Abdoulaye Sy has a degree in Marketing/Commercial Actions and has been in charge of cultural mediation at the Théodore Monod Museum of African Art in Dakar/IFAN-CAD for several years, starting out as coordinator of a programme for young people at a play centre called ImagiNation Afrika. He is also a member of an association called ArtxaleYi, which sets up programmes and activities that use art as a means of development for children, especially Talibés (street children), who are the forgotten members of Senegalese society. Today, Abdoulaye is a member of the museum's dynamic team who participates in the research and creation of new mediation strategies and adapted pedagogical tools, allowing young people to make the Théodore Monod Museum a framework for learning, inspiration and knowledge sharing.
Abdoulaye Sy participated in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023 in Dakar, Senegal.

Abdourahmane Seck is a co-founder of the Groupe d’Action et d’étude critiques (a critical and decolonial action & thinking Collective), based at Saint-Louis in Senegal. He is a senior lecturer at University Gaston Berger, in the same city. Dr Seck has authored numerous works on intellectual history, politics, religion, and culture in/about/from (West-)Africa. His current research is on the topic of Memography as an african perspective in the global debate of renewing theory about Africa in/and the World. 
 

Adam Yawe is a 3D artist and product designer from Kenya. Growing up skateboarding in the streets of Nairobi and trained as a biomedical engineer, Yawe's work focuses on urban material culture and objects that he encounters on his daily commutes. Where they come from, why they exist and how they can be redesigned are questions that drive his artistic practice. How can the reinterpretation of everyday objects change the way we perceive the world around us? Yawe hopes to create archives and references that can serve as inspiration for further artistic explorations. In 2024 he took part in the TALKING OBJECTS residency programme.
 

Agie Biwersi, a skilled chef of Gambian origin, introducing to you the original and mouthwatering food from the Senegambia region of West Africa. Being Jolof by tribe and Senegambian by heart, she is also the publisher of #gambiancookbook where you can find more of her creations. To bring you closer to her cultural heritage, Agie has deeply dug into the archives to retrieve the authentic tribal and regional food you are about to taste. “Naci jàam bari”—Enjoy your food!
Agie participated in LA PALABRE #4 - LEARNING LESSONS at Vierte Welt. 

Aïcha Diallo has been Head of Education & Outreach at DAS MINSK Potsdam since November 2020. As a cultural scientist, educator, freelance writer and editor, she has collaborated on various projects. For many years she worked as managing editor for the art magazine Contemporary And (C&) and curated exhibitions and events for the off-program of the Biennale Dak'Art. She was co-program director of KontextSchule, a project based at the Institute for Art in Context at the Universität der Künste Berlin (University of the Arts). In addition, she has worked for the pan-African cultural platform Chimurenga in Cape Town, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) exhibition project prêt-à-partager, was co-founder of and performer in the Label Noir performance platform and contributing guest editor of the Platform Africa edition of the magazine Aperture. Her research and teaching interests are trauma and memory studies, critical pedagogy, and postcolonial critique. She is a member of bildungsLab* in Berlin, a collective of scholars of Color who comment, intervene and publish in the field of critical pedagogy. In addition, Diallo is editor with Annika Niemann and Miriam Shabafrouz of the anthology "Untie to Tie: Colonial Fragments in the Context of School" (ifa Gallery Berlin and Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (BpB – Federal Center for Civic Education) which will be released in summer 2021.
Aïcha Diallo participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge from the 11th – 12th of June 2021.
 

Aisha Camara lives and works as a curator, freelance moderator and communications consultant in Frankfurt. She has been working in the communications industry for over 10 years and combines this expertise with a sociopolitical ambition. Among other things, she works at the interfaces between communication, culture and political (youth) education.
 

Alba Rodríguez García is an islander, she grew up in a remote archipelago deeply connected to distant lands: to Latin America linguistically and culturally, to Africa geographically, to Europe politically. Hence her passion for languages and cultures; the more, the merrier. Her researches focus mainly on postcolonial and decolonial translation studies; the treatment of CSI (culturally specific items); the translation of African literatures and thought, and the ethics and criticism of translation, on what she has published book chapters and journal articles. For more than a decade she has been an associate professor at the Department of Applied Foreign Languages, Université Gaston Berger (Senegal), and recently joined the Universidad de La Laguna (Canary Islands). You will find her at the flea market, the art exhibit opening or the neighbourhood concert. She is passionate about understanding, bringing thoughts and discourses from one place to their antipodes, finding parallels and bridging distances. She is a co-founder of the afro-decolonial collective GAEC-Africa, walks barefoot and drinks unsweetened ‘bisaab’.
 

Aleya Kassam is a Kenyan feminist, storyteller, writer and performer.  She is widely experimental; from page to stage, screen to speaker, micro fiction to memory poems, docu theatre to participatory filmmaking - she loves to play with how people experience story.
Her writing has been performed and published on multiple platforms and stages around the world, from Nairobi to Kigali to Stuttgart. She is the A in The LAM Sisterhood, which fills the world with stories for African women to feel seen, heard and beloved, such as the award-winning stage show Brazen.
Aleya also makes performance jewelry and whimsical samosas.

Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University where he teaches Black literature and culture, critical theory, social technologies, and popular culture. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005), Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), Feenin: Black Music and Technology in the Now (forthcoming). Currently, he is working on Black Life/SchwarzSein, which situates Blackness as an ungendered ontology of unbelonging. His work has been published in many journals, and the anthologies Black Europe and the African Diaspora, The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht: (K)erben des Kolonialismus im Wissensarchiv deutsche Sprache, and re/visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland. 
Alexander Ghedi Weheliye participated in Mapping Academia / The Pathways of Healing and Caring in New York, USA on the 17th of December 2021.

As a curator, filmmaker, musician and writer, Alibeta's main focus has been KENU Lab’Oratoire des Imaginaires, a community-led interdisciplinary laboratory at the cross-section between arts, culture, and research which was founded in 2020 and is based in the heart of the Ouakam neighborhood in Dakar, Senegal. His curatorial practice is based on an exploratory movement that aims to reveal the local imaginaries that shape ways in which we live together and that explores questions around communal relationality. In addition to his artistic work, Alibeta currently coordinates a program for university students and is the Founder of the start-up Baraka Global Arts, which supports cultural productions from Senegal.
Alibeta participated in the Artistic LABoratory RÉ-IMAGINER LE PASSÉ from the 22nd to 24th May 2023 and in Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023, both in Dakar.

Anna Yeboah studied architecture with a focus on cultural theory at the Technical University of Munich and the UPC Barcelona. Her research and practice revolve around systems of power in architecture and urban space and decolonial spatial strategies. Her research on these subjects has been shown at the Venice and Chicago Biennials, among others, and published in international media. Since May 2020, Anna Yeboah has been responsible for the overall coordination of the  five-year pilot project Dekoloniale Memory Culture in the City on behalf of the Initiative of Black People in Germany e.V.
Anna Yeboah participated in LA PALABRE #3 — TELLING TALES at Vierte Welt.

Andreas Doepke is a cultural worker, researcher, and writer from Berlin. With degrees in political science and geography, his interests revolve around concepts of nature, social justice, putting transdisciplinarity to practice, and the role of biographical research in contemporary artistic practice. Andreas is part of the Field Narratives collective. He has been working as a researcher, coordinator, and assistant for transdisciplinary projects in and through museums since 2017: the long-term Anthropocene Project (2021-2022) by HKW Berlin, Owned By Others (2020) on Museum Island, Ocean-Archive.org (2019) for TBA21 Academy and Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest (2018-2019). Currently, he is a researcher in a project on philosophies of nature in the early Romanticism for Senckenberg Naturmuseum, the German Romanticism Museum, and Stiftung Kunst und Natur. As an author Andreas collaborates conceptually with artists, for example for the essay Blue Canary, together with Barbara Marcel (intercalations 6, K. Verlag/HKW, 2022) or for the workshop Agro-Centric Thinking: A Pathway to a Collective Biographical Imagination with the poet and curator hn. lyonga (New Alphabet School #4: Caring, 2020). Andreas Doepke participated in LA PALABRE #2 - COLLECTING SEEDS in Vierte Welt. 
 

Anguezomo Mba Bikoro merges archeology, sonic radio, writing, textiles, sculpture, live art performances, film & archives for immersive installations. The work analyses processes of power & science fictions in historical archives critically engaging in migrational struggles and colonial memory. The artist creates environments for alternative narratives and future speculations of colonial resistance movements led by African women of the German diaspora and indigenous communities. Sedimented in narratives of testimonial Black queer experiences of sonic nature archives, revolt, queering ecologies and postcolonial feminist experiences towards new monuments which reacts to the different tones of societies shared between delusions & ritual. The work offers complex non-binary readings pushing new investigations about the architectures of racisms in cities, the archeologies of urban spaces & economies of traditional systems by exposing the limitations of technologies as functional memory records.
Anguezomo Mba Bikoro participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge from the 11th – 12th of June 2021. Anguezomo also participated in the Artistic LABoratory RÉ-IMAGINER LE PASSÉ from the 22nd to 24th May 2023 in Dakar, and she is one of the artists being shown in the Ré-imaginer le passé exhibition at the Musée Théodore Monod, Dakar and at the KINDL, Berlin.

Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature, film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions. Her books include: Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019); Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012); The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008); From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950, (Pluto Press, 2011); co-author with Adi Ophir. The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River, (Stanford University Press, 2012). Her potential histories, archives and curatorial work were shown in different places: Errata (Tapiès Foundation, 2019, HKW, Berlin, 2020), Enough! The Natural Violence of New World Order, (F/Stop photography festival, Leipzig, 2016), Act of State 1967-2007, (Centre Pompidou, 2016, Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa Fotografico, 2020); "The Natural History of Rape" (Pembroke Hall, Brown University, 2015); The Body Politic [in Really Useful Knowledge, curated by What, How & for Whom / WHW], Reina Sofia, Madrid; When The Body Politic Ceases To Be An Idea, Exhibition Room - Manifesta Journal Around Curatorial Practices No 16 Potential History (2012, Stuk / Artefact, Louven), Untaken Photographs (2010, Igor Zabel Award, The Moderna galerija, Lubliana; Zochrot, Tel Aviv), Architecture of Destruction (Zochrot, Tel Aviv), Everything Could Be Seen (Um El Fahem Gallery of Art). Among her film-essays: Un-documented: Undoing Imperial Plunder (2019); Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48 (2012); I Also Dwell Among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi Bishara (2004) & The Food Chain (2004).

Ayomide Fasedu is a prolific writer and spoken word poet with academic training in law, who writes to connect to herself out of a belief that there's no way more beautiful to understand a thing than to make poetry out of it. She was born and raised in Lagos and writing and performing poetry have been able to neatly pack her life into boxes. She wrote and self-published her Debut Poetry Collection, The Ashes Have Their Own Stories this August, and was the first runner up at The Lagos International Poetry Festival in 2022, as well as being shortlisted for the 2022 SPRINNG women Author’s price. She emerged winner at the Wordaholics poetry slam in 2018, the best performer at Terra Kulture in 2018, and the Best Essayist at Saint Titus initiative, 2017, and won The Best performer Awards at the Fan Vanilla Campus Tour.
Her writing is centered around women and identity. She draws her inspiration from love, the nature of God and chaos; She engages with a variety of themes ranging from healing, femininity, queerness and Nigerianism. Through her bare and honest language, she writes poems that push self-love further into spaces it hasn’t yet permeated, like secondary schools, spaces with teenage girls, and most recently through her book dedicated to the generality of women. When she is not writing or performing poetry, she is making frozen yoghurt in her kitchen or creating amazing music. Recently, she was featured on the most recent Black Magic album titled ‘The Invitation’.
Ayomide Fasedu is a contributor of UNEXPECTED LESSONS #4 – Decolonizing Restitution in Lagos.

Assaf Gruber (b. Jerusalem, 1980) is a sculptor and filmmaker living and working in Berlin. The dynamic relationship between individuals and institutions is at the center of his practice, which aims to explore both how the political orientation of legacy establishments impact the lives of individuals and how these organizations choose to represent and communicate facts and their attendant artifacts. The absurd biographies of the protagonists in his projects simultaneously reveal and obscure the reasons and motives that lead people to obey or rebel against their inner world or the society in which they live. His photography, sculpture, and installations place the materiality of objects in relation to narrative dimensions, which in turn create fictional spaces where movement and non-movement function as a medium.
Gruber’s solo exhibitions include the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2018), Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2018), and the Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (2015). His films have been featured in festivals including FID Marseille (2022), the Berlinale Film Festival (2016), and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2016). He studied at Cooper Union in New York and is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and of the Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent. Gruber is currently one of the fellows of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme 2022/23 (gkfd).
Assaf Gruber participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #2 – Decolonizing Nature in Reykjavík, Iceland from the 13th – 15th of September 2022.
 

Ayesha Keshani is an artist, museum worker and PhD candidate in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of the Arts London. Her research practice explores the tensions between coloniality, cosmos and nature in Southeast Asian natural history museums. Working through video, sound, image and text, her work circulates the interstices and many lifeworlds of the Sarawak Museum, Malaysian Borneo and the restive possibilities for cosmopolitical museology amidst planetary crisis.
Ayesha Keshani participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #2 – Decolonizing Nature in Reykjavík, Iceland from the 13th – 15th of September 2022.

Azu Nwagbogu is the founder and director of the African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), a non- profit organisation based in Lagos, Nigeria that is dedicated to the promotion and development of contemporary African arts and artists. Nwagbogu also serves as founder and director of the LagosPhoto Festival. Nwagbogu was the interim director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in South Africa from April 2018 to August 2019. He created Art Base Africa, a virtual space to discover and learn about contemporary Art from the African continent and the diaspora. Nwagbogu is on the jury of major arts awards and committees such as the Dutch Doc, the POPCAP Photography Awards, the World Press Photo, the Prisma Photography Award (2015), the Greenpeace Photo Award (2016), the New York Times Portfolio Review (2017-18), the W. Eugene Smith Award (2018), Photo España (2018), Lensculture and Magnum. Nwagbogu also works as an independent curator and culture critic.

With 12 years of experience in the digital sector Mr. Badara DIOUF is the Founder of the startup SAMA WEB SUNU WEB and also the President of the Association of Young Entrepreneurs and Promoters of the African Digital commonly called J.E.P.N.A and also the Vice President of the Network of Digital Entrepreneurs of the Francophonie R.E.N.F. I had to participate in various activities of promotion of digital in Senegal but also in digital entrepreneurship of young people through training and activities to accompany them in their first steps in the business world. Thus, my ambition is to promote and popularize information and communication technologies to allow our youth to take advantage of the opportunities that information and communication technologies can bring them. In addition, Mr. DIOUF was chosen as the only representative of Senegal in the largest competition of mobile application e-commerce called AFRIC'UP in 2019 in Tunisia or in its category only 10 Africans are chosen per year.
Badara Diouf participated in TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE @Dakar in Dakar, Senegal between the 17th and 18th January 2023. 

Bayo has always had a strong interest in hospitality. Since secondary school, he has been creating event promotional companies that bring people together around food, music, and culture. He has also worked in startups focusing on event marketing. Specifically, he has expertise in event production & strategy, working alongside companies such as Adidas, Dig, Spotify, and Grey Goose. More recently, Bayo was a partner in a promotion company that hosted dinners and parties in some of New York’s most well-known downtown establishments. Bayo was formerly co-owner and partner of Victoria Tacos and now co-owner and partner of Love Deluxe.
Together with Edwina, Bayo participated in LA PALABRE #3 — TELLING TALES at Vierte Welt and served delicious food. 

Bénédicte Savoy is the head of the Department of Modern Art History at the Technische Universität Berlin. Since 2016, she has also held a professorship at the Collège de France in Paris in the cultural history of artistic heritage in Europe from the 18th to the 20th centuries. In 2018, together with Senegalese scholar Felwine Sarr, she produced the report "On the Restitution of African Cultural Assets" on behalf of French President Emmanuel Macron. She studied art history, German language and literature, and history in Paris and Berlin, and received her PhD as a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure with a thesis on Napoleon's art theft in Germany. She has received many awards for her research and academic teaching, including the 2016 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the German Academy of Language and Poetry, and various academic advisory boards and committees. She has published widely on her research interests in art theft and looted art in a global context, transnational museum history, and cultural transfer in Europe. Most recently, her book "Afrikas Kampf um seine Kunst. Geschichte einer postkolonialen Niederlage".
Bénédicte Savoy participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge from the 11th – 12th of June 2021.

bethuel muthee is a poet living and working in Nairobi, Kenya. 

Bremen based artist Brunn Morais has been honing their skills in mixed and unconventional media, combining academic concepts within contemporary art in the past years. He is a critical scholar, Post-colonial researcher and an artist. Currently working as PhD fellow at Bremen University, they graduated in International Relations and have a Masters Degree in Anthropology. Their works discuss Post-Colonial themes in order to produce critical thoughts regarding the impact of colonisation in the European context. They have been acting in the field of Roma Studies since 2018. Brunn's evolution into academia allowed work through multi-modal Anthropology, encompassing research and knowledge production in a multi-disciplinary way, including art on its methodology in order to theorise about decolonisation of knowledge. Their work includes the exhibition "Reflections" participation in "Young Romani Artists" and is the artist behind the performance "I'm alive".
Brunn Morais participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #3 – Decolonizing Romantik, a digital event on December 10, 2022 in Berlin.

Bruno Diomaye Faye is a PhD Student in Social Sciences of Religions at Gaston Berger University in Saint-Louis. He is a co-founder of Gaec Africa. He was interested in the dynamics of conversions at work in village communities in Senegal. Furthermore, he is currently working on the history of the Catholic Church in Senegal through musical practices.
 

Carey Baraka is a writer from Kisumu, Kenya. He sings for a secret choir in Nairobi.

Carmen Mörsch (* 1968 in Kaiserslautern) is an artist, cultural scientist and art educator. She was the director of the Institute for Art Education at the Zurich University of the Arts from 2008 to 2019 and has been a professor of art didactics at the Mainz University of the Arts since 2019. Mörsch has been working on projects at the intersection of culture, education, and research. In her research and teaching, she is particularly dedicated to concepts and practices of art education from a queer-feminist, postcolonial, and discrimination-critical perspective.
Carmen Mörsch participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge from the 11th – 12th of June 2021.

Caroline Gueye is a Senegalese visual artist. She was born and raised in Senegal, then pursued her higher education in France, USA, and China. She graduated in Atmospheric Physics, Radio Protection and Nuclear Safety at Claude Bernard University, Astrophysics at Tulane University and in Chinese at Shanxi University. Caroline has been immersed in an artistic environment since childhood. She is based in Senegal and often travels to France.  She was selected for the international exhibition of the official Dakar 2022 Biennale and won the ECOWAS Integration Award for the best visual artist in West Africa.
Caroline Gueye participated in Le Langage des Objets in Dakar, Senegal on the 4th of December 2021. She also participated in the Artistic LABoratory RÉ-IMAGINER LE PASSÉ from the 22nd to 24th May 2023 and in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023, both events in Dakar, Senegal. Caroline is one of the artists being shown in the Ré-imaginer le passé exhibition at the Musée Théodore Monod, Dakar and at the KINDL, Berlin.
 

