These dances radiate a vibrancy that bounces right off the static of the Reiterdenkmal, the unpopular Equestrian Monument that lords over them, only making this statue seem even more monstrous– even though this testament to the nation’s colonial past has long been banned from public view. In December 2013, Namibian law enforcement officials removed it from its plinth under the cover of darkness. Today, the monument stands in the courtyard of the Alte Feste Museum. It was “salvaged” on account of the fact that some historians argued that the German community in Namibia also has a right to its place in the nation’s cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the polemic, the statue was removed. The direct descendants of the Nama and Herero killed during the genocide see nothing in this monument other than a painful relic from the past that has been turned brutally against them.
Gutiérrez’s work polarises––by enabling dance and war to make a head-on encounter. And by questioning the ambivalent feelings evoked by colonial statues and monuments.
The choreographer’s avowed purpose is to pave the way for narratives that superimpose experiences of oppression and war. This performance will be rerun in Germany, in the presence of descendants of the perpetrators in Baakenhafen, that section of Hamburg’s harbour from which the German troops once set sail for Namibia.
Windhoek and Hamburg cling to a common past. The maritime trading companies operating from the Hanseatic port during the German colonial wars before the outbreak of the First World War did not only leave evidence of their business prowess in Namibia.
Windhoek and Hamburg cling to a common past. The maritime trading companies operating from the Hanseatic port during the German colonial wars before the outbreak of the First World War did not only leave evidence of their business prowess in Namibia. For those Hanseatic merchants, so-called groceries [colonial merchandise] and their investment shares in German maritime companies formed the basis for lucrative business. From 1884 to 1915, the German Empire was the operative colonial power in Namibia and during this period it quelled two popular uprisings by the Herero and the Nama. Hamburg constituted the logistical hub for military supplies during the genocide of the Namibian population. Companies such as the Hamburg shipping line Woermann Linie profited from German colonialism. During the Herero and Nama revolts, the Woermann Linie transported thousands of troops and tons of war materials to the colony. As of 1905, the shipping line also operated its own concentration camp in Namibia. Its headquarters in Hamburg is to be found in the Afrikahaus, a listed building–– to this very day.
Being closely associated with the then Reich’s Chancellor of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck, the merchants who came to the colonies annexed by Germany were able to capitalize on the opportunities thereby up for grabs. Bismarck’s monument can still be seen today in the Old Elbe Park in Hamburg. The dancers later chose this site as one of their performance venues.
Gutiérrez is a Hamburg native of Mexican origin. For her, decolonisation encapsulates that ability to view and reflect on such past events from a non-European, non-Western perspective. In this way, fresh and different narratives should be able to emerge. In describing her project Decolonycities, she notes how it fills “lacunae in our own history with another way of looking at the city.” She hopes to use Decolonycities to “establish a multi-perspective view of urban space” through performative, dance interventions “in combination with audio walks” in order to contrast the lingering traces of colonialism with the help of her own biographical narratives.
In 2021, Gutiérrez founded the platform “Shape the Future,” where she also presents these projects in digital space. Because, according to Gutiérrez, the abiding propagation of colonial clichés and Eurocentric perspectives in politics, media, culture and science have exposed how the process of decolonisation is far from complete: “It’s about breaking with concepts that hinder, restrict and reduce, concepts that pin you to the shortcomings in your own reality.” Underdeveloped, poor, illegal, these are but some of these negative attributes. She quotes the Senegalese musician Felwine Sarr: “Above all, it is no longer about resembling a victim, but rather as the starting point for one’s own history”.