The Brazilian artist and activist Idylla Silmarovi explores in her project ›POVOAR‹ how personal memory can become a counter-narrative to the colonized collective consciousness through performance. Together with anthropologist and filmmaker Edgar Kanakykõ Xakriabá, she’s developed collaborative actions with people from Essen during a two-week workshop aiming to reclaim spaces, images, and bodies in the urban public sphere and amplify suppressed and unheard voices. The outcomes of this mapping will be presented here in the form of a performative reading.

Following her Sprungbrett Residency in 2023 as part of Memories & Resistance, iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo, is once again constructing a ›Shelter‹ at PACT. This project forms part of a broader transatlantic inquiry, where the artist engages with indigenous communities of the northern Andean region, examining the anti-colonial resistance practices that have emerged there, alongside exploring concepts of hospitality and embodied knowledge. The performative and inclusive installation ›Shelter‹, developed in collaboration with Roman Jungblut, endeavors to forge spaces for communal gathering and exchange. Its aim is to come closer to prevailing narratives and a reappropriation or reclamation of historical memory. It serves as a hybrid place of refuge that connects tangible and imaginary elements across temporal and geographical boundaries.

›Visions In Monochrome‹ is an audiovisual installation that explores the depths of the human psyche in displacement, where the body contends for survival amid a world confined within parallel lines. Led by inspiration from wheat-cultivating Saweel Al Qamh - صويل القمح‹), the multidisciplinary artist Qusay Awad composes experimental soundscapes and incorporates body performance within the language of »physical cinema«.
By exploring the interplay between space, time, and the queer body, Qusay demonstrates how embodied memory serves as a catalyst for healing, recognizing it as an integral part of ancestral collective memory. Through this lens, viewers are invited to consider resistance through deliberate memory selection, highlighting the pursuit of personal narratives amid influences.
This installation is part of a live performance and research project that began during the summer residency at PACT Zollverein in August 2023.

During a residency at PACT, the Berlin-based Iranian choreographer kiana rezvani has been collaborating for the first time with artist Eli Wewentxu, who resides in Chile within the Wallmapu territory. Collectively, they’ve been examining the complex interactions between conflictual positioning, belonging, historiography, and their own narrative forms and exploring how connections can be made within the often-necessary concealment of their respective political struggles, and how gatherings can still be possible despite their restricted freedom of movement. Their aim is to bring artists from the Global South together to intertwine their narratives of resistance and thus open up new spaces of possibility.