Celina Baljeet Basra is a writer and curator based in Berlin. Since graduating from Free University of Berlin with a degree in Art History in a Global Context, she has worked with numerous art institutions and intiatives in Berlin and internationally–among them Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Galerie im Turm, Nature Morte Delhi, Berlin Biennale and Times Art Center. Celina is co-founder of the curatorial collective The Department of Love. Her first novel will be published in November 2023.
She has been working in the team of TALKING OBJECTS LAB since 2020 and is co-curator, as well as contributor, of the series LA PALABRE (2023).

Chao Tayiana's work focuses on the application of digital technology to the preservation and dissemination of African cultural heritage. She is the founder of African Digital Heritage (Nairobi) and co-founder of the Open Restitution Africa initiative, as well as the Museum of British Colonialism. Chao Tayiana holds an MSc in International Heritage Visualization from the University of Glasgow/School of Art and worked for the Science Museum Group as a software developer for digital museum exhibits. She was awarded the Google Anita Borg Scholarship for Women in Technology. Chao Tayiana is part of the curatorial team of the TALKING OBJECTS LAB.

Che R. Applewhaite is a Trinidadian-British writer, filmmaker and cultural worker. He holds internationalist and interdisciplinary commitments to politics of time, specificity, relation and cultural process. His debut short film, A New England Document, received its world premiere in 2020 at Sheffield Doc/Fest. He has written for publications including Harvard Magazine, Open City Documentary Festival and Millennium Film Journal and worked for artist-filmmakers Christopher Harris and Ja’Tovia Gary; for the Harvard-Mindich Program for Engaged Scholarship and the Harvard Art Museums.

Njathi Kabui is an eclectic Chef with a passion in Food Justice, a leading expert in Food Literacy, a Medical Anthropologist and an Organic farmer. He is actively involved in promoting Food Literacy as a public speaker, a blogger, an author and a social commentator. Chef Kabui considers himself as an organic chef, who has intentionally designed his own disruptive cuisine. He calls this cuisine, “Afro Futuristic Conscious Cuisine” which promotes a mix of indigenous and healthy foods for the sake of sovereignty, health, and food justice.
He holds an MA in Political Science and Philosophy, double Masters in Medical Anthropology and Urban Anthropology and trained as a Chef at the Centre of Green Studies, (CCCC), North Carolina. He has also developed expertise in Composting, Spices and Food Policies in the global context. His work has also received recognition by the Diaspora community, in his appointment as an Honorable of the Diaspora National Assembly as a CS Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security (2020-2022).
Chef Kabui makes a case that the best of African food is in the future. He has promoted this cuisine in far flung places such as Africa, Europe, USA and in the UAE. His cuisine has been discussed at various events in Educational Institutions, Corporate companies, Nonprofits and Embassies. He lives and works between Kenia and the United States.  Chef Kabui participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #2 – Decolonizing Nature in Reykjavík, Iceland from the 13th – 15th of September 2022.

I’m Cheryl, and I’m thrilled to introduce myself as an Operations Associate at African Digital Heritage (ADH). Based in Nairobi, my journey into the world of heritage preservation and digital innovation has been nothing short of exhilarating. As a lifelong history enthusiast, I’ve embarked on a unique path to bridges tradition with cutting-edge technology. My role at ADH allows me to channel my passion for history into the digital realm, where I contribute to the preservation of cultural narratives through innovative solutions. Beyond my responsibilities at ADH, I find immense joy in championing wildlife and environmental conservation across Africa. This commitment reflects not only my professional values but also a deeply rooted connection to our natural world. Additionally, I enjoy reading, exploring the Nairobi art scene, exploring new places, hiking through breathtaking landscapes, and embarking on game drives. Currently, I’m pursuing a master’s degree in Diplomacy, Development, and International Security. This academic pursuit empowers me to apply a multifaceted approach to heritage preservation, blending academic rigour with practical solutions. At ADH, I’ve found a community that resonates with my dedication to preserving the past while embracing the future. My journey is about contributing to a movement that redefines the role of technology in safeguarding Africa’s cultural legacies.
As part of African Digital Heritage she's a member of the TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE TEAM.

Chiara Figone is a researcher, curator and editor. She is the founder and artistic director of Archive Ensemble, a poly centric organisation operating out of Berlin, Dakar and Milan. She is the publishing director of Archive Books and editor-in-chief of Archive Journal. Figone is professor of editorial studies and art publishing at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti – NABA, Milan and part of a COOP study group at the Dutch Art Institute. She is part of the collective AWU founded in Dakar. Most recently she initiated and co-curated Publishing Practices (2020–ongoing) and Crossings (2022).
Chiara participated in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023 in Dakar, Senegal.

The C& Center of Unfinished Business is a mobile reading room that offers visitors an extraordinary, sometimes disconcerting selection of books that are connected to the topic of colonialism in various ways - from the German colonies to Congolese fashion to 21st century capital markets, the reading room stretches the subject to the many different areas that are affected by it. However, it is not about creating a library on colonialism that is consistent and complete, because: when would it ever be? Colonialism is an unfinished business that continues to exist in many ways. Contemporary And (C&) is a dynamic platform for reflecting and connecting ideas and discourses on contemporary visual arts. This includes the online magazines, C& Magazine and C& América Latina Magazine, which are published in multiple languages. In addition, the C& Print Issues are published several times throughout the year. Other online and offline projects include C& Commissions, C& Artists' Editions, the C& Center of Unfinished Business, the C& Critical Writing Workshops and the C& Mentoring Program for young journalists.
The C& Center of Unfinished Business will be part of the Ré-imaginer le passé Exhibition at the KINDL, Berlin. 

Daeng Khamlao, born in Bangkok raised in Hessen, was the founder and headchef of The Panda Noodle in Kreuzberg where she served homemade thai food inspired by the food of the kitchens of her mom and her aunties. With the Panda Noodle Daeng tried to bring a piece of Bangkok's street to her Berlin neighborhood. Soon her restaurant became the meeting point for Berlins food loving bipoc community. Many of the smells like collectives events were held there. Daeng is a co-founding member of the smells like collective since day 1. Now Daeng retired from the restaurant business to pursue her ambitions to become a writer.
Daeng Khamlao participated in LA PALABRE #1 – CUTTING FRUITS and LA PALABRE #5 — REFUSING, EMBRACING, LETTING GO in Vierte Welt.

Dr. David Frohnapfel studied art history, comparative literature, and religious studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and at Universidad de la Habana in Havana. He received a Ph.D. degree from Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on decolonial theory, socially-engaged art, critical race theory, queer theory, affect theory, and Caribbean Studies. He also worked as curator of The 3rd Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince together with Leah Gordon, André Eugène, and Jean Herald Celeur, and curated the exhibition NOCTAMBULES on Queer Visualities on occasion of Le Forum Transculturel d’Art Contemporain. He is also the author of Alleviative Objects. Intersectional Entanglement and Progressive Racism in Caribbean Art (2020) and worked as substitute professor in art history at Freie Universität Berlin in 2022 and 2023.
David participated in LA PALABRE #5 - REFUSING EMBRACING LETTING GO at Vierte Welt.

DEMBIS CLEVER was born on 14 April 1989 in Dakar under the civil name DEMBA BANGOURA. He is a dancer and choreographer who has lived in Keur Massar since 1998 and originally comes from the Medina. As he loved to dance from a young age, in 2006-2007 he visited his older brothers who danced in the group CRAZY BOYS. Then in 2008, he became very interested in dancing himself and started participating in dance competitions known as Battle in the suburbs of Dakar. In 2013, he gained further experience when he transferred to the Alvine Aley de Blaise Senghor dance academy for three years, where Jean Temba, Moustapha and Omar Sene from the 5e dimension company were his teachers. Dembis Clever participated in the 2017 Francophonie Games in the Ivory Coast in creative dance and many dance festivals in the country. He has also supported other artists such as the group TALIF with video clips. Since 2016, Dembis has participated as a dancer and choreographer in the COME TO MY HOME festival in Morocco. In recent years, he has worked with one of the world's greatest painters, Kalidou Kassé, on a project at the Museum of Black Civilisations.
Dembis participated in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023 in Dakar, Senegal.

Dena Abay was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and grew up in Cologne. Her artistic career began with urban dance and led her through music to acting. She gained international stage experience throughout Europe such as at the ExFila-Connessioni-Metropolitane in Florence, Italy. Her vocation took her to stages in London, Windhoek, Paris to Accra. In 2017, she graduated as a film and television actress in Cologne. Since then, Dena Abay has performed as an actress and performance artist on a wide variety of stages, including the Theaterhaus Dortmund, Kampnagel in Hamburg, Ballhaus Naunynstraße in Berlin, the Heidelberg Stückemarkt and the Gropius Bau Berlin. In addition to her work in the theatre, Dena Abay also regularly appears in front of the camera for film and television. These include television formats such as Tatort from Dresden, SOKO Stuttgart, WAPO Bodensee as well as independent films. Her award-winning short film Get home safe (directed by Tamara Denić), in which she plays the lead role of Maya, is currently being screened at numerous festivals (including the Rome Independent Film Festival). When she is not filming or acting, Dena Abay's heart beats for martial arts and music. Dena Apay participated in LA PALABRE #2 - COLLECTING SEEDS at Vierte Welt. 
 

Edwina has worked in the Gastro/Hospitality industry since her teens, mostly as a Cook but also in service and Bars. She was raised in a Polynesian/Australian household with all social events centered around food, thus being the roots of her career in the hospitality industry. Edwina emigrated from Australia to Berlin in 2016 and has run kitchens in some of the busiest and most well-known brunch restaurants in Berlin (Distrikt Coffee, Hallesches Haus, 21 Gramm) before partnering with Bayo Adafin to open Love Deluxe. 
Together with Bayo, Edwina participated in LA PALABRE #3 — TELLING TALES at Vierte Welt and served delicious food.

