open until june 2022

About the Exhibition

Pathways To Reconnection is an invitation to notice, appreciate and learn about the different spaces, stories and webs of meanings that exist in our world. These anthropologically informed visual works look into ubiquitous questions through the experiences of specific communities around the globe. Questions of meaning and temporality arise in ways that may allow you to question your own webs of meaning. We inquire how one finds ways to overlay the past and the present, traversing spaces both real and imagined. Wandering through this virtual space we invite you to peek into the lives of sentient beings, materialities and those that tie us all together.

Rooms

[

Chirs

Chris
[

Tatiana

Tatiana

Tatiana

[

Cleo

Cleo

Cleo

[

Y-ul

Y-ul

Y-ul

Charlotte

Charlotte

[

Charlotte

Romina

Romina

[

Romina

Annie

Annie

[

Annie

Cloud

migration
family
latin america
ethnography
Intergenerational social mobility
Trees
Urbanity
Environmental Personhood
Encounters
Noticing
Wall
Organic
Boundary
Connection
Passageway
intimate
queer
cartographies
wellbeing
indigenous knowledge
dreams
decolonize nature
Future
Climate change
Imagination

About the Projects

What was the Colour of your First Kiss? , 01/07

by Annabel Shewring 

What does it feel like to trace the outline of someone’s body with your fingertips for the first time? What does it feel like the hundredth time? What does it feel like to lust for multiple people at once, or to fall for your best friend? What does it feel like to say goodbye to a relationship, to a version of yourself you may never see again. These questions speak to the essence of my inquiry and to the ordinary affects of queer intimacy. What was the Colour of your First Kiss? becomes a way to grasp at (but never quite reach) the subjective cartographies of queer relationality. The poignancy of these queer mappings may lie precisely in their representational failures.

abuelito, 02/07

by Charlotte Michèle Ernst

My research project abuelito (2019) is a multimedia autoethnography that explores ancestor connections in the ritual context of peyote ceremonies during a New Age Pilgrimage across the Mexican Wirikuta desert. The project is presented in a vulnerable installation of audio testimonials, a short film that deals with the repercussions of toxic maternity and a visual dialectic with my grandmother’s gaze by means of her travel archives. Through my own photographic archives and my experiences, I seek to stimulate a dialogue between the generations on the meaning of ancestry, biography and identity in order to move away from the cliché of victim and perpetrator, and instead, zoom in to a gaze of co-existence by re-relating to history in a different form.

Between Dreams and Naku, 03/07

by Tatiana Lopez

In Sapara ancestral teachings witsa ikichanu (good living) means to maintain an open connection to the spirit world through dreams. Drawing my fieldwork from the Sapara Nation in the Llanchamacocha community located in the Providence of Pastaza in the Ecuadorian Amazon, this research-based project explores Indigenous Sapara women’s local pursuits of ecological well-being and the symbolic relationships between Sapara women, the land and dreams.  This work is part of an experimental artistic project that combines cyanotype photography, embroidery and video.

Shape of the Wall, 04/07

by Y-ul Suh

I explore the wall ranging from a building material to a psychological wall, and how it affects our behavior, movement, and way of thinking. During my research, there has been many shifts on my relationship with the wall. It was a process to discover this object that is inevitably and tightly weaved into our lives. My perspective have changed several times, from seeing this object as a symbol of limitation, creating simultaneously a stronger mental wall bringing me an urge to break down what creates the disconnection between us, to realizing that at the same time how much it has become fundamental in our lives in terms of giving a definition to the space and creating interior space where we have spent more and more time within. Now, I am reaching a point where I am rediscovering the potential of a wall as an object that is in fact creating connections and relationships, and making passageways on the horizon of overflowing possibilities. Through interior monologue and conversations and various medium, I attempt to reveal the experiences of confrontations and connections around walls which we all share. It is a journey of exploring the complexity of it and discovering it as a living material that is not just rigid nor solid, rather that it is fluid, ever-changing, like an organism.

Stories from the Future: How do you imagine what’s to come?, 05/07

by Christian Tröndle 

In the work on my thesis, stories from the future played a significant role. My research process began with collecting stories about different futures. In the process, stories have been used in a variety of ways and in a variety of projects by the future activist collective Camp Collapse, which I joined in my research.
Heavily influenced by Deep Adaptation, Camp Collapse asks people to reconnect – with their own imagination, with their future, with behviors and values that got forgotten, with alternative ways of knowing and living, with each other, and with the more-than-human world.
My exhibition space asks you to join me in a short future meditation excercise, before you learn more about the Camp Collapse Collective, and get a little insight into stories from the future collected and recorded during my research process.

City/Trees  – A guide for the Urban Human, 06/07

by Cleo Wächter

Pick one Tree. 

What do you think it sees?
What do you think it hears?
How do you think it feels?

I have been researching the relationship between the inhabitants of Berlin and the city Trees. Through expert-interviews and literature review, I researched the socio-economic framework surrounding the Trees. As well as the everyday experiences of people sharing the streets with the Trees. I inquired as to what those Trees meant to them on a personal level, as well as to the community as a whole. Acknowledging that our environment consists of both human and non-human networks, I was interested to see if and how one can move past seeing the Trees from the perspective of merely a bystander, only appreciating them for their arbertrairy functions. In this specific urban European context, how can we arrive at the notion of environmental personhood with an awareness of the problems surrounding the ontological turn?

The question that I want to raise is therefor:
What do you and the Tree mean to each other?

”The Making of En la Lucha”, 07/07

by Romina Hendlin

En la Lucha, is the story of Maria, a single mother of 3 kids, who as a Venezuelan migrant living in the border city of Cucuta Colombia, struggles to make ends meet and ascend the socio-economic ladder. This exhibition is about the process of making a film that explores how migration affects intergenerational mobility through the day to day of a family who tries to adapt to a new country with other rules, other laws and above all, away from home. Through my fieldnotes, video logs and fieldwork you’ll be immerse in the making of “En la Lucha” (in the fight)

MA Roundtable Discussion, 08.07.2021

In this late-breaking panel, the seven anthropologists behind Pathways to Reconnection come together under the genuine moderation of Blake Paul Kendall to reflect on their visually informed works: By looking into ubiquitous questions through the experiences of specific communities around the globe, a range of questions arise: How are sentient beings, both human and non-human related to each other? How do materialities, both graspable and imagined tie us all together? What sense do the practitioners make of the concept of reconnection? Explorations of meaning and temporality arise in ways that may allow yourself to question your own webs of connection.

Organizers:

Blake Paul Kendall
HKMW Berlin

Locations:
  • Berlin, Germany
  • Ambato, Ecuador
  • New York, USA
  • Lostorf, Switzerland
  • Bern, Switzerland
  • Brisbane, Australia
Panelists:
  • Annabel Shewring
  • Charlotte Michèle Ernst
  • Tatiana Lopez
  • Y-ul Suh
  • Christian Tröndle
  • Cleo Wächter
  • Romina Hendlin

Who Is Behind It

This Virtual Exhibition is part of the 2021 Graduation of the Visual and Media Anthropology Masters Program at Freie Universität Berlin.
It features work from students of the MA program’s 11th generation.

Web realisation is done by  weTellmedia.