Description
Book SynopsisNo one had ever asked Feliciano Lana about white history when the editors of this catalog asked him for images on the subject. In Germany, portraits of Europeans as caricatured colonial actors are primarily known from the African context; Feliciano Lanas series of pictures can be considered a South American, contemporary example of such a reverse historiography. Lana''s pictures tell the story of entanglement on many different levels. They form the continuation and at the same time contextualize a collection of the Ethnological Museum Berlin from the region of the upper Rio Negro (Northwest Amazonia). In the watercolors acquired in 2019/20, we white people are held up to a merciless mirror. The images are presented in the catalog together with an explanatory text, the heart of which is an interview with the artist. Several indigenous and non-indigenous experts enter into a dialogue with the series of images in commenting essays. Artist Feliciano Lana was born in 1937 as a member of a high-ranking clan of the Desana indigenous group. In a Salesian boarding school, Lana experienced and suffered the upbringing of the whites and over the years became more and more a sought-after translator between the worlds. The artist''s series presented in the catalog was to be the last in a long line of collections, some of which are now in private hands and some in European, North American, and Brazilian museums. Lana died in May 2020 as one of the first prominent victims of the COVID-19 pandemic in his region.
