Ritual BPM (English)
RITUAL BPM understands the practice of rave as a spiritual ritual in a West/Pan-African tradition and wants to make the origins of the culture visible again. The spiritual understanding of West African cultures was transformed by the international slave trade – the MAAFA – to the USA, parts of South America and the Caribbean. In the resulting cultures, spiritual rites are still practised today collectively and in connection with physicality, dance, music and ecstasy. Through physical exhaustion and dance exertion, Sophie Yukiko aims in RITUAL BPM to create a spiritual moment.
RITUAL BPM confronts the challenges of the spaces of the HKW, the former congress hall, which as a “beacon of freedom” should be visible from afar, also in the East, and propagate the ideals of US-American power; it addresses the apparent transparency and openness and attempts to counter the physical dominance of the prevailing material concrete with a movement: How can ritual intervene in the problematic modernist legacy that demonstrates the erasure of a colonial legacy? How can the practice of this West African ritual respond to a Eurocentric architecture?