Dreamer & Goner
Dreamer & Goner was a 3-day long intervention for Dekoloniale, 2024. Performances, a workshop and a city walk invoked two Moko Jumbies who haunted back Berlin Wedding and Berlin Mitte.
Using the production, labour & trade history of a sunken container ship, the SS El Faro, I developed a costumed choreography for two Moko Jumbies (stiltwalkers), named Dreamer and Goner.
The performance haunted streets, buildings, electrical boxes, pissoirs, monuments and people along Dekoloniale’s memory-culture walk in the so-called African Quarter and Asian Streets (Berlin Wedding) as well as M-Straße and the Nikolaiviertel (Berlin Mitte). Dreamer and Goner were costumed in correspondence with my paintings and textile works, in which overalls, jumpsuits and other workwear often feature.
Working with bodies other than my own is an externalization of my own wrestling with grief, love, trust and mortality. How to live when you know you’re doomed? How to dream when you know you’re a goner?
Stiltwalkers at rest, on a low wall or in a tree, leaning on some impossibly high piece of our cityscape during Trinidad & Tobago Carnival, were so cool, so dread and so vulnerable. This moment of an exerted body paused between walking, swooping and coming down off of their stilts was haunting in a special way.
El Faro: Mas Camp
For this project, I temporarily transformed the Barazani space into a Mas Camp; this is the name of the masquerade-making hubs where costumes for Trinidad & Tobago Carnival are produced by passionate and often socially precarious persons. My own experience in such a space helped form my interest in maintaining communities of care.
Moko Jumbies: Earl Ward Jr. and Tekel Sylvan
Dramaturgy: Luiza Furtado
Videography: Isma Gane
Production Assistant: Kech
Backstage: Barazani Berlin e.V.
Moko Support: Kriston Chen / Alice Yard / 1000Mokos
Production Support: BPA// Berlin Program for Artists, Each One Teach One (Eoto) e.V., Barazani Berlin e.V.
Commissioned by: the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin for Dekoloniale Festival & Academy 2024
