Luisa Ascending

Exhibition, event and sermon series for the Passiontide 2022

Luisa Ascending is a Passiontide exhibition by Felisha Maria Carenage that is an exploration of the abolitionist narrative surrounding Luisa Calderón, tracing suffering, pathos and identity in a decolonial context.

In the early 19th century, images of the tortured 14-year-old Luisa Calderón caused a sensation in Britain: They showed the violence that had remained hidden from Europeans but was part of everyday life in the colonised territories. The exhibition is an attempt to explore how this violence relates to our reality in the here and now.

Using tools of visual communication which refer to the most famous drawings of Calderón’s case as well as other visual phenomena of colonial imagery, the colonial history of Flensburg is addressed in a program of events around the exhibition. The focus is not only on the economic traces of the colonial era, but also on the work of German Christian missionaries and their connections to colonial rule. These interventions have been organised in a series of events and sermons by city pastor Johannes Ahrens and pastor Dr Marcus Friedrichs, including a lecture by Hamburg missiologist Dr Anton Knuth (Fri 18 March at 7pm) and a performance by the Flensburg theatre workshop Pilkentafel (Fri 25 March at 7pm).

‘Luisa Ascending’ is accompanied by ‘Ashes’, a related installation.

These artworks were realised as part of a postgraduate scholarship for a project on ‘Colonial Continuities in Schleswig-Holstein Port Cities’ at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design, Kiel.

The Artistic Research is kindly supported by the working group Integrative Geography at the Europe University of Flensburg, and the installation of the artworks is possible thanks to a grant from the Cultural Office of the City of Flensburg.