Tanja Hamester

Photographer: Francesco Conti. Artists in Residence, 2023

Workshop: The Empowerment Archive – Valletta Edition

Dates and Time:
Tuesday 14th March 2023, 6pm
Wednesday 15th March 2023, 10.30am
Duration: 1hr 30min
Venue: Valletta Design Cluster – Makerspace

Tanja Hamester, a research-based artist from Germany, will present a lecture performance about historical facts (e.g. the witch hunts) that led to gender specific discrimination mechanisms that still exist today. Tanja’s lecture focuses on the late Middle Ages (the end of feudalism), the Reformation period, the witch hunts, the Thirty Years’ War, through to the early colonial period, when community-based work became paid work.

After the lecture, a community workshop will be held as a storytelling and joint work moment held at the VDC Makerspace, where the community will be invited to share their thoughts about the changing scenarios and perspectives with the artist and/or to listen to experience being shared. Based on the idea of collective care and reproduction work, the second part of the workshop will lead to the creation of a sculptural archive of fist imprints that stand for personal empowerment situations. The results will be presented in the form of a booklet: The Empowerment Archive – Valletta Edition.

Note for Participants:

Participants are required to bring a salad bowl to the workshops.
Participants will be required to wear gloves which will be provided to work on materials during the workshop. Materials include salt, wheat flour, sunflower or rapeseed oil, and colour.
Participants are responsible for their own health and safety at all times when into the Valletta Design Cluster.
The maximum number of participants is 15, accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.
The workshops will be very similar as far as the delivered content is concerned. Spazju Kreattiv and the VCA will therefore try their best to grant at least one spot in either workshop to all applicants to maximise the number of participants.
All applicants will be notified by email after the closing of the call on whether they can participate in one of the workshops according to the availability of space.
The application process, as well as the participation in the workshops, are free of charge.

About the Project

“I propose a strategy that creates a personal archaeology of the places I encounter. I carry out an investigation of the public space, deploying a set of tactics designed to avoid falling into the stereotypical representation of a place. I oppose a bottom-up strategy based on encounters, trajectories and stories. Born in the process of discovering a territory, the Gesture Objects (GO) constitute an archive of the implicated passage of the artist body through it.
I create and collect site specific objects referring to the residency territory (Gesture Objects). The GO are an artistic strategy to explore a place physically and psychologically. They reproduce social conditions, specific situations, but also abstract constructs. With gesture-performances animate the GO and record these performances with contact microphones. This way I create an archive of digital sonoric performance-imprints. I propose a transdisciplinary collaboration with a local sound engineer or musician and have a live performance together.
I will hold a workshop-like collective ritual, a re-enactment of a social practice from the past. The workshop results in a mini fanzine that will tie in with the Empowerment Archive – a participative project that I started in southern Italy.”

Q&A With the Artist

Tell us a bit about yourself.

My name is Tanja Hamester and I am a contemporary feminist artist and researcher. My working methods are research-based and engage with possibilities of an anachronic approach to history. I completed my studies in Fine Arts at the AdBK Munich with the 1st State Examination and a Master in Art and Mediation. I also holds a master’s degree in medieval studies and church history at the LMU Munich with a focus on literature and iconography of the High Middle Ages. In recent years, I held teaching assignments in art history and gender studies at TUM and AdBK Munich. I received several scholarships as well as project funding and was part of international solo and group exhibitions in Italy, Greece, Great Britain, Austria and Germany.

2) Tell us a bit about your art practice and what inspires you.

The focus of my artistic work is on installation, video and performance art that draws on strategies from cartography and archiving. Material and medium develop from intensive philosophical and political research before and during my projects. Site-specific issues play a major role for me, so I often engage with public space and the settings that surround me. I understand my artistic practice in terms of an overlapping constellation and act in a transdisciplinary way. The uncovering, de- and reconstructing of power structures as well as the concept of (un)learning are important for my work. In my performative practice, I deal with the right of representation of my body as a performer. As a member of several international artist collectives such as RoomToBloom (a feminist platform for ecological and postcolonial narratives about Europe) and LeBlocccate (art collective, research program, sports club) I am particularly interested in collective working and thinking processes.

3) What do you hope to achieve with your residency in Malta?

For the residency I am proposing a strategy that creates a personal archaeology of the places I encounter. I carry out an investigation of the public space, deploying a set of tactics designed to avoid falling into the stereotypical representation of a place. To approaches that reduce a location to its “common places” — through references to monuments, buildings, figures, and events of the past — I oppose a bottom-up strategy based on encounters, trajectories and stories. Born in the process of discovering a territory, the Gesture Objects constitute an archive of the implicated passage of the artist body through it.

In a research and exploring phase I create and collect site specific objects referring to the residency territory (Valetta Gesture Objects). The Gesture Objects are an artistic strategy to explore a place physically and psychologically. They reproduce social conditions, specific situations, but also abstract constructs. With gesture-performances I animate the Gesture Objects and record these performances with contact microphones. This way I create an archive of digital sonoric performance-imprints. We are planning a transdisciplinary collaboration with local sound engineers to create a performance and a gesture-sound-piece together.

Primary material of the Gesture Objects is salt paste which is prepared in a workshop-like collective ritual with two groups of locals. The Workshop is a re-enactment of a social practice that has been taken up from the past. The workshop results in a mini fanzine that will tie in with the “Empowerment Archive” – a participative project that I started in southern Italy and that is now being moved.

Spazju Kreattiv Artists’ Residency programme is organised in collaboration with the Valletta Design Cluster and the Ministry for Gozo