El Hadji Malick Ndiaye is a researcher at Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar and curator of the Théodore Monod Museum, as well as Secretary General of ICOM, Senegal. He was part of the directorial team of Dak'art 2018 and curator of Dak'art 2020. As a theorist and curator, his work focuses on contemporary art, African cultural heritage, global history, and African museum institutions; he teaches art history and African cultural heritage. Ndiaye holds a PhD in art history from Université Rennes II and is a graduate of the National Institute of Heritage in Paris and the National Institute of Art History, Paris.
 El Hadji Malick Ndiaye is part of the Curatorial Team of TALKING OBJECTS LAB.

Eleonore Wiedenroth-Coulibaly is an author, translator, language lecturer, anti-racist and feminist activist. The winner of the City of Frankfurt's Tony Sender Prize, she is a co-founder of the Second Black Movement in Germany and the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (ISD), which was founded in 1985. She is co-author of the movement's seminal work "Farbe bekennen - Afrodeutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte", published in 1986. Also in the 2015 anthology "Children of Liberation. Transatlantic experiences and perspectives of Black Germans of the post-war generation" in 2015. In 2016, she co-edited the anthology "Spiegelblicke - Perspektiven Schwarzer Bewegung in Deutschland" to mark the 30th anniversary of the ISD movement.

An Artist born in Martinique, Élise Fitte-Duval has been living and working in Senegal for twenty years. She graduated from the School of Plastic Arts of Martinique (DNAP, 1989) and from the École Nationale Supérieure de Arts Décoratifs de Paris in photography in 1996. She pursues a photographic research of narrative form. She received the Casa Africa prize for a woman photographer at the 2011 Rencontres Photographiques de Bamako. Until 2018, Élise Fitte-Duval was an editorial photographer at Panapress, a pan-African news agency based in Dakar. One of her first series “Nude Portraits” made in Paris, where she resided at the time, was presented at the Revue Noire exhibition in Bamako in 1994, at the Festival des Trois Continents in Nantes in 1998 and appeared in the anthology of black female photography: The Black Female Body by Deborah Willis. Seeking to tell stories, she became interested in the creative world of contemporary African dancers. This research was exhibited under the title Danser l'Espoir at the Panafrican festival PANAF in Algiers within the exhibition Reflets d'Afrique and at the gallery Le Manège in the collective exhibition Danses, in June 2009. Since then, she continues to collaborate with dance companies. Continuing her series of portraits of humans in their struggles with everyday life, she exhibited her series Living countries in the water at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Cape Town in 2010, at the festival of Fort-de-France and is finally awarded at the Biennale of Bamako in 2011. Then she continued her narrative research by working on the current events of citizen engagement, in Dakar, Ouagadougou and Madrid. Her reflection on the city and its inhabitants evolves with the series Trottoirs in 2018. She collaborates with organizations to whom she offers her vision of portraits and landscapes, including her latest virtual exhibition “Géantes Invisibles” in 2020.
Élise Fitte-Duval is currently holding a TALKING OBJECTS LAB residency at the Musée Théodore Monod, and she participated in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023 in Dakar, Senegal.

Now based between Berlin and Yaoundé, Elsa M’Bala aka A.M.E.T. is one of the rare female sound artists of African descent. By using technology as an empowering tool and through her own keen observations, she explores further the interconnections between race, gender, technology and spirituality. Specifically in times of acute racial crisis in Europe and in the US, while the dominant discourse reproduces the patterns of disconnected narratives, exclusion, and invisibility. Elsa M’Bala shows us that marginalized bodies and voices can be (re)connected through shared collectivities. In addition, Elsa M’Bala also practices as a massage therapist since 2019. She performed her writings and music at various events throughout Europe and the African continent at Centre d'art contemporain de Brétigny (F), Bandjoun Station (CMR), Engagement global (DE), Aperture Magazine (USA), Contemporary And (C&) (DE), New Art Exchange Nottingham (UK), Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) (DE), Goethe Institut Kamerun (CMR), Centre Culturel Français du Cameroun (CMR), Alte Oper Frankfurt (DE), Berlin Biennale (GE), da; augmented reality festival (DE), Dak’Art Biennale for Contemporary African Art (SEN), Heroines of Sound (DE), amongst others.
Elsa M’Bala participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge from the 11th – 12th of June 2021. She also participated in the Artistic LABoratory RÉ-IMAGINER LE PASSÉ from the 22nd to 24th May 2023 in Dakar, Senegal. She is one of the artists being shown in the Ré-imaginer le passé exhibition at the Musée Théodore Monod, Dakar, and at the KINDL, Berlin.

Erik Stein is a software developer, information architect, and art director based in Berlin, Germany. For more than twenty years, he has worked in these disciplines with a focus on archives, strategic website content management, information architecture as an art form, and sharing and preserving of knowledge. He was co-founder of the early co-working space Bootlab, geared towards net criticism and critical practices regarding new technologies. Stein was also a member of publishing house and venue space b_books collective. He has worked with universities, print journals, art institutions, artists, and scholars to set up web-facing databases that make project and work history as well as collections and archives accessible from a technical, theoretical, and aesthetic point of view; including Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, scientific collections at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, RomArchive – the digital Archive of the Roma, Archive of neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst Berlin, Harun Farocki Institute, Cargo Journal/Website for Film, Media, Culture, the journal Texte zur Kunst, MARKK Museum am Rothenbaum, and among others artists Pauline Boudry, Renate Lorenz, and Natascha Sadr Haghigian. Stein studied philosophy in Berlin and Paris. 
Erik Stein participated in the Decolonial information technology workshop that was held online in December 2021, and in TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE @Dakar in Dakar, Senegal between the 17th and 18th January 2023. 

Fatou Kandé Senghor is an artist and filmmaker who produces documentaries, television shows and fiction. She also trains young students and youth with learning difficulties in video-making. Her documentary film entitled Giving Birth, which portrays the enigmatic Casamance-based sculptor Seyni Awa Camara, was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2015. She has published several essays discussing gender, urban cultures and African cinema. Kandé Senghor is the founder of Waru Studio, an arts center that brings together young artists, filmmakers and researchers to explore the nexus between art, technology and politics in Africa. In 2015, she published WALABOK, An Oral History of Hip Hop in Senegal (Amalion Publishing). The publication is an anthology of two generations of artists that make up the hip hop movement in Senegal. It serves as a basis for a television series that deals with Senegales youth through the lens of hip hop; tackling both the ills and positive aspects of our society. Kandé Senghor’s artistic practice combines photography, film, public installations, writing and research in which she explores intimate concepts such as identity, community, religion, history and geography. Her primary passion is documenting social transformation in order to better reveal how perceived sacred texts, poetry and the legends of oral tradition inform modern life. Kandé Senghor likes to blur the dichotomy between ancestral heritage and religious practice (Islam, Judaism and Christianity) in order to challenge and complicate expectations and stereotypes. She lives and works in Thiès.
Fatou Kandé Senghor participated in the Artistic LABoratory RÉ-IMAGINER LE PASSÉ from the 22nd to 24th May 2023 and in Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023, both in Dakar.

Felisha Maria Carenage is driven by inherited paradigms of romance and kinship. She uses painting, publications and interactive installations to explore recontextualisations of cultural commodities in language, literature and history. Currently resident in France and Germany, she has worked, studied and lived in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe and was born in Trinidad and Tobago. Her post-graduate research, HEIMATSCHUTZ: Colonial Continuities in Schleswig-Holstein’s Harbour Cities examines the inherent inequalities in the architecture and infrastructure of post-colonial cities, and their role in engineering and perpetuating harmful myths in german memory culture, as well as climate hypocrisy. Focusing on colonial traces in harbour cities on and near the Baltic Sea, she works with Integrative Geographies at the Europa-Universität in Flensburg, which deals with reparative justice, in cooperation with Kiel Postkolonial and Flensburg Postkolonial. Parade Créole, her drawing and garment project, centers gendered and racialised identities in domestic, public and professional space. Parade Créole has been shown in varying iterations at Alice Yard//Granderson Lab in Port of Spain, Studio Dem in Brooklyn, SAKUKU in Göttingen, Grind&Shine at the Kunstverein Hamburg Harburg and FREIRAUM at the Museum of Applied Arts, Hamburg. Since 2017 she has been an Associate Lecturer in Fine Arts at the Muthesius University of Fine Art and Design in Kiel. She is currently working with fine art as well as design students on a Glossary, Unbehagen Pflegen, intended to underline the role of decolonial thought as integral – rather than peripheral – to art and design education and practise.
Felisha participated in LA PALABRE #5 - REFUSING EMBRACING LETTING GO at Vierte Welt.

Felwine Sarr is a Senegalese scholar and writer born in 1972 in Niodior, in the Saloum islands. He attends high school in Senegal before studying economics at the University of Orleans where he obtains a doctorate in Economics in 2006. Full professor and agregation holder, he teaches at the University Gaston Berger of Saint-Louis since 2007. His lectures and academic research focus on economic policies, development economy, econometrics, epistemology and history of religious ideas. In 2010, he was awarded the Abdoulaye Fadiga prize for research in Economics. In 2011, he became dean of the Economics and Management faculty of the University Gaston Berger of Saint-Louis, and head of the new faculty of Civilizations, Religions, Arts and Communication (CRAC) of the same university. He is also a writer and has published several novels and essays. As a musician, he has published three albums thus far: »Civilisation ou Barbarie« (2000), »Les Mots du Récits« (2005) and »Bassai« (2007). With the writers Boubacar Boris Diop and Nafissatou Dia, he co-founded the publishing house Jimsaan. Felwine Sarr is also editor of the review »Journal of African Transformation« (CODESRIA-UNECA). In 2016, he organized with Achille Mbembé in Dakar and Saint-Louis, the Ateliers de la pensée, which gathers African and diasporic intellectuals and artists to think around the transformations of the contemporary world.
Felwine Sarr participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge from the 11th – 12th of June 2021.

