Alle Menschen werden Brüder

Ludwig van Beethoven's death mask runs through the entire Neun Kelche project space in Theresa Weber's solo exhibition Alle Menschen werden Brüder (All People Become Brothers). Again and again, it is the central pictorial element of her sculptural paintings. Details from the paintings also become a recurring pattern on the wall-high wallpaper Beethoven Wall - Density of the forest. In the density of its reproduction, the death mask becomes a symbolic forest landscape of pluralism. In the Beethoven series, Weber has been addressing the recurring debate since 2022 as to whether Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), one of the most famous European composers, could have had a Black background. The fact that Ludwig van Beethoven was Black was first publicly discussed in 1907 by the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Other famous proponents of this theory range from Roberto Blanco, who called for an investigation into Beethoven's mortal remains, to Malcolm X. Even during his lifetime, he was nicknamed “Spagnol” due to his non-white appearance – a further reference to his Moorish origins. Is this a case of deliberate 'white-washing' in historiography? Speculation continues even into 2023, when strands of van Beethoven's hair were archaeogenetically examined by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to provide definitive proof. The results are still not uniformly interpreted. But what if van Beethoven had been Black? The potential idea alone allows the persistent cultural Eurocentrism to crumble further and Afro-German history to become more visible. Lines of color made of acrylic paste run through Weber's works. They spread across the black ground of the paintings, overgrowing the entire surface of the wallpaper. They connect and delimit, they give structure to the other pictorial elements and create a greater image. The new thinking about borders sees borders as something unexpected that we encounter, and that distinguishes between realities. However, the purpose of the border now is to bring these realities into connection. - Édouard Glissant, Philosophy of a World Relation. Poetry of Vastness, 2009 Édouard Glissant coined the term 'creolization', to which Weber repeatedly refers visually. With this, the author, who was born in Martinique in 1928 and died in Paris in 2011, imagines “not an arbitrary (uniform) mixture where each individual is lost, but a series of surprising solutions”. Theresa Weber adopts his method of 'archipelagic thinking' in her practice as “tentative thinking, a thinking of intuitive experimentation”. In her perspective as an artist with a Jamaican, German and Greek family background, Weber takes up the concept of the rhizome—as described by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—as a further exploration of diasporic identities. It describes a non hierarchical network that creates connections beyond geographical and genealogical fixations. The rhizome spreads across space and time through a multitude of relationships and memories. Despite geographical separation, this structure makes it possible to maintain a connection between ancestors and the present and to form a collective memory. What happens when the surviving traces become visible in the collective diasporic memory? This is addressed by Weber's new series Ghost: six square paintings that echo the rhizomatic wallpaper world behind them, and ask what ghosts our past still holds in store. The paintings in the room are also composed of numerous paper prints of the death mask, acrylic paste, mosaic stones, marbles and acrylic nails. The heads of van Beethoven float individually or grouped next to—and on top—of each other like islands in an archipelago within a pattern that resembles coral reefs or roots. These islands, framed by a black ocean, can be made out particularly in the large-format paintings Alle Menschen werden Brüder and Moon light on the two transverse sides of the room. This pictorial superimposition of islands and coral reefs reflects the idea of the archipelago as a metaphor for plurality and interdependence. The complexity of interwoven island worlds takes on a physical dimension with the Woven Bodies and ties in with social complexities. The costumes distributed throughout the space are inspired by the resistant traditions of Caribbean carnival, in which they serve as a sign of protest and liberation. Through gestures of fencing, knotting and improvisation, they emphasize the importance of self-empowerment and care as resistance. They emphasize human agency in the web of relationships, space and time. In the project space, they occupy the entire center of the room and hint at the bodies that fill them and set them in motion. For Berlin Art Week, Theresa Weber and sound artist Nathanael Amadou Kliebhan will present the performance Die 9. Sinfonie und die Dichte des Waldes together with dancers Tiffani Achilleas and Maia Joseph. Weber often works collaboratively and especially in her performances with recurring collaboration partners. In the Neun Kelche project space, the Woven Bodies are activated by the two dancers. They can be seen as extensions of the body and question what gives meaning to the cultural body. They connect the individual with a network of past and present, of ancestors and fellow human beings. The title of the exhibition Alle Menschen werden Brüder is borrowed from the final movement, the Ode to Joy, of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. The 9th Symphony is regarded as the pinnacle of van Beethoven's compositional output and was adopted by the European Community as the official European anthem in 1985. According to the explanatory statement, “it symbolizes the values shared by all and unity in diversity”. Theresa Weber's work is concerned with these values and a decolonial reshaping of Western historiography.