Felisha Carenage

Ashes & María

Installative paintings and performances playing with archipelagos’ global intimacies. Himmelsleiter and Ashes, after Steve McQueen and La Soufriére, …

Installative paintings and performances playing with archipelagos’ global intimacies.

Himmelsleiter and Ashes, after Steve McQueen and La Soufriére, are personal reconnections with forms of death and destruction that are inextricable from island living, which are undertaken by referencing mental health crises, gun violence and natural disasters.

The Maria works are collaborations between Felisha Carenage, Luiza Furtado and Anne Meerpohl. The aqueous Maria is a changeable figure who serves as the artistic alter ego of the three painters. In this way, they deal with care-work, friendship, sexual capital and memory.

Maria: Miradores

Invited by the Museum am Rothenbaum to intervene on the theme of Der, Die, Das Tod, which accompanies this year’s Dia de los Muertos festival, Santa Maria Paraffina: Miradores de la Viuda deals with gender (non)specific forms of mourning and death.

Photo: Anne Meerpohl
Photo: Anne Meerpohl
Photo: Anne Meerpohl

As a choreography and construction that plays with the architectural idea of a Widow's Walk, Miradores guides visitors through the border space between ocean and sea, life and non-life.

Using various literary excerpts, Miradores plays with elements of longing, loss and nostalgia to address the real-world emotions that accompany discussions and (in)abilities to act in relation to climate justice, Radical Mourning and other strategies of futurity.

The intervention will be activated through walks/readings led by the 3 Marias, with texts in multiple languages.

Texts include:

Bodies of Water, Astrid Neimanis
To the Lighthouse/ À la Phare/ Zum Leuchtturm, Virginia Woolf
The Sandman, Neil Gaiman
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
In The Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
Recht auf Trauer, Francis Seeck
Queer Abstraction, David Getsy
Ghosts of my Life, Mark Fisher
Von dem Fischer und syner Fru, Philip Otto Runge/ Jakob&Wilhelm Grimm

Created with the support and curation of Weiqi Wang and Gabriel Schimmeroth.