Olorunfemi Johnson is a multi-disciplinary artist and cultural producer. He has worked in film, visual art, and technology, collaborating with organizations such as the European Union Institutes for Culture, Google Arts and Culture, and NGFX. He is the creator of the Documentary ‘’Nigerian Museums Homes of Identity and Culture’’ and has received fellowships from the Basel House of Film in Switzerland and the GAS Foundation. He has exhibited his visual art internationally and has lectured on the intersection of art and technology. He is currently employed as a Digital Heritage Specialist at the Edo Museum of West African Art, where he is involved in a project to digitize African Artifacts.
He is a contributor of UNEXPECTED LESSONS #4 – Decolonizing Restitution at G.A.S. Lagos, Feb 10, 2023.

Field Narratives as an artistic research body looks at rural biographies as well as transgenerational and cross-continental storytelling as sites where transformative knowledges can be found and made palpable. As a multi-year endeavour beyond institutional logic, Field Narratives scrutinises the biographical and the rural as places where personal and communal recollections intersect and where imaginations and practices convene with the aim to connect, liberate, or ground ourselves anew. Field Narratives participated in LA PALABRE #2 - COLLECTING SEEDS at Vierte Welt. 

Fogha Mc is a non-human self-inflicted severe drapetomania patient, a kulturbanausse, a trickster, liar, criminal, and a multi-award-winning troublemaker. Amongst his numerous awards and recognitions, he recently received the prestigious ban from the Humboldt Forum, he was the first to receive the prestigious award. He was born in a place with no culture and no history until its contact with humanity. In a place where he survived primarily on flesh and watermelons, today, this stereotypical black man that loves water melons either eats them as tasty treats or uses them as political symbol. He also cannot swim, which explains why he would drown in the Mediterranean. He stereotypically embodies everything that whiteness fears about itself and others, and manages from time to time to show whiteness what he has not yet learned to fear. He is a recovering cannibal, a beast of no nation, and a noble savage who is masquerading as a noble critic in academia. His academic motivations are mainly money and the social mobility that might one day allow it to be a human subject. The body of his academic work is a series of irrelevant, redundant, repetitive, barely intelligible, emotional and biased polemic arguments, presented with such disregard or lack of academic skill that they barely pass. He exists primarily as a counterpoint to whiteness and is a tolerated presence in academic spaces for reasons of diversity and colourfulness, the colourblind can not see him. He is a Marxist, not the kind that sits down in ivory towers writing books and jet-setting around the world, eating fine dining, and sleeping in 5-star hotels, he is the kind that takes Marxism seriously, so seriously in fact, he bought the communist manifesto from Amazon.
Fogha MC participated at LA PALABRE #6 - LISTENTING TO THE OBJECTS, which took place on the 14th December 2023 at Vierte Welt.

Franck Freitas-Ekué is a PhD in political science at the University of Paris-8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis (France). His dissertation is entitled "Black Bodies®: Genealogy of a racial identification through the commodification of the body". His work focuses on the politics of representation within the Black Atlantic, the construction of Black identities in a context of capitalist economy. He co-edited, "Penser avec Stuart Hall" this year. 
Franck Freitas-Ekué participated in Mapping Academia / The Pathways of Healing and Caring in New York, USA on the 17th of December 2021.

Gladys Kalichini is a contemporary visual artist and researcher from Lusaka, Zambia. Her work centres around notions of erasure, memory, and representations and visibilities of women in colonial resistance histories.
Gladys is currently a PhD candidate at Rhodes University in South Africa and a member of the Arts of Africa and Global Souths research programme, supported by the Andrew. W. Mellon Foundation and the National Research Fund.
She has participated in Àsìkò International Art Programme in Maputo, Mozambique in 2015 and the second iteration of the “Women On Aeroplanes” project in Lagos, Nigeria in 2018 themed “Search Research: Looking for Collete Omogbai”. Selected residencies that she has participated in include the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, the USA in 2017, Künstlerhaus Bethanien international studio programme in Berlin, Germany in 2019/2020, supported by the KFW – Stiftung and the Dekoloniale residency programme also in Berlin.
Gladys Kalichini participated in Mapping Academia / The Pathways of Healing and Caring in New York, USA on the 17th of December 2021 and contributed to LA PALABRE #4 — LEARNING LESSONS at Vierte Welt. 

Gülsüm Güler is an artist, photographer, and co-founder of the Supper Club TDD. When she is not cooking herself, Gülsüm organises culinary gatherings with guest chefs, whom she accompanies photographically. Gülsüm is also part of the Smells Like Collective, a community of BIPOC chefs, artists, writers, and food lovers who use storytelling to celebrate and negotiate food culture on their own terms. She is the editor, photographer, and co-creator of the self-published publication “flavours & friends”: it is a cookbook for large groups and tells the story of the 15-year-old supper club TDD with about 500 of her photographs. She is also a member of Floating University e.V., a self-organised space and group where practitioners from different fields meet to collaborate, create and work imaginatively on the future. She has been teaching and giving photography workshops at the Städelschule in FFM since 2022. Gülsüm Güler participated in LA PALABRE #2 - COLLECTING SEEDS at Vierte Welt. 
 

Hamady Bocoum, born in Kanel in north-eastern Senegal, is Director of the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire at Cheikh Anta Diop University and Director of the Museum of Black Civilisations in Dakar. Most recently, he published “The Search for Takrur - Archaeological Excavations and Reconnaissance along the Middle Senegal Valley” with Roderick Mcintosh and Susan Keech Mcintosh (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2017).
Hamady Bocoum participated in Le Langage des Objets in Dakar, Senegal on the 4th of December 2021.

Halima Diallo holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Paris. She is a lecturer at UCAD and is responsible for gender equality at the NGO Right To Play. Halima Diallo has worked with several UN organizations and entities – including the UN Population Fund, UN Women and the World Food Programme – to promote equal participation in decision-making processes, combat discrimination and gender-based violence, and ensure equal opportunities for leadership. In 2022, Halima Diallo was invited by Chancellor Olaf Scholz to join the Gender Advisory Council (GEAC) and develop recommendations across the G7 agenda.
Halima participated in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023 in Dakar, Senegal.

I am a forty-eight-year-old African Woman from the Kipsigis community currently based in Kenya. I own a company known as Harriet’s Botanicals in Nairobi Kenya, which has a focus on African Botanicals. We currently have five products: Arorwet (Menstrual and Digestive Herbs for Adult Women) and Tendwet (Prunus Africana and other Herbs for Adult Men), Sagawaita for Respiratory Health, Busarek ab Lelaitich for Gut Health and a Harriet’s Botanicals Wellness Journal. The four products are sourced from Sotik / Kapletundoh and Lelaitich both in Bomet County and other parts of the Rift Valley, Kenya. I am from both these parts as my mother’s ancestral home is Lelaitich and my father’s is Sotik. Within this project is growth of medicinal herbs and sustainable harvesting and propagation of existing trees, shrubs, and bushes to ensure feedstock for present and future generations. We use up to 50 different herbs for our formulation. In this capacity, we work with communities in this area who are also co-users and suppliers of the feedstock. We are also looking to develop products from the Maasai Community and collect wild-harvested and farm grown feedstock from an area known as Kisiriri in Mau Narok. We therefore have a community engagement program in this area looking at sustainable harvesting. For all three sites mentioned we have up to 400 participants in our community engagement programs which include information exchange on the herbs and their subsequent use for an urban and diaspora population. Within this group there are 50 herbal practitioners 20 of which we have contracts with for our products and for building a cultural archive. We have done needs assessment with these communities with reference to herbal medicine and identified potential sites for research and training, cultural and traditional language translation. Herbs we use include Arorwet (Cape Ash), Tendwet (Prunus Africana), Sagawaita (English Knobwood) and Muarobainne (Neem).
Prior to this I was a Finance Consultant and Investment Banker based in London and more recently with a focus on Climate Finance and Renewable Energy Projects. I worked for JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and the Financial Services Authority in London. I studied at the London School of Economics and have two degrees: LLB in Laws in Mercantile Law and LLM Laws in International Banking and Finance Law. This provided me with a lot of experience on Financial Markets, Compliance, and Legal issues in the corporate world. After that I worked in Kenya as an Entrepreneur Consultant and Project Leader in the Renewable Energy, Affordable Housing, Health and Water Sectors. This provided me with experience on running a young business, scale, and growth of SMEs in Africa.
I have since received obtained patents, copyrights, and trademarks to protect my inventions and formulas. My objective is to create a market for African sourced herbal products locally and in the diaspora and develop sustainable business practices around communities and conservation.
Harriet Chebet Ng'ok participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #2 – Decolonizing Nature in Reykjavík, Iceland from the 13th – 15th of September 2022 and in the Anti-Colonial Approaches to Nature Workshop in Nairobi on the 15ht of July 2022.

