der greif: braiding indigeneity
"Braiding Indigeneity"* invites photographers, artists, and visual storytellers to revisit how images construct identity, land, and relational memory. Developed within the framework of Der Greif’s Pulse online exhibitions series and grounding itself in the ethos of Issue 19, "I Am, Because of You, Mother Earth," guest-edited by Zanele Muholi with the support of Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung, and rooted in Ubuntu "umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu," a person is a person through other persons – this open call carries that relational ethic forward in conversation with Indigenous visual sovereignties and non-linear ways of knowing.
It is open to anyone, who engages with these ideas through genuine collaboration, consent, and accountability to the Indigenous individuals, knowledge-holders, or communities whose ways of framing life and relationality inform the work.
For centuries, Western and automated gazes have categorized, archived, and extracted Indigenous image-making, reducing living cultures to static historic artifacts or algorithmic metadata. "Braiding Indigeneity" asserts that visual interpretation is an act of dynamic connection. It aligns with Muholi’s vision that the body is landscape, the community is voice, and the environment encompasses everything that lives within and across us, into conversation with the distinct cosmologies of land and kinship held by Indigenous nations: *Because of environment, I am. Because of you, I am.
*The title pays tribute to a reading that inspired us for the Open Call's take: Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass.
Selected participants will join a hybrid workshop integrated into the FUTURES Hub program in Paris, engaging in collaborative image analysis, reciprocal critique, and public auditory sessions. The collective outcomes will be published as a permanent exhibition on dergreif.org in November 2026.
We invite submissions engaging with one or more of these core strands:
Sovereign Gazes & The Body as Landscape: Work that disrupts colonial archives and external surveillance, framing identity, self-determination, and the human form as living extensions of the environment.
Relationality as Method: Collaborative projects shaped by intergenerational exchange, community care, and shared authorship between artist, subject, and land—embodying “I am because you are.”
What the Machine Misses: Images that honor sacred knowledge, oral traditions, cultural subtext, and living memories that resist algorithmic classification, digital extraction, and reductive definitions of space.