17 June 2023, 4 PM
Rathausvorplatz Wedding / Wedding Town Hall Square

Popularised in avant-garde 20th century fine art, appropriation was seen as a transgressive act by those in a less powerful position to use and misuse the signs and language of the dominant elite. Today, cultural appropriation means to take a historically oppressed group’s customs, practices, ideas, etc. without authorisation at the cost of stereotyping and erasing their cultural heritage. Cultural appropriation functions within a power imbalance. It also takes freely disregarding the discrimination felt by the cultural bearers. In 2023, cultural appropriation can no longer be veiled behind the guise of art. It is a form of neo-colonialism and part of our complicated inheritance as members of the field of dance and performance. This session offers an exchange on the nuances of cultural appropriation, experienced through the frame of Joana Tischkau’s and Amelia Uzategui Bonilla’s artistic work and research. In collaboration, the two dance artists and performance makers will lead a combination of practical explorations to invite the participants to engage with theoretical discourses and questions around cultural appropriation. By sharing a plethora of material, including text, video, historical and pop cultural examples, small group discussions will be led. In an attempt to investigate how to negotiate cultural material within one’s own artistic practice Tischkau and Uzategui invite the participants to find a playful engagement with their own cultural baggage.

Joana Tischkau and Amelia Uzategui Bonilla are choreographers based in Frankfurt a. M. Amelia, born in 1985 in Lima, Peru, is an associate professor of dance at the HfMDK and co-leads ID_Frankfurt's ID_Tanzhaus FRM. Joana was born in 1983 in Göttingen, Germany. Her latest work, BEING PINK AIN'T EASY, shown at Tanzplattform Deutschland, searches for the ambiguities that are interwoven between defensive mechanisms like ›white fragility‹ (Robin DiAngelo) and forms of cultural appropriation. [Website Amelia Uzategui Bonilla] [Website Joana Tischkau]