History Will Be Kind To Me | Performance Art Event

History Will be Kind to Me as I Intend to Perform It

History Will Be Kind to Me for I Intend to Perform It examines performative and collaborative ways knowledge is embodied and performed. Initiated by Marcio Carvalho and Leena Kela, the project collaborated with New Performance Turku Festival (Finland), Performance Art Links /Fylkingen Stockholm (Sweden), Performance Art Bergen (Norway) and RAVY Biennial (Cameroon). It consisted of artist residencies, performances, talks and symposiums that took place in Turku, Stockholm and Bergen. Artists and thinkers traveled and perform in the Nordic countries, ultimately developing a series of up to 24 performances as exercises to demythologize and decolonize knowledge and its hegemonic singularity.

Can artistic performative processes challenge the dominating historical narratives?

The project title History Will Be Kind to Me for I Intend to Perfom It comes from Winston Churchill’s quote “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”. This quote reveals how the complex layers and events of the past have been reduced to dominant, one-sided narratives – for the benefit of the ones who have the power to create it. The project finds it crucial to replace “to write it” with “to perform it” to be able to re-analyze knowledge formations and meaning makings with bodies-in-performance. History Will Be Kind to Me for I Intend to Perfom relied on the body as a site of discourse and used performance as a tool to exercise counter-knowings, to perform and embody forms of individual and collective remembrance.

Artists: Maryan Abdulkarim (Finland), Elias Björn (Sweden), Christian Etongo (Cameroon), Serge Olivier Fokoua (Cameroon/Canada), Sasha Huber (Finland), Kirsty Kross (Norway), Nathalie Mba Bikoro (Gabon/Germany), Valeria Montti Colque (Sweden), Anthea Moys (South Africa), Mekdes W Shebeta (Ethiopia/Norway), Diana Soria Hernandez (Finland/Mexico), Gitte Sætre (Norway), Gøril Wallin (Norway).