Rotating AiRs

The storms, both natural and political, we experience today are a result of the voyages once enabled by the wind that blew ships from port cities such as Antwerp, Barcelona, and Hoorn to countries now called Congo, Mexico, and Indonesia.

Much like the wind, the effects of these voyages can be understood as invisible forces; often impossible to be quantified in numbers, yet still highly influential in contemporary cultural and ecological crises. This project aims to redefine the meaning of the routes these ships once took and create an international platform on which artists can critically engage with the lasting effects of colonialism, resulting in an ongoing exploitation of nature and the threatening climate crisis that surrounds us.

Similar to the rotation of air, the artists will be rotating between countries that were once colonised and European port cities from the countries they were colonised by. Air in this sense becomes a metaphor for motion and the passing of time. The chapels in which the art spaces HMK, La Capella, and MORPHO are located continue to exist, despite the changing air within their walls. A rotation of air entails a wind of fresh air blowing into the cultural and institutional structures. With this project, we aim to facilitate a rotation of air that allows for a change of air in such structures that have resulted from colonialism.

The ‘rotation of air’ will take the countries Congo, Mexico and Indonesia as the starting point from where the artists will take inspiration for the projects that they continue in Europe and finally present in the cities that once colonised the aforementioned regions in Africa, Indonesia and Latin America. The route the artists will take is meant to create a counter-current to the overseas voyages and the invisible forces that continue to shape our current world.

In order to expose how colonialism and climate change are inextricably linked, we need to create artistic structures that look beyond national borders. These global topics cannot be treated within national borders; they demand a broader approach that connects different localities with each other from a global perspective.

With our project, we aim to respond to the urgent need for opportunities for artists to research and have a local impact from a universal artistic perspective. The relations between climate change and colonialism and their cross-border character are ones that artists are particularly capable of making visible and tangible.

Therefore, we strongly believe that it is important to give artists the opportunity to develop their art in a transnational manner and to connect their artistic process with different localities, generate a dialogue where they share their perspective and are open to learn from local wisdom. In this infrastructure of AiRs, we aim to explore and expose their art, making processes in different national contexts, histories and realities will overlap and differ. This way, the artists become vessels of unwritten knowledge, rotating through different routes, crossing borders just like particles in the air.