Tectonic bones radio. Tonight there are ancestors on every channel

~~ I am struggling with language in the face of cruelty, of annihilation, of the murdering of the world (again).

* Words, really?

~~ Erdbeben, earthquakes, is all I can feel, say. How they might disintegrate language and become vocabulary.

* Do you know the poem “Alchemy Horse” by Natalie Diaz? I think there are earthquakes in it, when you speak the signs, or are they star constellations, that are not words, they become a movement. Is it that horse, making the earth tremble?

~~ Let’s make these lines

+ + + That’s why—
, I’m always halfghost + + half-back + + half-dressed
+ as the war party who will return—
, With a full tank of gas + + +
, And a stick of scalps + + +

Tonight the city + + is a tectonic bone radio—
, Our ancestors are on every channel + + +

Scorpions whip and fluoresce + from the shadows of Settler houses
Green-eyed wolf spiders + emerge from their dens +
to join the dark hunt + + +

a radio station.

* An ant is walking across the screen.

~~  Magic is a counter-pedagogy to cruelty.

* ~~

(from: Natalie Diaz, Alchemy Horse, 2023)

How does the existence of ancestral bodies seized during colonial occupation and genocide and to this day imprisoned in German museums and archives shift the cosmoecologies, the planetary tectonics? What do these presences mean for the political and spiritual landscapes in which they are embedded and in which they are missing? Can we think-feel the tectonic movements and shifts, the psychogeological fractures and shocks they create?

The multiple realities of colonial violence and of resistance and survival however hard they may have been erased continue to unleash something like seismic waves, signals that do not emerge in readable signs but tremblings and shocks that inscribe themselves into the natures they are in, traceable perhaps more in the wisdom of plants and rocks.

In connecting to the reality of people being captured in the buildings of German supremacist culture, they emerge like a constellation of epicenters. Their earthquakes move deep in time.  Could these tremblings and quakes, where we feel them, materialize connections of alivenesses, of resilience and worlding of interconnected life worlds? Could they bring these buildings to crumble?

SPREK TEKST TEKTONIK / TECTOTONGUES

Contributions to an Anticolonial Queer*feminist Glossary for Transformative Language Work and Political Poetics

an archive books and district*school without center publication

edited by Suza Husse with When The Jackal Leaves The Sun, Chaka Collective’s translation of Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s “Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza”, Fehras Publishing Practices’ “Hader Halal” [with regards to presence]. Contributions by Aline Benecke, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Anike Joyce Sadiq, Aziza Ahmad, Chaka Kollektiv,  Fehras Publishing Practices, Ina Röder Sissoko, International Women* Space, Jasmina Al-Quaisi, Jinran Ha, Jyl Franzbecker, Kook-Nam Cho-Ruwwe, Luna Ali, M. Ty, Memory Biwa, Michael Bader, Neo Sinoxolo Musangi, Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, Renée Akitelek Mboya,  Rehema Chachage, Sarah Imani, Suza Husse, Ulrike Gerhardt, Valerie Asiimwe Amani, Wali Chafu Collective, Yvonne Wilhem/knowbotiq

SPREK TEKST TEKTONIK / TECTOTONGUES is an attempt to connect and resonate language-dissident, poetic and emancipatory proposals that emerge from anti-colonial, post/migrant and anti-discriminatory movements and multilingualisms. The first edition of “Contributions to an Anticolonial Queer*feminist Glossary for Transformative Language Work and Political Poetics” aims to contribute to pluralizing and decolonizing modes of speaking, writing and embodiment within a German multilingual context.

EARTHQUAKES IN TREES

30 May 2024. Plants and earth memory workshop with Ina Röder Sissoko

Together with the healer, santera, activist and midwife Ina Röder Sissoko, we trace the connections between (medicinal) plants, memory and resistance. We will meet under the weeping beeches by the carp pond in Treptower Park. One hundred and six Black people and people of color lived and worked here from May to October 1896 as performers in the first German colonial exhibition. Unaware that they would become part of a racist “Völkerschau” for an audience of millions and pseudo-scientific research in Berlin, they came from lands in Africa and Oceania that were colonized by Germany at the time. Many of them lived and organized resistance on site, various currents of Black and anti-colonial resistance in Germany and the occupied territories intersected here and were among the beginnings of the Black movement in Germany. There is no monument in Treptower Park to commemorate these ancestors, the injustice they experienced and their struggles.

“Their voices resound in the whispering refrain of the leaves.

Their stories are reflected in the ripples of the water.

Their chorus drives change.

A gathering that amplifies the dreams of an otherwise.”

