Prendas – Ngangas – Equisos – Machines

Transducing a single film into printed matter, this book addresses the question of how to connect the nonhumans, animals and plants to the postcolonial space without deepening inflicted violations on both people and nature? The film prendas – ngangas – enquisos – machines {each part welcomes the other without saying} gathers affects of plants and animals whose ancestors were moved to the new world, and ‘had to colonize the new land with the humans as a team.’ in present-day Cuba animals such as cows, horses, goats, pigs and chickens provide food and labor, and often move around freely. Much like extended family members some animals share close relations with humans. Some entered the intermediate state between domesticated and wild, others return to the forest to fully reverse their domestication and to become something else entirely. The film sets out to relink adamantly separated concepts of human and animal bodies, vegetables and history. It suggests that nature is both, historically situated, evoking testimonies of past events, while recognizing their specificities, and at the same time continuously growing and surpassing historical formatting with its unique and machinic mode of constantly evolving and creating something new.

Prendas – Ngangas – Equisos – Machines

This publication is part of Elke Marhöfer’s doctoral thesis Ecologies of Practices and Thinking at the Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elke Marhöfer is an artist living in Berlin. Via moving images and suppositious writing, Marhöfer works with notions of self-admitted foreignness and radical othering. She collaborates with dear friends and things, and revises notions of animal, vegetable and object relations. Marhöfer studied at the University of the Arts Berlin, the School of the Art Institute Chicago, the Whitney Independent Study Program New York, and is enrolled in a practice based PhD at the University of Gothenburg. She received fellowships from IASPIS Recidency Sweden, Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart and Cité des Arts Paris. Her films have been screened at the BFI – British Film Institute London, Berlinale – Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Courtisane Festival Ghent, Cinematek Brussels, Images Festival Toronto, and the Showroom London. Her art exhibitions includes Palais de Tokyo Paris, FCAC Shanghai, Manufactura’s Studio Wuhan, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Houston Museum of Fine Arts and NGBK Berlin.

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