“La palabre” refers to the social practice of public discourse, gathering, and collective conflict resolution found in many countries across the African continent. The themes of each UNEXPECTED LESSONS edition are further explored and discussed through conversations, artistic interventions, and reading sessions. Guests are invited to spend time in the LA PALABRE Space, to pause, listen, participate, browse the library, drink tea, or simply linger.
LA PALABRE is a successful format evolved by Isabel Raabe and Celina Baljeet Basra in the context of the artistic research project TALKING OBJECTS LAB.
UNEXPECTED LESSONS 1 – Opening
The series UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Knowledges of Body and Sound kicked off with an opening programme from May 24 to 27, 2026, centred around the solo performance “Somewhere at the Beginning” by Germaine Acogny.
LA PALABRE Space — Tea, Reading & Resting Room
May 25, 6-8:30 p.m.
KUBUS, Radialsystem, Berlin
hn.lyonga and Melanie Garland presented their research project Neighboring Ecotones: An Intersectional Conversation Between Two Neighbors in Berlin, which explored the concept of intersectionality through a more‑than‑human lens, focusing on water–land relations — ecotones — within urban space. Through a multisensorial format comprising an audio walk and a dialogical essay, Melanie and hn.lyonga reflected on their global South situatedness as female, queer, disabled, non‑white, non‑German subjects living in Berlin — and as neighbours to one another.
LA PALABRE Space — Tea, Reading & Resting Room
May 26, 6-8:30 p.m.
KUBUS, Radialsystem, Berlin
Angela Guerreiro presented her research project 1952 | Archive in Motion: Between the Neighbourhood and the Museum, a co‑creation project that drew on the photographic archive of Portuguese anthropological missions in Africa from the 1940s and 1950s. The project aimed to encourage critical reflection on the colonial past and its repercussions in the present. In dialogue with Angela, Arantxa Ciafrino also presented part of her research. Arantxa had recently defended her doctoral thesis in Sociomuseology, titled The Decolonial Potential of Dance and Performance in European Museums: A Sociomuseological Perspective, at Universidade Lusófona in Lisbon. Her research examined how practices in performance and dance can become means through which museums reflect on their ways of engaging with memory, knowledge, and power, while also addressing the risks of their instrumentalization by these institutions.
UNEXPECTED LESSONS 3 – Rethinking Dance in Academia
LA PALABRE Space — Tea, Reading & Resting Room
September 11, 2–9 p.m.
KUBUS, Radialsystem, Berlin
jee chan shared their video work Bendungan from 2025. In this video, jee chan explored how memory and knowledge are expressed not only through personal recollection but also through social and physical environments, including bodies and waterscapes. Through choreographed movements, extended still shots, oral histories, and spatial interventions, they revealed memory as a layered, embodied process deeply connected to its surroundings.
Tsai Cheng-jung and her collective unfolded what it means, and what it costs, to live as a yellow woman in a white-dominant society. They traced the connections between Ornamentalism, their personal life stories, and embodied practices. In her presentation, Tsai shared her ongoing research and invited participants to map their own traces of negotiation, shaped by migration experiences and their proximity to Whiteness.
UNEXPECTED LESSONS 4 – Decolonizing the Body in Dance
LA PALABRE Space – Tea, Reading & Resting Room
September 12, 2–9 p.m.
KUBUS, Radialsystem, Berlin
On this day, the group Coole Kinder was invited — a dance project led by Susanne Grau, Juana del Mar, and Evgenia Chetvertkova. The project experiments with physical forms of expression and examines the relationship between dance and environment. A central aspect of the work is creating space for children to observe one another, to explore different roles within the creative process, and to articulate their impressions and emotions.
UNEXPECTED LESSONS 6 – Healing Practices and Body Memory
LA PALABRE Space — Tea, Reading & Resting Room
January 16, 5–7 p.m.
KUBUS, Radialsystem, Berlin
CLAUDIX VANESIX (they/them) is a performance and XR artist from Peru based in France. Their work is critical of sexism and racism in the digital social life and reflects about its impact on the physical world. Claudix creates performance and Virtual Reality art that challenges the narrative of technological inevitability by mixing new technologies with ancestral traditions. For thr LA PALABRE Space Claudix will present Dance Permit (Denied). A 360° Documentary, performance and critique of the patriarchal dynamics in Claudix's family and Peruvian culture, which is constructed based on the traditional dance “Los Negrazos de Sipza” in which only men can dance.
LA PALABRE Space — Tea, Reading & Resting Room
January 17, 5–7 p.m.
KUBUS, Radialsystem, Berlin
Raísa Inocêncio will present Banhos (Baths), a performance-ritual developed since 2010 that brings together contemporary art, ancestry, and institutional epistemologies, rooted in Brazilian Afro-Amerindian traditions. It opens with a philosophical approach in which selected images and theoretical frameworks explore artworks that envision the body as a territory for healing, within decolonial philosophy, through the notion of the colonial wound (drawing on Grada Kilomba and Frantz Fanon). The second part invites the audience into sensitization exercises drawn from ecological and sensible practice. Participants are forewarned of smell and living-writing (escrevivência). Banhos is an action-invitation to slow down, to feel, and to heal collectively, a practice of repair through tenderness in a world at war.
UNEXPECTED LESSONS 7 – Knowledge Systems in Music
LA PALABRE Space — Tea, Reading & Resting Room
Feburary 20, 5–7 p.m.
KUBUS, Radialsystem, Berlin
Nadine Nzambisa (she/her) is a cultural researcher, curator, grief worker, and vinyl DJ from Berlin with Congolese roots. She studied African Studies, specializing in African literature, culture, and linguistics, and graduated from Humboldt University in Berlin. In her work, she explores music and its transcendence, investigating its impact on people, bodies, and memories through sound and melody, supported by her experience as a DJ and her affinity for music, which make this impact visible. Bùi Việt Hoa Jin (Hoa/they) is a Berlin-based community organizer, cultural worker, moderator and DJ (aka ôolong) with Chinese and Vietnamese roots. Their practice moves across diasporic experiences and cultural heritage, particularly from East and Southeast Asian contexts. Over the past years, they have been involved in creating and nurturing politicized community spaces engaging with identity, belonging, memory, history and intergenerational narratives. As ôolong, their DJ sets unfold as deeply personal journeys carried by emotion and memory.
Nadine and Hoa will be in conversation, personal, associative, and at times somatic, tracing how sound carries histories of migration, belonging, and longing. The evening includes a narrated soundscape session inviting participants to connect with their own acoustic memories, followed by an open space for collective sharing.
LA PALABRE Space — Tea, Reading & Resting Room
Feburary 21, 5–7 p.m.
KUBUS, Radialsystem, Berlin
The series UNEXPECTED LESSONS — Knowledges of Body and Sound is funded by the LOTTO Foundation Berlin. In cooperation with the Betty Center for Movement Research in Dance Studies at LMU Munich.