berlin. Even if you spared yourself of those tasteless artifacts you will still encounter them on random bodies of friends, lovers and gym-buddies. But if you think about it the most damage has not been done to us Westerners, who have no real connection to those symbols and signs, but to the indigenous tribes who got their sacred tattoos “stolen” and westernized in the context of a body trend.
But that is actually not really what my article should be about, but rather this: Did you know that Samoa (near New Zealand) was once a German colony? And did you know that Germany used to have “Völkerschauen” where they presented indigenous people like Samoans in zoos just to entertain and “educate” the public about the wild people? A century after they were lucratively exhibited in German Zoos, three of them return to Germany in a folk-colonial spectacle by the Berlin choreographer Jochen Roller and the Samoan performance artist Yuki Kihara at the Sophiensaele. The piece Them and us is a mixture of hybrid choreography and film, in an extremely pleasurable way, the protagonists develop a re-writing of the German anthropological viewpoint of their former colony of German Samoa. Check out the dates and some photographic impressions after the jump.
all photos: Anna Agliardi
Them and Us
Dates: September 16, 18, 19, 20, 2015 – 19:30h
Sophienstraße 18
10178 Berlin Mitte
