Creolised Dance, Museumised Space: Jeannette Ehlers and Decolonial Re-Edification

Abstract

This chapter examines three works by Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers that involve dance as ritual movement in what I call“museumised space”. Examining these dances as creolised products arising from the enslavement of Africans by European nations, I will argue that Ehlers performs through them an Afropean decolonial praxis of ‘re-edification’ around the silences surrounding Denmark’s colonial past, involving in particular a dialectic between spectrality and material sumptuousness that draws purposely on dance in relation to the materiality of sound.