Becoming Native

in: Installation » 2019

Galer­ie Mar­tin­etz, Co­logne
06.04.-03.06.2019

Images by Tamara Lorenz

An­cest­or wor­ship. The ven­er­a­tion of our fore­fath­ers. It is but one pro­cess of pos­sible tem­por­al and spa­tial po­s­i­tion­ing with­in this world - ex­per­i­enced as a con­scious en­tity at the end of a deeply rooted net­work. An an­cient prac­tice ori­gin­at­ing in hu­man­kind's ex­ist­en­tial en­counter with death. But also in the ex­ist­en­tial en­counter with life as some­thing con­ceived, born and pro­tec­ted by oth­ers, like part of a long chain reach­ing back into the pre­his­tor­ic­al fog. It is an iden­tity-found­ing cult that makes us a com­pon­ent of an al­most trans-tem­por­al body.

Up until re­cent times, know­ledge of our an­cest­ors has been passed down through old rites and re­li­gions, how­ever, they are being re­placed by con­tem­por­ary coun­ter­parts; ge­net­ics in com­bin­a­tion with di­git­al pro­cessing. For the last dec­ade, simple ge­net­ic test­ing at a low cost has en­abled a new form of an­cest­or wor­ship that is avail­able faster than any walk through a cemetery or archive.

The know­ledge may be alarm­ing. What do we do if we are ge­net­ic­ally con­nec­ted to an eth­nic group that we do not want to or can­not identi­fy with at all? And what if our ori­gins no longer have a centre that we would like to call home?

Per­haps new re­l­at­ives with whom we share sig­ni­fic­ant ge­net­ic in­form­a­tion can help us over­come these con­cerns. Not a so­cial net­work but a ge­net­ic net­work. And from this com­bin­a­tion of char­ac­ter­ist­ics and stor­ies, maybe a new poly­morph­ic iden­tity of a bio­lo­gic­al clan that, until now, has been un­known, will emerge.

Evamaria Schaller ex­plores the pos­sib­il­it­ies of bio­med­ic­al self-dis­cov­ery in her cur­rent ex­hib­i­tion. She dis­covered for­eign an­cest­ors from the not so dis­tant past in East­ern Europe and the south of the con­tin­ent, but also in Africa and Asia. The in­tern­al ge­net­ics of the body seem to be glob­al­ised. This dis­sol­u­tion of bound­ar­ies not only provides a glimpse into the ab­surdity of ra­cial the­ory but also calls the nar­row concept of home into ques­tion and in turn raises ques­tions about one's own free­dom. In the end, how do genes de­term­ine our des­tiny, our iden­tity, our ac­tions and fi­nally – our death?

How­ever, with her kal­eido­scope of em­bod­i­ments the artist goes bey­ond this prob­lem. It is not only the spec­trum of skin and hair col­our from her own ge­net­ic pool, but also prim­or­di­al at­trib­utes chan­ging body and form that turn the artist into a prac­ti­tion­er of for­eign cus­toms. Nature and cul­ture com­bine into a single fig­ure.

How de­term­in­ist­ic is civil­iz­a­tion and with it, the his­tory of power? Which dis­course de­term­ines the re­spect­ive gender, en­dowed with al­leged rights and du­ties? What char­ac­ter­ist­ics are then still de­cis­ive in de­term­in­ing mem­ber­ship to an eth­nic group, a people, a state? And when does ap­pro­pri­ation of the other, even the ap­pre­ci­at­ive, be­come a vi­ol­a­tion?

Cul­tur­al and so­cial dis­courses and dis­tinc­tions are passed on just like ge­net­ics and like ge­net­ics they can change too. In muta­tion lies the core of all di­versity, it has been a game of chance for a long time. On the threshold of total self-im­prove­ment that dis­course and ge­net­ic ana­lys­is prom­ises, Evamaria Schaller takes a look at the ex­ist­en­tial basis of her own body, with­in which the ar­cha­ic, per­haps even the ar­chetyp­al, is con­cealed.

The es­sence of phys­ic­al trans­form­a­tion is not lim­ited to ex­tern­al trans­form­a­tion and the ap­pro­pri­ation of plants, horn and fur. They open up an in­tern­al and ex­tern­al in­ter­ac­tion and a com­mu­nic­a­tion that cre­ates the ter­rit­ory of one's own liv­ing en­vir­on­ment as a space con­nect­ing to the other and that re­places the bat­tle­field of he­ge­mony.

Thomas Wolfgang Kuhn, Tier­garten March 2019