Barbara Gamper

Linguistic landscapes (how do we come together in our differences?) textile banners: 2 x 150cm x 350cm, 4x wearables 75x180cm, reader, 2023

Exhibition: Vielheit. Stories from the post -migrant society at Kunst Meran/o Arte, Merano Italy

Curated by Jörn Schafaff 

For this exhibition project, which took place in my home town Merano, in the bilingual region of South Tyrol, I wanted to work with young people and address the topic of multilingualism. Kübra Gümüsay’s insightful book ‘Sprache und Sein’ created a really helpful departure point for this project to think about language, the power of language. Some parts really resonated with my own experience of growing up bilingually, later on moving to the UK where English became more of a mother tongue than German or Italian are for me today. But what mostly stood out from Gümüsay’s writings was the continuous exercising of linguistic supremacy and discrimination that happens in educational institutions, and society at large. Multilingualism (in Europe) only seems to be appreciated when the languages are German, French, Italian, English, Spanish ect..

I wanted to explore what bi- and multilingualism means to the youth in Merano today, who experience the mesh of post migrant society in the class room. For this purpose I developed questionnaires including my own research and the thoughts of local youth and teachers. These questionnaires were distributed across different high schools and youth centres in Merano. Around 120 pupils responded to it. I was deeply moved and humbled to get to know some of their thinking and experiences, to learn about their fears, their motivation, their views on society, the future, power, equality and discrimination. 

At a later stage we met in a somatic workshop in which we explored the topic in greater depth: What freedom can language offer, how does language restrict? What does language have to do with power? What does it mean to belong to a place, or a language? 

Linguistic landscapes (how do we come together in our differences?), textile banners, 2 x 150cm x 350cm, 4x wearables 75x180cm, reader, 2023

Exhibition: Vielheit. Stories from the post -migrant society @kunstmeranoarte 

Curated by Jörn Schafaff 

I transferred a selection of answers to the questionnaires (see prev. post) onto two textile banners in the shape of tongues referring to the bilingualism and ongoing cultural and linguistic rupture in South Tyrol. Like the questionnaires the banners invite the viewer to think about their own answers, to change perspective and think about language differently, as the basis of post-migrant negotiation processes.

At the opening of the exhibition I conducted a mini version of the workshop I did with the pupils, exploring the questions further and connecting audience members with tongue-banners, in order to get into different dialogues on the basis of the questionnaires.

A somatic journey.

Sense(s) of coherence Somatic audio play Hand-tufted rugs 2022

Sound composition by Ari Robey-Lawrence, Engl voice over by Darren Bancroft, Italian voice over by Matteo Bigliardi, German voice over by Barbara Gamper

You Mountain You River You Tree

Reach Out                                                                                                        Site-specific installation Textile print on polyester trikotfilet                                                                   100m x 75cm 2021

Exhibited in the fomer Chartreuse monastery of Karthaus/Certosa, Val Senales, Italy

The imprints of hands and feet on a long strip of cloth are nothing more than outlines of small wooden models in the Holy Sepulchre Chapel in the south-western corner of the monastery wall of Karthaus. The faithful of the area left the votive offerings in thanksgiving for salvation from an emergency or healing from an illness. Barbara Gamper prints the shadows of the wooden limbs from the chapel onto a 100-metre-long flag fabric, which - fixed to the floor - acts as a mental trace connecting the innermost part of the monastery with its surroundings. In their symbolism, they are reminiscent of hieroglyphics, of a forgotten script whose culturally determined significance is deconstructed by Barbara Gamper. She breathes a second life into the sigils of the forgotten language and places them in the middle of the 21st century as an artificial setting with their bright, pop colours.

Barbara Gamper’s installation re-implants the hands and feet from the chapel as visual foreign bodies at the site of their former use and reflects on their significance for the former monastery. Thus the feet stand not least for a form of firm rootedness with the place, while the hands seen outside the monastery wall - at the very end of the fabric band - symbolise a reaching out.

On the occasion of the 16th edition of the Day of Contemporary Art, AMACI invited the participating museums to reflect on the meaning of “community”. The contribution of Kunst Meran Merano Arte is the work ‘At the point of subversion (constituting the new normal)’, which was produced by the artist Barbara Gamper and the Black feminist activist Fouzia Wamaitha Kinyanjui especially for the annual theme and taking into account the current movement restrictions.

