#chtodelat

Settler Art? What's that?

A Mad Tea Party event by Katerina Valdivia Bruch and Marina Camargo

2 March 2025, 18:00 h

Does art belong to someone? Is it attached to a particular geographical space? Can we speak about something such as "settler art" or "settler artists"? If so, who are the settlers? Who would be the ones suffering from these "art settlements"?

In contemporary discussions, the concept of "settler art" serves as a basis for analysing how colonial history and power dynamics continue to shape artistic expression and cultural production, particularly when it comes to land, identity, and the relationship between settlers and indigenous peoples. In this context, "settler art" reflects the settlers' worldviews, ignoring or erasing indigenous peoples' narratives and their experiences.

Inspired by Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg’s Course: Parables of a Planet in Crisis, we would like to use the concept of "settler" as a notion to open up a discussion to a broader context of ongoing geopolitical concerns related to settler colonialism and extractivism, including the migration movements resulting from them.

Beyond this, during the Mad Tea Party we would like to challenge the use of the notion of "settler" in the arts and question whether the concept of art is linked to a particular group of people, such as collectors, gallerists, critics and curators, who value and define artistic production. Based on this, we pose the following question: Is art something that needs to be re-conquered?

The evening will be hosted by the artist Marina Camargo and the curator Katerina Valdivia Bruch.

Katerina Valdivia Bruch is an independent curator, researcher and arts writer. She holds a PhD in Art (University of Reading) and an MA in Museum Studies and Critical Theory (Independent Study Programme, MACBA/Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). Katerina has curated exhibitions, organised talks and symposia, and collaborated with several institutions, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt, ZKM-Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Para/Site Art Space, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. In 2008, she was co-curator of the Prague Triennale at the National Gallery in Prague. Since 2020 she is the artistic director of the research platform on Latin American art “Rethinking Conceptualism: Avant-Garde, Activism and Politics in Latin American Art (1960s-1980s).”

Marina Camargo is a visual artist based in Berlin. She holds a diploma from the Academy of Arts Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, an MA from Instituto de Artes at UFRGS in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and an MA in Visual Culture from the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. Her works have been exhibited internationally. Recent exhibitions include the 14th Shanghai Biennale (Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China, 2023), the 37th Panorama of Brazilian Art (Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo, Brazil, 2022), and the solo exhibitions “A Certain Shade” (Instituto Ling, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2023) and “Cartografías Fluidas” (Fundación Giménez Lorente, Valencia, Spain, 2022).

Address: Chto Delat Emergency Room Brunnenstr. 43, 10115 Berlin (entrance from Rheinsbergerstr., ground floor), metro U8 Bernauerstraße

Museum Songspiel: The Netherlands 20XX (2011) A film by Chto Delat?

This film, by the Russian artists’ collective Chto Delat? (What is to be Done?), is set in a dystopian future where immigration to the Netherlands is outlawed. A group of people seek asylum in a modern art gallery, huddling in a large display case designed for street art. The director wants them out, fearing that the authorities will close the museum; an artist wants to use them in a continuous performance piece inspired by Aleksei Kruchenykh’s Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun; the curator is caught in the middle.

via chtodelat news 

(What Happened to Filipp Dolbunov) is a feature about the situation for activists in Russia by Ilya Matveev. In his text Matveev writes about his friend Filipp who was arrested despite his peaceful engagement in changing politics. Please read this outraging call for courage!

Filipp Dolbunov is nineteen and a student in the cultural studies department at the State Academic University for the Humanities (GAUGN) in Moscow.

Filipp is an anti-fascist, a friend of mine, and a comrade in the Russian Socialist Movement. He is a smart, brave and responsible young man. Filipp was involved in defending the Khimki and Tsagovsky forests, and he has worked with us in the Russian Socialist Movement on many protest actions. He went to organizing committee meetings, and handed out leaflets and newspapers—the usual activist routine.

During the afternoon of October 25, police detectives broke into Filipp’s home. Threatening him and accompanied by his parents’ shouts, they dragged him outside to a car. This story had begun earlier, however...