Postcolonial shifts: Christian Rosales Fonseca takes aim at the asymmetrical power relations of the global art world. His multimedia performance ‘Ezuakakne’ is based on three videos and a multitude of field recordings that Fonseca collected in his native Colombia. The focus is on the search for sound material – songs, fragments of speech, traces of rituals – that was suppressed in indigenous communities in the course of colonial violence. Paradoxically, remnants of these cultural practices were then preserved and archived precisely through ‘colonial’ recording techniques. Rosales Fonseca approaches this dialectical intertwining of erasure and preservation with samplers and electric guitar: as a sound-archaeological practice that does not reconstruct memory, but reactivates it.

Christian Rosales Fonseca was born in Bogotá in 1993 and now lives and works in Bremen, where he teaches and conducts research at the University of the Arts. As a composer and improviser, he focuses on the political, social and cultural dimensions of (post-)colonial relations between indigenous, pre-Columbian and European communities. The Kágaba (Kogui) people in particular are the focus of his projects, which are funded by music foundations and the Bremen Senate. He is part of several experimental music collectives, including INCOMODO, CROMBF and KLANK.