Antje Majewski, Berlin
The video “O que nos nutre” was commissioned by the Goethe-Institute Rio, Brazil. The German curator invited a group of artists with the intention to show the first “Indigenous World Games”, an Olympiad of indigenous peoples, as an “innocent” counterpart of the Rio Olympics. Instead, I decided to focus on the boycott of the games by the indigenous people of the Krahô, and conducted many interviews. This led to conflicts with my assistant, a white Brazilian. She was of the opinion that one should show indigenous people only in the backlight and as a shadow, otherwise they would be “exoticized”. We had a long and difficult discussion about how political a film could be. Where is the line between art and activism?
Antje Majewski works as an artist with painting, video, texts and performances. In her recent work, she questions objects, plants and land, explores alternative knowledge systems and narratives and the possibility of transformative processes. Majewski often works with other artists as well as with ecological and urban groups. Majewski is a professor of painting at the Muthesius Academy of Arts Kiel.