Luisa Ascending
Luisa Ascending is a Passiontide exhibition that is an exploration of Luisa Calderón’s story, tracing suffering, pathos and identity in a critical geo-feminist context.
Installation Views in the St. Nikolai Church in Flensburg, April-June, 2022
In the early 19th century, widespread images of the tortured 14-year-old Luisa Calderón (a free mixed-race person in Trinidad) caused a stir in Britain: they showed the violence, previously hidden to Europeans, that was part of everyday life in colonised places. Calderón’s story still raises questions today about how this violence is connected to our reality in the here-and-now.
Using tools of visual communication which refer to the most famous drawings of Calderón’s case as well as other visual phenomena of colonial imagery, the colonial history of Flensburg will be addressed in a program of events. The focus is not only on the economic traces of the colonial era, but also on the work of German Christian missionaries and their connections to colonial rule.
These interventions have been organised in a series of events and sermons by the city’s pastor Johannes Ahrens and pastor Dr Marcus Friedrichs, including a lecture on Missionary Work and Colonialism by Hamburg-based missiologist Dr Anton Knuth (Fri 18 March, 7pm) and a performance of scenes from ‘Travels to former colonies’ by Flensburg’s Pilkentafel Theatre group (Fri 25 March, 7pm).
These paintings were realised within the framework of a postgraduate scholarship ‘Traces of Empire in Schleswig-Holstein's Port Cities’ at the Muthesius University of Fine Art and Design, Kiel. The Artistic Research is kindly supported by the working group Integrative Geographien at the European University, Flensburg.