– Joel Vogel and Vincent Bababoutilabo, zurückerzählt

In the workshop, we connect to the memory work in relation to these ancestors and their transformative legacy, which has been and is being done by Black and decolonial activists and cultural workers, for example in the exhibition “zurückgeschaut I looking back” at the Museum Treptow-Köpenik, and by artists such as Joel Vogel and Vincent Bababoutilabo with their audio walk “zurückerzählt” (2020/2021). Through learning from the healing, resilient and spiritual powers of trees, shrubs, herbs and mosses, we get in touch with these ancestors, their stories, their worlding that lives on in the plants.

TONIGHT THE CITY ++ IS A TECTONIC BONE RADIO—

From June 2024. Radio transmissions with Anike Joyce Sadiq, Ina Röder Sissoko, Michael Bader, Mnyaka Sururu Mboro, Refuge Worldwide Radio, Sarah Imani, SoundSysters, Suza Husse, Yvonne Wilhem/knowbotiq

Inspired by Black, Indigenous, queer and anti-colonial anti/futurisms and specifically by the experimental speculative fiction film “Reclamation” (2018) by TJ Cuthand, Tectonic Bone Radio proposes to imagine a time and space amidst and after the great earthquakes and tectonic shifts. Artists, fighters, healers and thinkers embark on a journey into a time in which the seismic waves of transgenerational anti-colonial resistance have undone the edifices of coloniality.

IS THE DARKNESS THICK
NEVER MIND
STRETCH OUT YOUR HANDS CAREFULLY

6 June 2024. Radio Listening Session & Zine Releases (multilingual) with Fehras Publishing Practices, D’EST, Aziza Ahmad, Kenan Darwich, Leila Bencharnia, Nancy Naser Al Deen, Omar Gabriel Delnevo, Sama Ahmadi, Sami Rustom, Suza Husse, Ulrike Gerhardt 

Try to keep your heart alert
Stare with your fingers*

We will gather around Hader Halal zine and Fehras’ archival collection of the quarterly magazine Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings (1968-1993). We will be reading, listening and lively activate a spirit of solidarity memories together, histories which shaped the cultural and the publishing work behind this magazine and beyond. Hader Halal zine is a testament to the ongoing battle against colonialism and hegemonic structures. The ways in which geography and metaphor intertwine in the context of Palestine serves as a conduit that condenses the aspirations and adversities lived in both Asia and Africa over the past two centuries.

More information here: https://fehraspublishingpractices.org/Dates

*Lines from “The Booby-Trapped Poem” by Samih Al Kassem LOTUS: Afro-Asian Writings No.59, 1988

NUESTRAS ANCESTRX SONARON CONTRA EL FIN DEL MUNDO. [Our ancestors dreamed against the end of the world.]

// SPREK TEKST TEKTONIK / TECOTONGUES. Contributions to an anticolonial queer*feminist glossary for transformative language work and political poetics

6 June 2023. Radio transmission, publication release & video Screening with Verena Melgarejo Weinandt and Suza Husse

… Es el lenguaje del cosmos, habla en las profecías talladas en las cicatrices donde nuestras ancestras y ancestros soñaron. [… It is the language of the cosmos, speaking from the prophecies in the wounds where our ancestors were dreaming.]*

On the occasion of releasing SPREK TEKST TEKTONIK / TECTOTONGUES artist and glossary contributor Verena Melgarejo Weinandt will be in conversation with “Tectonic Bone Radio” coinitiator and glossary editor Suza Husse with and through Verena’s alter ego Pocahunter. Pocahunter is a warrior who returns from the grave to seek revenge for colonial violences, interfering with peoples’ dreams and imaginaries. Pocahunter troubles the double presence of indigenous people and especially indigenous women in German culture, which is both characterised by an overrepresentation of racist and sexualised colonial stereotypes and by an imaginary absence, that relegates indigenous people to the realms of the dead and the past. Verena Melgarejo Weinandt’s zombiesque avatar acts within this disturbing gap by re-appropriating these stereotypes to craft them into bold and exuberant colonisers’ nightmares.

Verena Melgarejo Weinandt (*1986, D) is a German-Bolivian artist, curator, educator and researcher. Often intertwining different fields of practice, she uses her own being in this world as a tool to address colonial and patriarchal structures and to search for ways of individual and collective healing: methods of what she calls “arte-sana”. She works with performances, textiles, photography, video and installations.

* Lines from Repensando el Apocalipsis. Manifesto Indigena Antifuturista, Oaxaca

TONIGHT THE CITY + + IS A TECTONIC BONE RADIO— , OUR ANCESTORS ARE ON EVERY CHANNEL + + +   is a collective production by district*school without center.