Rituals
Chronicling the care practices of three Black Berliners – Caritia, “a BDSM practitioner, domina and sex worker,” Lee a “gender-terrorist, yoga instructor” and Goitseone, “a pessimistic witch,” and “Twa Sana (Light of a New Moon)” rituals consists of a twenty-minute documentary video and a twelve-piece photo-series. In the video, describing their respective experiences as Black bodies in the German health care system, Lee, Caritia, and Goitseone also demonstrate some of the ways in which they find healing for themselves and for others outside.
Year: 2020
Length: 17′
Format: HD, stereo
Language: English
Subtitles: German
Filmmaking: Nnenna Onuoha,
Edna Bonhomme
Exhibition:
Cartographies of Care. 15.02–13.03.2020
Film Program:
Acting from the Middle of Somewhere. 15.02–07.03.2021
Exhibitions:
Cartographies of Care. alpha nova and galerie futura. 2020.
The exhibition Cartographies of Care by Edna Bonhomme and Nnenna Onuoha, which opens during Black History/Futures Month, charts not only Black Berliners’ often-difficult experiences with the German healthcare system, but also how they find solace and restoration in Afrodiasporic healing arts.
Care is at the core of Black, queer and feminist traditions. Care is ubiquitous, and its parameters dictate how we move through the world; determining whether we survive or thrive. Cartographies of Care traces how healing is imagined and exercised in African diasporic bodies. It gathers experiences and practices from a variety of cultures living in Berlin. These rituals generate modalities of healing that overcome ongoing traumas faced by Black womxn, non binary, and transgender people who are all threatened by the climate crisis, health inequities, and the rise of the far right. This exhibition is a space of experimentation that works through ancestral memories, mobile archives, and Black futures. It is an invitation for a collective sensorial experience that shows how Afrodiasporic people repair.
video, audio, installation, photography, research
14 Feb — 13 Mar 2020
alpha nova & galerie futura
We Cannot Skip This Part–Accessibility. Kunstverein Osnabrück. DE. 2021.
As Above, So Below: Three Films on Ritual. Kunstverein Langenhagen. 2024.
In this exhibition, Nnenna Onuoha presents three video works that show different forms of rituals and processes, documenting them how black bodies move in and through spaces – from intimate to public space. The three videos draw our attention to everyday rituals of (self-)care and care, as well as on how the attention and honoring of one’s body is interwoven into larger actions of intervention and the collective recovery of stories that focus on black voices.
