Preuss’s Dilemma: weaving a Stone Grandmother whole again.

A Círculo de Palabra y Escucha (word and listening circle) around the Stone Grandmothers, ancestral lithic beings from the Colombian Massif now held in the collection of Berlin's Ethnological Museum. Members of the Yanakuna and Misak Misak peoples, the Rematriation Oversight Group and Posmonumenta take part, including Jhon Alirio Córdoba Quinayas, Carla Isabel Espinosa Muñoz, Martha Jeannette Gil Gómez, Indy Piapya, Marleny Deli Yalanda Cuchillo, Adriana María Velasco Muelas and Julián Santana-Rodríguez. At the centre stands a soft textile sculpture of a Grandmother of Stone, divided into two parts, which participants will reunite through a collective weaving and sewing action whose line of joining remains visible. The gathering asks what it means to preserve an ancestral being by fragmenting it – as the German ethnologist Konrad Preuss once did to transport some of them – and is accompanied by community projection mapping with archival images and landscapes of memory.