The starting point of this project sits at the intersection of artistic and activist practice evolving around the term power sharing. The dynamics of power, which constitute the division of roles and hierarchies were uncovered via dialogue: Who is in the position to ask questions and who answers? How is room made for those voices that are often assigned a subordinate role in public, social, political, economic and art spaces?

The result of this examination is a video that speaks directly to the viewer and asks them to join this opposition (which forms the new normal) and to think about their own privileges and behavioral models. The video work is based on verbal communication as well as on non-verbal forms of expression: On the one hand, the questions, answers and quotations in different languages (German, Italian, English, Swahili and Kikuyu) create a feeling of belonging in the viewer as well that of exclusion; on the other hand, the use of textile materials creates a performative, visual and tactile language. An examination of the historical and symbolic meaning of textiles and their patterns as well as the handling of them provides the background to the use of textiles. Barbara Gamper dealt with the cultural history of the material in her previous research and referred to the archaeologist and linguist Marija Gimbutas , to the natural science historian and feminist Donna Haraway, to the sociologist Riane Eisler, and to the philosopher and postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak.

The video, which was published on the website of Kunst Meran Merano Arte on the occasion of the day of contemporary art as part of AMACI, forms the starting point of a more extensive project, which is developing in an open and participatory form and a critical reflection on concepts of society, individuality, rights and responsibility.

Becoming Otherwise (hot pink triangles and holes, or how to become woman?)

Site-specific video installation

Museion Media Façade

10mins looped

2020

The video created by Barbara Gamper for the Museion façade features a performance-style activation of the installation, which was on display in the exhibition Unlearning Categories at Museion. The installation consists of a large tapestry and a series of coloured images and icons applied to the glass of the exhibition space so they can be seen from the outside. In a fascinating interplay of contacts and interpenetration, abstraction and figuration, the video displays the details of the tapestry and their relationship to the body of the artist. A searching hand, an open mouth and a breathing chest emerge from the folds and layers of fabric that “coat” the vast surface of the façade with their colours. Each frame in the video is accompanied by the gesture of drawing – the act of tracing lines and shapes that, here, reference archaic art. One example of this is the cave painting of a body that is half woman and half animal – a divinity from the past transported into the digital present. To connect the various stages in the video and emphasize the act of flowing, the video includes a series of images of the water in the river Talvera that runs in front of the museum. The huge surface of the Museion façade therefore restores the dynamism of the continuous mutation created by the artist by projecting it onto the urban space.

Womb to Web (human / nonhuman entanglements #2)

Digital print on natural linen/cotton

9m x 3m

2019

Project with KELDER, curated by Rudi Christian Ferreira and co-curated by Ingrid Berthon-Moine

Returning to the generic notion of care as ‘everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves and our environment, all that we seek to interweave in a complex life sustaining web’.

María Puig de la Bellacasa referencing Joan Tronto in Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, 2017

Responding to social systems scientist Riane Eisler’s research on sustainability and partnerships, Gamper wishes to unpick the threads surrounding the notion of a more equitable world based not on domination, but on partnership. Re-enforced by the formal qualities of Gamper’s textiles, performers become active participants in an alternative arrangement of power, thus turning the textiles into a re-imagined collective cloth.

As if the source of a subterranean river, the space becomes flooded in textiles marked with an aquatic motif from a lost civilisation. A constant reminder of another time and place far removed from our own – removed from our own failing world. Slipping from this source is a body that is slowly learning to move, to touch, to feel and to be, whilst simultaneously becoming entangled in a web – a web that conditions.

Gamper and guest contributors will begin to explore the complex and contested notion of touch and the role of the performing body within this system through a series of performative gestures and workshops throughout the project.

Meditating on María Puig de la Bellacasa’s thinking around touch as described in her timely publication Matters of Care:Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, she posits “The ambivalence of touch, the reversibility of touch (who touches is also touche), to be in touch physically doesn’t mean being in touch with oneself (or the other), is there something like a detached touch?’’

A consuming touch, an illusion of being in touch with oneself by performing/mimicking/consuming gestures and postures. How to engage with oneself in this contemporary landscape of political, economic and ecological anxiety?