Henri Sagna was trained at the Ecole Nationale des Arts de Dakar (environment section) and received the first prize of the Senegalese plastic artists' salon in 2005. Some call him a "sculptor recycler". Starting from collected elements, recovered, the artist assembles them in original installations. He exhibits in several museums including the Montreal Fine Arts Museum, the Dapper Museum in Paris, the Der Dinge Museum in Berlin. The St Louis Museum in Aigues Mortes and the Art Fair in Dubai. Henri Sagna is an avant-garde artist who totally breaks with a certain belief in drawing clear boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture, indeed the lines of demarcation are not so watertight … volumes come out, forms spring up, alternating color contrasts, reinforcing the gravity of the theme … considering that Sagna constructs, shapes, mixes elements and forms and that each part of his sculptures is conceived with a precise intention. 
Henri Sagna is currently holding a TALKING OBJECTS LAB residency at the Musée Théodore Monod and participated in in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023 in Dakar, Senegal.

hn. lyonga is a Black, Queer, interdisciplinary writer, Poet, and currently the Neighbour in Residence at Gropius Bau.
I live and work in Berlin. I have lived in other places – and they are still present in my body, my writings, and in my life in the diaspora. I have not come or arrived here on my own. I have arrived on the shoulders of others. My work focuses on writing, storytelling, community, ways of being and existing in space, and migrational inquiries pertinent to historically colonized and marginalized communities. Among other things, I am a neighbor, a (livelong) student, a founding member of the Black Student Union at Humboldt University, a member of the curatorial board of BARAZANI.berlin - Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand and a member of the Field Narratives Collective, working on ideas of rural biographies, transgenerational and cross-continental storytelling. My work qualifies as Wake Work because it is labor within the space of paradoxes surrounding Black citizenship. And because it is the work of continuous inhabiting and rupturing of episteme – Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.
hn. lyonga participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #2 – Decolonizing Nature in Reykjavík, Iceland from the 13th – 15th of September 2022. hn. lyonga also participated in LA PALABRE #1 - CUTTING FRUITS and  LA PALABRE #2 - COLLECTING SEEDS at Vierte Welt. 

Ibou Coulibaly Diop is a literary scholar and curator. He is currently developing a remembrance concept for colonialism for the Berlin Senate and is working together with Lorraine Bluche for the Berlin City Museum Foundation in the Decolonisation Competence Centre. As part of his dissertation, in which he explores the global(ised) dimension of Michel Houellebecq's literature in particular and the question of globalisation and universalisation of literature in general, he found that globalisation and universalisation are described as new elements, although Senegal's first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, had already addressed the issue of universality much earlier. In his work, he is interested in the question of how we can grow together despite our differences and what approaches can be found in the literature on the subject.
Ibou participated in LA PALABRE #5 - REFUSING EMBRACING LETTING GO at Vierte Welt. Ibou is the co-curator of the exhibition Ré-imaginer le passé, which takes place at the Musée Théodore Monod, Dakar and the Kindl, Berlin.

Born in 1976 in Saint louis du Sénégal, Ibrahima Thiam moved to Dakar where he studied economics. Following a workshop organized by the Goethe-Institut during the Month of Photography in Dakar in 2009, he discovered a passion for photography. Self-taught, he is interested in memory, archives, African orality as well as myths and legends. Ibrahima Thiam collects images, some of which come from his family archives, which contribute to forge his imagination. He has also been developing a practice that highlights the deities of the Lebu communities. His work has been presented in several national and international group exhibitions, including: Raw Material Company, Dakar, Senegal, (2020), The View From Here: Contemporary Perspectives From Senegal, Zuccaire Gallery, SUNY Stony Brook University, New York, USA (2019), Gallery Eulenspiegel, Bale, Switzerland, (2017), Bronx University, New York, USA (2016) as well as Telling Time at the 10th edition of the Rencontres de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de la photographie (2015). He lives and works between Saint louis and Dakar.
During his residence at the Museum Théodore Monod in Dakar, Senegal, Ibrahima Thiam participated in Revisiter les Objets on May the 26th 2022. Moreover, he participated in the Artistic LABoratory RÉ-IMAGINER LE PASSÉ from the 22nd to 24th May 2023 in Dakar. He is one of the artists being shown in the Ré-imaginer le passé exhibition at the Musée Théodore Monod, Dakar and at the KINDL, Berlin.

Ikal is an activist for grassroots indigenous rights, social and environmental justice and community organizer working towards indigenous, grassroots groups and especially women inclusion in decision-making and leadership within their lands and territories. She is the Director and Head of Programs of Friends of Lake Turkana (FoLT), an organization that she co-founded. FoLT works with and on behalf of communities within the greater Turkana basin to demand collective social, economic, cultural, environmental, and territorial justice and to foster the participation of indigenous communities. The focus areas are: 1) Providing women leadership - increasing women's participation in decision-making; 2) Increasing engagement of communities in budgeting, policy and development processes; 3) Protecting Lake Turkana - demanding for improved management of Lake's ecosystem; 4) Safeguarding land and environmental rights. Ikal is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Geography at University of Leicester, and has a master’s in Public Policy from the Department of Political Science in State University of New York (SUNY) Stony Brook, and a Bachelor’s degree at University of Nairobi.

Isabel Raabe is a curator and project developer from Berlin. She studied Contemporary Dance and later cultural management and curated numerous interdisciplinary international art and cultural projects. She is interested in curatorial and artistic strategies that deconstruct Western perspectives and traditions of thought. She recently initiated RomArchive - Digital Archive of the Roma, funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, which won the European Heritage Award 2019 and the Grimme Online Award 2020. Isabel Raabe initiated the project TALKING OBJECTS which consists of the TALKING OBJECTS LAB and the TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE, a digital archive for decolonial knowledge production which is supposed to be launched in 2024.

Israel Kaunatjike was born in 1947 in Okahandja, the memorial site of the Herero, in Namibia. He has lived in Berlin since 1970. As a Herero activist, he is committed to the recognition of the genocide against the Herero and Nama in what was then German Southwest Africa, now Namibia. In Berlin, he is a member of the alliance "Völkermord verjährt nicht" and works with Berlin Postkolonial e.V.
 

Jasmin Anna Awale has been a Master's student of global art history with a focus on Africa at the FU Berlin since April 2022. She participated in a tandem exchange organized by Kulturweit and the German UNESCO Commission. The exchange focused on the histories of colonialism and the perspectives of our postcolonial present. In her university past, Jasmin has worked extensively on viewer reactions to sculptures read as female. She is currently looking for new research interests.

Jeanne Mizero Nzakizabandi is a curator, educator and writer. She lives in the Rhein Main area where she studied Political Science and Philosophy (B.A.) as well as Curatorial Studies (M.A.). With this background, she strives for a transdisciplinary practice, which not least includes issues around community care. Jeanne's interests include post- and decolonial theories, Black German history, and Black feminist theorizing particularly in relation to body politics. In the past, she has worked for the Historisches Museum Frankfurt, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, among others.

Jim Chuchu is a filmmaker, musician, and visual artist living and working in Nairobi, Kenya. He is the co-founder of The Nest Collective – a multidisciplinary artist collective based in Nairobi. In 2015, Jim Chuchu co-founded HEVA, an East African creative enterprise fund based in Kenya that invests in the creative industries sector in the East African region. His films and artworks have been shown at MoMA, the Toronto, Berlin and Rotterdam film festivals, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Vitra Design Museum, among others. For UNEXPECTED LESSONS, Jim Chuchu was part of the curatorial team of the TALKING OBJECTS LAB. 

Josephine Apraku is a scholar of African Studies who has been working as a lecturer at both the Alice Salomon University and Humboldt University in Berlin since 2015. They also write columns for Missy Magazine and Edition F.
Josephine Apraku participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #3 – Decolonizing Romantik, a digital event on December 10, 2022 in Berlin.

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land, and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of archaeology, agriculture, and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruly potential of ruination as an integral part of life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.
Jumana Manna participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #2 – Decolonizing Nature in Reykjavík, Iceland from the 13th – 15th of September 2022.

Kahira Ngige is an urbanist interested in the way design influences cultural production and shapes cities. His writing has appeared in Columbia University's Avery Journal, the New York Review of Architecture, Harvard's Graduate School of Design's UD:ID and the Goethe Institute. In addition, Kahira’s photography work has been exhibited at the Kirkland Gallery in Cambridge, MA. Kahira holds a master’s in urban planning from Harvard University and lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya.

Karwitha Kirimi is an artist and writer based in Nairobi, East Africa. They work with words, images, ritual, and research. Their poetic practice attends to the word, the line, silence, and space. They use performance as a medium for ritual practice — they perform where their beloveds are to be found. For Karwitha, to be a cultural worker is to work with the very pillars of reality. Their explorations are fueled by questions that emerge within the dark. Their work is in service of worlds where African babies are free, beloved, whole and complex. Karwitha is made possible by her ancestors and communities. They embrace play as process and impetus. When not loitering under the trees, they can be found drinking the moon.
 

Kavita Meelu is a culinary curator, cultural anthropologist and community organizer. Over the past 14 years, she has created a number of different projects that support budding food entrepreneurs to build independent food businesses. With a particular focus on markets, migration and culture her projects include Street Food Thursday, Burgers & Hip Hop and Kebabistan to name a few. Kavita’s research into the intersections of race, power, and gastronomy at SOAS led her to co-found the 'Smells Like Collective'. A community of BIPOC chefs, artists, writers, budding cooks, restaurant owners and food lovers use storytelling to celebrate and negotiate food culture on their own terms. Alongside working as a freelance cultural Anthropologist, Kavita is currently developing a TV show that uses our favorite food to explore our biggest social issues.   
Kavita Meelu participated in LA PALABRE #1 - CUTTING FRUITS in Vierte Welt.

Having found a scarcity of Malaysian and Singaporean food in Berlin, Kaylin Eu founded Ma-Makan in May 2017. Kaylin had moved to the German capital a few years prior, and decided to start cooking the dishes her parents brought over from Singapore to her native Melbourne – not just for herself, but for the appetite of the public. All of the spice pastes, condiments, and stocks are made from scratch, prepared with traditional methods while still preserving a note of the chef’s personality. In the following years, Ma-Makan hosted several sold-out pop-up meals across the city, hosted an 8-month-long residency in Neukölln, and in November 2022, finally opened their doors to their first brick and mortar in Kreuzberg, Ma-Makan Kopitiam. The dishes of Ma-Makan are tokens of memory: the taste of a family’s home cooking, the history, and heritage that can only be passed down through cuisine. 

