Conectarse en la Oscuridad. Invocando Pocahunter, video, 2022.
Verena Melgarejo Weinandt
Conectarse en la Oscuridad. Invocando Pocahunter / Connecting in Darkness. Invoking Pocahunter (Part 1)

Verena Melgarejo Weinandt (*1986, D) is a German-Bolivian artist, curator, educator and researcher. She studied Fine Art and Art and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Universidad Nacional de Bellas Artes Buenos Aires. Often intertwining different fields of practice, she uses her own being in this world as a tool to address colonial and patriarchal structures and to search for ways of individual and collective healing: methods of what she calls “arte-sana”. She works with performances, textiles, photography, video and installations. Her works have been exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Salta (Argentina), at the nGbK Berlin (Germany), at the Wiener Festwochen Art Festival in Vienna (Austria) and at the Biennial Sur Cúcuta (Colombia) and Buenos Aires (Argentina).

An important focus of her practice is building bridges to the work and legacy of the »feminist visionary spiritual activist poet-philosopher-fiction writer« Gloria E. Anzaldúa through artistic, pedagogical, activist and theoretical approaches. From 2019 to 2021 she curated a transdisciplinary program with District*School Without Center in Berlin to collectively engage with the propositions and movements that Anzaldúa’s work and life continues to nurture and accompany the process of translating Anzaldúa’s “Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza” into German. The German translation of “Borderlands” by Chaka Collective appears alongside a volume on Gloria Anzaldúa as a method in decolonial artistic and educational practice in fall 2023 with Archive Books.

Conectarse en la Oscuridad. Invocando Pocahunter / Connecting in Darkness. Invoking Pocahunter (Part 1)
Pocahunter is an alter ego of Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, a warrior who returns from the grave to seek revenge for colonial violences. Pocahunter is interfering with peoples’ dreams and imaginaries, creating nightmares that work against colonial desires and white projections on indigenous people. She is a fictional hybrid between the resurrected historical Matoaka – a woman of the Powhatan people who was kidnapped, sold to a British military official and renamed Pocahontas – and Disney’s colonial pop cultural version.

Pocahunter troubles the double presence of indigenous people and especially indigenous women in German culture, which is both characterised by an overrepresentation of racist and sexualised colonial stereotypes and by an imaginary absence, that relegates indigenous people to the realms of the dead and the past. Verena Melgarejo Weinandt’s zombiesque avatar acts within this disturbing gap by re-appropriating these stereotypes to craft them into bold and exuberant colonisers’ nightmares.

The performance figure developed by the artist has reappeared in different guises and environments since 2015. She is an artistic method to resist, revenge and heal the racialising childhood experience of being compared to the exotified Disney character, growing up in Berlin in the 1990s. As a revenant whose struggle connects present, past and future in nonlinear ways, Pocahunter shows and interrupts how colonial images of indigeneity have formed German and European identities.

Conectarse en la Oscuridad. Invocando Pocahunter (Connecting in Darkness) is a ritual at the ruinous interstices of modern infrastructure and unruly nature, an invocation to call and nurture this persona back into another life cycle. In this offering, the artist practices Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s concept of autohistoria-teoría to blend moments, references and experiences from the artist’s own life and the life of the character into the manyness of the avatar.

Conectarse en la Oscuridad. Invocando Pocahunter / Connecting in Darkness. Invoking Pocahunter (Part 1) was produced on the occasion of revenge ~ avatars and manyness * by Oreet Ashery, Suza Husse and Verena Melgarejo Weinandt as part of re.act.feminism #3 – polyphonies. interferences. drifts.

For More information on the work, it’s making and contexts see the zine she creates nightmares against colonial desires (see relations)

Selected work from the re.act.feminism archive
Teresa María Díaz Nerio: Hommage à Sara Bartman
Format
Video Performance

Document media
video, colour, sound, 6:51 min

Issue date
2022

To be seen in
revenge ~ avatars and manyness*, re.act.feminism #3 – polyphonies. interferences. drifts., 2022-2023

