My project at CURE is twofold: The first part was the continuation of a workshop program, “We Grow With Our Leaves, and Flowers Turned Towards Home”, which was itself part of a larger project, “When the Jackal Leaves the Sun”. This multinational cultural project creates a transterritorial infrastructure for artistic, cultural, and educational work in the context of the legacies of German colonialism in Africa, histories of anticolonial resistance, and the return of ancestral human remains from German institutions to descendant communities. Connecting artists, curators, activists, lawyers, cultural practitioners, and collectives, as well as art and cultural organizations in Windhoek, Kigali, Dresden, Dar es Salaam, Berlin, and Cape Town, the project aims to foster artistic and political forms of countering colonial dispossessions that amplify demands for return, repair, and land redistribution. The second part of the fellowship is part of a collaboration between CURE and the World Heritage Site Völklinger Hütte. My work Ozerandu is part of the exhibition THE TRUE SIZE OF AFRICA (9 November 2024–17 August 2025). In Otjiherero, “Ozerandu” is the word for the colour red. The title refers to the iron-rich red ochre, otjize, mined in southern Africa; and the red dust remains of the Völklinger Hütte. Covering everything they come into contact with, otijze and the red dust recall the histories of iron ore export and the intimacies between people and land. The body of work is an immersive aural installation that translates a migratory cartography of rocks, stones, soil, and dust from the dislocation of people, to the emptying of land, iron ore extraction, and processing at industrial sites.
MEMORY BIWA
CURRICULUM VITAE
Memory Biwa is a historian and artist. Her research addresses anticolonial resistance, genocide, memory, and reparative processes in Namibia. Biwa’s practice interweaves aurality, the production of history, and geographies. Biwa has curated workshops, including “We Grow With Our Leaves, and Flowers Turned Towards Home,” a transnational project between Cape Town and Berlin in 2024, and “P(r)ossession Pedagogies” as part of the Artist-in-Residence program between Namibia and Germany organised by the Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Goethe-Institut Namibia, and the National Art Gallery of Namibia in 2023. She has also co-curated exhibitions, including “A Sacred Story at the Tree of Life” at Ifa Gallery in 2023 in Berlin and “Die Vibration der Dinge” (The Vibration of Things) at the Kleinplastik Triennale in 2022 in Fellbach. Biwa is also part of the duo Pungwe Listening, with Robert Machiri. Their work centres Southern African aural histories and multimedia archives and presents relational art formats through performance, installation, and collective curatorial practice in durational play in public space.