Keguro Macharia (pronouns a/u/he) is an independent scholar from Nairobi, Kenya. Macharia's scholarship explores the relation between difference and freedom across the Black Diaspora, focusing specifically on the seam between Africa and Afro-diaspora. Macharia is the author of Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (NYU Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Alan Bray Memorial Prize. Other writing has appeared in Brick, GLQ, Research in African Literatures, Callaloo, Critical Arts, The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, and The Queer African Reader. Macharia blogs at http://gukira.wordpress.com and is on Twitter as @keguro. 

Creative Director and co-founder at Musel, Kofi has developed his creativity drawing on his experience in the foundation of 3 distinct cultures from Togo, his origins, Gabon where he was born and Senegal where he spent 20 years of his life. Creative, Pan-African and futuristic. His audacity and leadership in the creative industries sector opened him the doors of NASA Open Data innovation program (Spaceapps) that he led during 5 years in Senegal, The institution that created the NASA Museum Alliance.
With a 15 years's experience background in graphic design, 10 years in the video games's industry and a travel experience in 10 African countries including Ethiopia, South Africa, Senegal and Algeria. He understands the challenges and codes of African heritage in the digital age. He is recognized as a GIZ/BMZ (German Government) Certified Gamification Consultant for his forward thinking on digitization, engagement and think out of the box attitude. Kofi has an  e-estonia e-residency (e-nationality) from Estonia, the most advanced digital society in the world.
The Microsoft Education Center recently declared kofi as a Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert and a Microsoft esport leader in 2021. In 2022 during the 40 years's anniversary of Creation & design content world leader Adobe, he became an official Adobe Express Ambassador driving and educate the production's philosophy around Graphic design in West Africa.
Kofi Sika Latzoo participated in TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE @Dakar in Dakar, Senegal between the 17th and 18th January 2023. 

Kylie Kiunguyu is a Communications specialist with a penchant for poetry and creative writing. She has over nine years’ experience in the corporate and non-profit sectors. As an avid Pan-Africanist and social justice advocate, her published work champions Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR), gender inequality, minority representation, social justice, African knowledge and histories, climate action, conservation and regeneration.
Her editorial work can be found on platforms such as This is Africa, Daily Nation, and Love Matters. She is also a published contributor to the anthologies “Akello” and “A Side of Raunch”, and a fierce hoarder of more personal pieces on her blog; Beads and Mirrors.
She is part of African Digital Heritage and a member of the TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE TEAM.

I am a sociologist and community organiser with over ten years of experience in research, advocacy, community building, project management, monitoring, and evaluation in Senegal and Canada. I currently work as a gender equality advisor for FAR (Femmes Agriculture Résilientes) in the Kolda, Sedhiou and Tamba areas of Senegal. My job is to ensure that women from different backgrounds are included and that their voices are heard. This means working on tools and activities for advocacy, accompanying farmers' organisations on the way to a better consideration of women, and preparing and facilitating trainings around gender equality. 
I am a co-founder of the Jàma collective that launched #DeetDuWaaw #SiifNaDakk, a campaign to raise awareness and identify community strategies to combat sexual violence in Senegal. I am also an adjunct professor at Saint Paul's University in Ottawa, Canada, and my courses focus on gender, race, ethnicity and critical development theories. In 2005, I was a recipient of the CODESRIA Small Grants Programme as part of my Master's degree. I am currently an associate researcher at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute (Concordia University).
Laïty Fary Ndiaye participated in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023 in Dakar, Senegal.

The LAM Sisterhood is an award-winning content studio that fills the world with stories for African women to feel seen, heard and beloved. From producing an original children's podcast "KaBrazen - Our rich histories for our little ones", to teaching their unique collaborative creation methods at Stanford, NYU and others, their multimedia works span multiple disciplines including film, stage, audio storytelling and experiential theatre. 

 
Lamin Leroy Gibba [he/him] is an actor, screenwriter and filmmaker. He gained early theater experiences in the youth group of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg and later attended drama school at The New School University in New York City. After his studies he appeared in film and television productions, as well as theater (Classical Theater of Harlem, Lincoln Center, Performance Space New York, Theater Oberhausen, Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Kampnagel Hamburg). Lamin has written and produced several short films, including FEVER SOURCE and CLOUD ZERO. He wrote, co-produced, and stars in the short film DOGFRIEND (OT: HUNDEFREUND) that screened across the world, including Tribeca Film Festival and the BFI Flare Film Festival. The film won the first prize at the International Short Film Festival Berlin and was nominated for the German Short Film Award 2022. In 2023 Lamin appeared on the European Forbes 30 under 30 list. His television show BLACK FRUIT (OT: SCHWARZE FRÜCHTE), in which he is the showrunner, screenwriter and lead actor, will appear on ARD in 2024. Lamin lives and works in Berlin.
Lamin Leroy Gibba participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #3 – Decolonizing Romantik, a digital event on December 10, 2022 in Berlin. He also participated in LA PALABRE #6 — LISTENING TO THE OBJECTS on the 14th of December 2023 at Vierte Welt. 

Lene Markusen is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work weighs in on historical discontinuities and spatial disparities, activating the catalytic and micro-utopian moments of performance and storytelling. Through drawings, films and video installations she makes women’s hardships and desires — in different political situations and systems from socialism to capitalism — aesthetically and narratively tangible. Most recently she has been interested in the topic of trans-cultural memory for which she follows the lives of European migrant women who moved from East to West. Based on conversations and interviews she explores life stories and somatics from an ecofeminist and postsocialist perspective in Germany, Denmark and Italy. Her films and video installations have been screened and exhibited at Haus der Kulturen der Welt; Kunstverein Braunschweig; BeFem Festival, Belgrade; Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden: Hamburger Kunsthalle; Photo Paris; Halle für Kunst Lüneburg; K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen; Stuk, Leuven, and Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, among others. She won the Villa Romana Prize in 2021. In 2019, she published her artist book Sisters Alike. Female Identities in the Post-Utopian with Spector Books. Until 2017 she was a professor at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. In the context of the Field Narratives Collective she retraces the personal reminiscences of gender oppression in the agrarian biographies of her female ancestors. Lene Markusen participated in LA PALABRE #2 - COLLECTING SEEDS at Vierte Welt. 
 

Lucky 3 (est. 2019)  is a collective founded by Darren Mark, Dýrfinna Benita Basalan, and Melanie Ubaldo; Icelandic artists of Filipino origins. 
Unreliable narrators at best, our voices speak of diaspora-of people experiencing constant displacement, renovation and salvaging heritage in the face of cultural loss. With an unapologetically unabashed honesty and vulnerability, the collective addresses issues, but not limited to; the Filipino immigrant experience in Iceland, displacement and racism.
Lucky 3 participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #2 – Decolonizing Nature in Reykjavík, Iceland from the 13th – 15th of September 2022.

Magnus Elias Rosengarten is a curator, writer, and performer who works at the interactions of discourse / performance curation, Film and Video / public programming and criticism. His practice engages in the complex relations between bodies and space in Contemporary Art. Central questions are: Which spaces turn some bodies into a political issue and others not? Who has the power to define bodies and what realities are produced to that effect? He has written and published for ContemporaryAnd Magazine (C&), Artforum and X. Berlin Biennale, among others, as well as presented work at the Kraine Theatre, New York City (2016), the California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2018) and Ballhaus Naunynstraße (2023). More recently he curated public programs for Gropius Bau and Berliner Festspiele.
Magnus Rosengarten regularly moderates and interviews for various Talking Objects projects, including UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge from the 11th – 12th of June 2021. In 2023, he moderated three wonderful LA PALABRE evenings.

Dr. Mahret Ifeoma Kupka is an art scholar, freelance writer and, since 2013, Curator of Fashion, Body and Performance at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main. In her exhibitions, lectures, texts, and interdisciplinary projects, she addresses the issues of the future, memory culture, representation, and the decolonization of art and cultural practices in Europe and on the African continent. She is a member of the advisory board of the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland e.V. and spokesperson for the Neue Deutsche Museumsmacher*innen. Mahret Ifeoma Kupka is part of the curatorial team of TALKING OBJECTS LAB and participated in LA PALABRE #4 — LEARNING LESSON at Vierte Welt. 

Born on the second of March 1967 in Saint Louis, the first capital of AOF (French West Africa), more precisely in Ndoiloféne in the Sor district in the northern part of Senegal. Maïssa Tounkara was one of eleven children and from a very young age he had to combine Koranic and academic (French) education as required by Saint Louisian traditions. Fiery, an objector, a dissident in his youth, he took refuge in reading, which certainly allowed him to escape and to understand certain aspects of life. His passion for reading seems to have come from his mother, a state nurse at the time, who brought him books. Through the books he used to read, he discovered various works of art that ended up fascinating him. This fascination materialized in an intense passion for art education, and more precisely for drawing.
Maïssa Tounkara participated in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023 in Dakar, Senegal.

El Hadji Malick Ndiaye is a researcher at Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar and curator of the Théodore Monod Museum, as well as Secretary General of ICOM, Senegal. He was part of the directorial team of Dak'art 2018 and curator of Dak'art 2020. As a theorist and curator, his work focuses on contemporary art, African cultural heritage, global history, and African museum institutions; he teaches art history and African cultural heritage. Ndiaye holds a PhD in art history from Université Rennes II and is a graduate of the National Institute of Heritage in Paris and the National Institute of Art History, Paris. El Hadji Malick Ndiaye is part of the Curatorial Team of TALKING OBJECTS LAB.