Relations
Zine download: she creates nightmares against colonial desires

Curated by
Suza Husse
A
Ebtisam Abdulaziz
Marina Abramović
Helena Almeida
Eleanor Antin
Arahmaiani
Malin Arnell
Oreet Ashery
Augusta Atla
Margarita Azurdia
B
Antonia Baehr
Maja Bajević
Anne Bean
Anat Ben-David
Renate Bertlmann
Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz
Nisrine Boukhari
Marijs Boulogne
Tania Bruguera
Nancy Buchanan
Maris Bustamante
C
Cabello / Carceller
Shirley Cameron/ Monica Ross/ Evelyn Silver
Graciela Carnevale
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Ève Gabriel Chabanon
Helen Chadwick
Chicks on Speed
Lygia Clark
Paul Clarke
Mary Coble
Colette
Cooltūristės
Corpus Deleicti
Nieves Correa
Laura Cottingham
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
D
Katrina Daschner
Vlasta Delimar
Carola Dertnig
Teresa María Díaz Nerio
Disband
Ines Doujak
Orshi Drozdik
Yingmei Duan
Kirsten Dufour
Fabienne Dumont
E
Silvia Eiblmayr
Diamela Eltit
Rose English
Giulia Essyad
VALIE EXPORT
F
F.F.F.F.
Factory of Found Clothes
Esther Ferrer
Les filles Föllen
Rose Finn-Kelcey
Angelika Fojtuch
Simone Forti
Coco Fusco
G
(e.) Twin Gabriel
Regina José Galindo
Anna Bella Geiger
Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin
Patrycja German
Ghazel
Kate Gilmore
Trine Mee Sook Gleerup
H
Mona Hatoum
Lynn Hershman
High Heel Sisters
María Teresa Hincapié
Nan Hoover
I
Icelandic Love Corporation - Gjörningaklúbburinn
Sanja Iveković
J
Elżbieta Jabłońska
Françoise Janicot
Joan Jonas
Anne Jud
Birgit Jürgenssen
Kirsten Justesen
K
Kanonklubben
Line Skywalker Karlström
Tina Keane
Klonaris / Thomadaki
Bettina Knaup & Beatrice Ellen Stammer
Jakob Lena Knebl
Verica Kovacevska
Elena Kovylina
Katarzyna Kozyra
Christina Kubisch
Kvinder på Værtshus (Women down the pub)
Verena Kyselka
L
Nicola L
Latifa Laâbissi
Leslie Labowitz
Leslie Labowitz & Suzanne Lacy
Suzanne Lacy
Katalin Ladik
Sigalit Landau
Klara Lidén
Kalup Linzy
Natalia LL
Léa Lublin
M
Jumana Manna
Manon
MaraM
María Evelia Marmolejo
Muda Mathis
Dóra Maurer
Mónica Mayer
Verena Melgarejo Weinandt
Ana Mendieta
Marta Minujín
Fina Miralles
Molly and me
Linda Montano
Charlotte Moorman
Teresa Murak
Sands Murray-Wassink
MwangiHutter
N
Narcissister
Rabbya Naseer & Hurmat Ul Ain
Senga Nengudi
Les Nyakes
O
Lorraine O'Grady
Itziar Okariz
Yoko Ono
ORLAN
Tanja Ostojić
Paulina Ołowska & Lucy McKenzie
Funda Özgünaydin
Hannah O’Shea
P
Gina Pane
Letícia Parente
Ewa Partum
Bojana Pejić
Jillian Peña
Performance Saga
Sanja Iveković & Performance Saga
Friederike Pezold
Howardena Pindell
Adrian Piper
Mariuccia Pisani
Polvo de Gallina Negra
Anni Puolakka
Pussy Riot
R
Yvonne Rainer
Eglė Rakauskaitė
Laurence Rassel
Chris Regn
Jytte Rex
Àngels Ribé
La Ribot
Angelika Richter
Jesusa Rodríguez / Liliana Felipe
Ulrike Rosenbach
Martha Rosler
Boryana Rossa
María Ruido
S
Raeda Saadeh
Estíbaliz Sábada
Andrea Saemann
Zorka Ságlová
Les Salonnières and Dr. Soley
Christine Schlegel
Cornelia Schleime
Carolee Schneemann
Rebecca Schneider
Schwarze Schokolade
Stefanie Seibold
Stefanie Seibold & Teresa María Díaz Nerio
Miriam Sharon
Bonnie Ora Sherk
Barbara T. Smith
Cornelia Sollfrank
Antonieta Sosa
Spiderwoman Theater
Annie M. Sprinkle
Sandra Sterle
Gabriele Stötzer
Annika Ström
Melati Suryodarmo
Anna Szwajgier/ Zorka Wollny
T
Jinoos Taghizadeh
Eden Tinto Collins
Milica Tomić
Mare Tralla
Teresa Tyszkiewicz
U
Mierle Laderman Ukeles
V
Valie Export Society
Cecilia Vicuña
W
The Waitresses
Faith Wilding
Hannah Wilke
Martha Wilson
Julita Wójcik
Y
Nil Yalter
Yeni & Nan