Patricia Werneck Ribas is a Dutch/Brazilian artist based in Amsterdam.
She works with mainly moving and still images, photographing people, places and creating video installations. Her figurative work is often elusive, but it is never removed from a particular historical moment. It always belongs to and expands on the complexity of memory, time and location. She takes what is familiar and make it strange and compelling through creating unexpected juxtapositions and collaging ideas from often very distinct sources.
Questions of ‘identity’ run throughout her work, a word which is always predicated on defining what we are not as a way of thinking through who we are.
For the Prospects & Concepts 2020, she will be showing “Tribal Affairs," her latest video work. The footage was shot in Germany, during a Pow-Wow-a Native American hobbyist ceremony involving feasting, singing and dancing. The images have a documentary character and show an all white crowd dressed up in traditional Native American clothes dancing and chanting together. The German fascination with Native American peoples has a long history in that country and different estimates suggest that there might be between 40.000 to 80.000 hobbyists in Germany alone.
The artist wanted to go beyond looking at the absurdity of white people dressing up as Native Americans. She edited a conversation between two tribal women from South America looking at the video images of the Germans slow dancing in their ‘exotic’ costumes. The sound of the Europeans chanting can be heard in
the background while the women speak. This unexpected combination is neither critical nor condoning these fascinating get togethers, just opening up a space
to reflect on what it means to be ‘the other’.
In this video, tribal women from South America heard that some people from the North have affinities with the Indian spirit and their way of life, and that they
come together in these Pow-Wows.
These tribal women saw a potential in a shared love of nature and they wanted
to study the possibilities of contacting the Germans to see if they could be allies in the women’s quest to take over the world and find solutions to global environmental problems.
Looking at these images is their “first encounter” with Northern Europeans and they wonder: will people in the North be willing to abandon their comforts? What would they give up to help save the planet?