Tania
MM230322_007-web
TANIA, 2022
Mural and 16-channel sound installation
Tania, that is the fighting name of Tamara Bunke. Bunke was born in Buenos Aires in 1937 into a communist German-Jewish family in exile. After the war she moved with her parents to the GDR, joined the FDJ and later studied at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
In the 1960s, she left the GDR, first to Cuba and then joined the guerrilla group led by Che Guevara. Che Guevara’s guerrilla struggle in Bolivia, where she was was ambushed and shot in 1967. For the work complex TANIA, Michaela Melián intensively researched reports, events and places from Tamara Bunke’s / Tania’s life. In her life story, the major themes of the 20th century: National Socialism, war, socialist modernity, emancipation and liberation. Her biography, however, can only be unreliable narratives, falsified documents, cover identities, projections and suggestive documentations and permanently eludes elucidation.
Melián does not censor Tania’s representations, but collectes as much material as possible in order to channel it into an artistic-intellectual process that makes it possible to thematise the political and medial conditions of these representations. Models for the total of 250 drawings that Melián made as the basis for the new mural TANIA, are excerpts from documentary films, views of La Paz, where Tamara Bunke worked as an agent of the Cuban secret service in the midst of Bolivia’s political of indigenous sculptures she made in her camouflage identity as ethnologist Laura Gutiérrez Bauer, current Google Street Views of the places where she lived, among others. Berlin of socialist modernism, postcards from Western European capitals that Bunke had during her training as a spy or agent, photographs of the oil production towers in Cuba, of the Bolivian Andes and of the funeral service for Bunke at the ZK der SED with the speaker Anna Seghers. Melián digitally assembled the drawings into a dense fabric, which is dissolved into pixel points stamped on the wall in repetitive, collective handwork with eraser and stamped onto the wall. Melián realises thematically and in terms of formal design, Melián thus realises a image and draft, archival document and vision of the future, information and vision of the future, information and noise.
In the work complex TANIA, central processes and themes from and themes from Melián’s work and also from this exhibition. These include the potentially infinite research, which a fanned-out and unfinished view of history and biographies. history and biographies. These include the series of processes of reproduction and media translations – from and media translations – from film to drawing to Photoshop to Photoshop or from photo to verbalisation to drawing. to drawing. In this way, Melián can independently the artist’s „ingenious stroke“, Melián can thematise the conditions under which the conditions under which identities and spaces are and represented. Traditional artistic forms of representation
of identity and space are the and the veduta (view of a city), of which there are several on the of which can be found on the mural Tania. How is identity, how do we want to live, what is the space that is granted, that is fought for? These are questions around which this work, but also other works in the exhibition, such as the Gobelin Girl culture, revolve around.
The site-specificity of the work is also to be seen as an engagementwith the history and social reality of the city of Berlin and its artistic genres. In its form, the mural is not only related to South American murals, but also to socialist mosaics, one of the most famous of which is From the Lives of the Peoples of the Soviet Union on Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee, where Bunke’s parents also lived.
The work is a further development of the 2004 Werkleitz-Biennale in Halle on the same theme. In the update, the views condense into a thicket that is impenetrable in places. The mural does not offer a sovereign, possessive view of the metropolis on the red threads of the world; rather, identities, places and histories dissolve again and again into unknown figures, forms and indistinct flickering.
The second part of the TANIA installation and central to the complex of works in this exhibition is the newly developed sound installation
TANIA, which deals with the musical canon around Tamara canon around Tamara Bunke. For this work Melián assembled sound fragments of self-recorded protest songs of of 10-20 seconds in length: Die Internationale, Die Moorsoldaten, Bella Ciao or the anthem of the 26th of July, also known as the Cuban as the Cuban Revolutionary March. In addition there are from musical cultures that Tania researched in her cover identity as an anthropologist. The recordings with Inca flutes refer to the recordings found in Tania’s backpack, which she backpack she was carrying when she was shot. The recordings are displayed in the exhibition room over a dozen or so pressurised chamber loudspeakers, like those as you would hear on public transport.
Music: Michaela Melián
Music production: Felix Raeithel
Technical direction: Jürgen Galli
On the occasion of the exhibition a record edition of 100 copies (12 inch EP, signed and numbered) is released.