Michelle-Marie Letelier
Residency: March 24 – May 4, 2023
Michelle-Marie Letelier is a Chilean artist and researcher based in Berlin. Her multidisciplinary work orchestrates transformations of ‘natural resources’, alongside extensive wide-ranging, interdisciplinary research into the sea-landscapes where their exploitation and speculation take place. Through her work, she blends different epochs, regions and societies, examining political-economic, historical and cultural aspects.
Supported by the Chilean Ministry of Culture & Arts; Deutscher Künstlerbund e.V.; KORO – Public Art Norway; Goethe Institut Chile-Canada-Norway, IFA and Berliner Senate in Germany, Letelier’s work has been included in Videonale.18 in Bonn; Screen City Biennial 2019 in Stavanger; Bienal Sur 2017 in Buenos Aires; 5th Mercosur Biennial in Porto Alegre and X Video and Media Arts Biennial in Santiago. With solo exhibitions such as at in MSSA in Santiago (2022) and Or Gallery in Vancouver (2021), she has participated in numerous group shows including at Gropius-Bau, Tabakalera, Kunsthall 3,14, Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago and Chilean’s National Museum of Fine Arts.
About the residency
This residency will facilitate the continuation of Transhemispheria, an ongoing artistic research that explores cross-hemispherical relations, with regard to different tensions: the kinship, insertion, farming and impact of salmon; the anthropocentric management and manipulation of living marine resources, and the coexistence and disappearance of ancestral knowledge under artistic & scientific understandings. Its main objective is to provide a reflection on these issues through a series of artworks and to stimulate an interdisciplinary debate between local, artistic, philosophical, scientific and indigenous communities in the so-called Global North and Global South.
Part of this project is The Poetry: a performative work involving oneiric and poetic knowledges alongside biomaterial explorations, open to possible collaborations with members of Coast Salish communities. These material explorations will be also part of The Ethos: a collective performative work whose initial device has been a role-play. The Ethos is being adapted to a theatre play in collaboration with Reactor in Basel, Switzerland, and Canadian-born, Norway-based marine biologist Karin Pittman. This play has been commissioned for the upcoming exhibition Experimental Ecology at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger (KBH.G) in August-October 2023.
Residency programs
Film Screening: “The Bonding”
April 13, 2023
Introduction to Bioplastics Workshop
April 29, 2023
Open Studio Event
April 30, 2023
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This residency is presented in partnership with The City of Richmond and Branscombe House. Click here to learn more about Branscombe House and this partnership.