Dr. Mamarame Seck is a scholar at the Fundamental Institute of Black Africa (IFAN), in the department of African languages and civilizations, more precisely in the linguistics laboratory. He is also curator of the Gorée Historical Museum.
Dr. Seck received his doctorate degree from the University of Florida in the United States, where he taught for a few years before joining IFAN. He is the author of several publications, the most recent of which is: Youssou Ndour: A Cultural Icon and Leader in Social Advocay (2020), published by Peter Lang, New York.
Dr. Mamarame Seck is interested in Wolof language and discourse, Sufi oral productions in West Africa, and Senegalese culture and society. His recent investigations focus on the manuscript and the Senegalese origins of the Muslim slave Omar Ibn Said, captured and then deported to Charleston, North Carolina, United States, in 1807.
Mamarame Seck participated in Le Langage des Objets in Dakar, Senegal on the 4th of December 2021.

Mame Penda BA is an associate professor of political science, former special advisor to the Rector and former Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the Gaston Berger University of Saint-Louis (Senegal).  She is currently editor-in-chief of Global Africa, an interdisciplinary and pan-African journal on global issues published in French, English, Arabic, and Swahili. She is the Executive Secretary of the African Studies Association in Africa (ASA-A) and co-editor of Critical Investigations around Humanitarianism in Africa (Cihablog). She also directs the Laboratoire de recherche sur les sociétés et les pouvoirs Afrique/Diaspora (LASPAD/ www.laspad.org). Mame Penda BA is also a member of several international research networks. Her research in recent years has focused on public policy analysis, particularly in the areas of scientific research, education, gender, and data policy.
Mame Penda BA participated in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023 in Dakar, Senegal.

Ciss has never abandoned the search for the significance of traditional forms. His work, which today also utilises new digital media, sets its reference points historically both to the power relations that emerged from colonialism and to pre-colonial knowledge and its symbolism. Following the Congo Conference in Berlin from November 1884 to February 1885, the artist Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, a Senegalese living in Berlin, founded an art laboratory called Laboratoire de Déberlinisation in 2001. This laboratory is a conceptual, active space for art that aims to expose exploitation, ideologies and mercantile practices applied in Africa at the end of the 19th century. The project works collaboratively and involves different professional groups and artistic practices. Faced with the insurmountable obstacles that prevent the emergence of a single currency and a single space of mobility and exchange indefinitely, Mansour Ciss Kanakassy has joined forces with other artists to achieve the seemingly impossible: The Afro. The Afro is an imaginary single currency for Africa, is the artistic answer to the failed politics of the post-independence era. The Afro is a conceptual work composed of multiple practices such as installation, print, performance and public lecture.
Mansour Ciss Kanakassy participated in the Artistic LABoratory RÉ-IMAGINER LE PASSÉ from the 22nd to 24th May 2023 in Dakar. He is one of the artists being shown in the Ré-imaginer le passé exhibition at the Musée Théodore Monod, Dakar and at the KINDL, Berlin.

BIPoC Colombian artist, decolonial curator, choreographer, performer, and researcher. 
Martha got her Master in Arts at the University of the Arts, UdK Berlin. She studied dance in her home country and completed her dance theatre & solo dance studies at the Folkwang-University Essen under the direction of Pina Bausch. In 2019, she was Pina Bausch Fellowship recipient. 
Her own creations have been invited to festivals and venues in Europe, Asia and the so called Americas. She is artistic director of Plataforma/SurReal Berlin Festival. In her curatorial praxis she reflects on (de)coloniality processes and forms of survival that artists have experienced in their migration to Europe or as part of local utopias. 2021/22 she was associate curator of the ENCOUNTERS programme at Radialsystem Berlin.
Hincapié Charry has created several unlearning spaces dealing with underrepresented and excluded BIPoC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) expressions and struggles. She has been opening up a dialogue space between continents through a transdisciplinary reflection on the body, where the topics of climate chaos, the relationship between art, human/more-than-human, and the visible with the invisible world, find a platform.
Martha Hincapié Charry participated in LA PALABRE #3 — TELLING TALES at Vierte Welt.

María do Mar Castro Varela holds a degree in psychology, a degree in educational science, a doctorate in political science, and a professorship in general education and social work at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, queer studies, trauma, and emancipation. Castro Varela studied education and psychology at the University of Cologne and received her doctorate in political science from the Justus Liebig University of Giessen in 2005 on the topic of “Utopian Discourses of Migrant Women”. Among other publications, Castro Varela wrote together with Nikita Dhawan “Postkoloniale Theorien: Eine kritische Einführung” (2005/2020), together with Yener Bayramoglu “Pos/Pandemische Leben. Eine neue Theorie der Fragilität” (2021), together with Max Appenroth: “Trans Health. International Perspectives on Care for Trans Communities (2022) and together with Bahar Oghalai: “Freund*innenschaften. Dreiklang einer politischen Praxis (2023).
María do mar participated in the Artistic LABoratory RÉ-IMAGINER LE PASSÉ from the 22nd to 24th May 2023 in Dakar.

Matthew Blaise is a non-binary, openly gay award-winning LGBTQ+ rights activist. They’ve dedicated their life and work to confronting the violence towards gender non-conforming persons & Queer people in Nigeria by creating safe spaces for the LGBTQI+ community, advocating for Queer rights through online and in-person events, and mobilising actions.
Matthew is the founder of Òbòdò, a youth-led organization that is focused on advancing Queer education and Rights in Nigeria through innovative mediums like art, tech and outreach. They are a recipient of the 2021 MTV EMAs Generation Change award, SOGIESC activist of the year award 2020, and they’ve been nominated for The Future Awards Africa, DAZED 100, The Diversity and Difference prize. 
They’ve also been featured on Vogue, Ze.tt, ZDFheute, Out Magazine, PinkNews, Time, Bloomberg, Channel4News, among other notable global media outlets and publications.

Melody Makeda Ledwon, socialized in Berlin and New York, is a translator, social pedagogue and yoga teacher. In her work, she deals with Afro-diasporic history(ies) and perspectives on sexuality, body and language. She founded BPoC Community Yoga Berlin in 2015 and launched the Network of Black Translators in 2020.

Miriam Siré Camara is founder and managing director of akoma coaching & consulting (2014) and akoma art (2022). For almost 20 years, she has been designing and accompanying classical and discrimination-critical transformation processes in art and cultural institutions, non-profit, and profit organisations as a consultant and coach. She is also a speaker and moderator in the fields of diversity/discrimination, power and art and a freelance curator. 
As part of baobab créations, Miriam is part of the Ré-imaginer le passé exhibition at the Musée Théodore Monod, Dakar and the KINDL, Berlin. In 2023 Miriam has moderated the last three evenings of the La PALABRE series. 

Mutanu is a digital society scholar who works with African communities to identify how they can use technology to protect, preserve and promote their culture and heritage assets. She has extensive experience in designing holistic digital approaches that support research and innovation, that centre the needs and realities of communities, in the cultural heritage sector in Kenya. Her research interests lie at the intersection of digital storytelling, cultural heritage, gender studies and community participation. Mutanu has a background in Computer Science and a specialization in digital cultures and community development. She consults for a variety of national and international organizations.
She is part of African Digital Heritage and a member of the TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE TEAM.

Mũthoni Mwangi is a multidisciplinary creator working at the intersection of African philosophy, Cultural heritage, and community development. Her approach is mostly experimental and grounded in the spirit of Community building and community care. At ADH, she works as a research associate and curator on various projects. She is a published poet and often writes for the ADH website. She has a BA in Development Studies and Philosophy. Muthoni spends most of her time reading, writing, thinking about or eating potatoes, making zines, and watching Salem.
She is part of African Digital Heritage and a member of the TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE TEAM.

Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Writer, Filmmaker, and Art Historian who lives and works in Accra, Ghana. She is Founder of the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, through which she has pioneered a Pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia, a Mobile Museums Project, and curated Ghana’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She published her first novel The God Child with Bloomsbury in 2019, and with Penguin in German in 2021. She has made award-winning films for museums such as Tate Modern, LACMA and The New Museum, and lectures a course on History and Theory at the Architectural Association in London. She is the recipient of various awards and honours, having been named one of the Apollo ’40 under 40’; one of 50 African Trailblazers by The Africa Report; a Quartz Africa Innovator in 2017; one of 12 African women making history in 2016 and one of 100 women of 2020 by Okayafrica. She received the 2015 the Art & Technology Award from LACMA; the 2016 AIR Award, which “seeks to honour and celebrate extraordinary African artists who are committed to producing provocative, innovative and socially-engaging work”; a 2018 Soros Arts Fellowship, was a 2018 Global South Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, was appointed to the Advisory Council of Oxford University’s Cultural Programme in 2020, was a Principal Investigator on the Action for Restitution to Africa programme, and is currently Special Advisor to the Ghanaian Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture on Museums and Cultural Heritage.
Nana Oforiatta Ayim participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge from 11th – 12th of June 2021.

Natasha A. Kelly has a PhD in Communication Studies and Sociology with a research focus on colonialism and feminism. Born in the UK and bred in Germany the author, curator and lecturer has taught at numerous universities in Germany and Austria. As Research Assistant at the Centre for transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt-University Berlin (2010 – 2013) she dealt with the decoloniality of knowledge, power and beings. In her publications e.g. »Afroism« (2008), »Sisters & Souls« (2015), »Afrokultur« (2016) and in her creative works e.g. »EDEWA« (2010 – 2018), »Giftschrank« (German Historical Museum, 2016/2017, Museum Schöneberg 2017) und »African_Diaspora Palast« (»World Exhibition_Reformation«, Wittenberg 2017) she combines theory and praxis at the intersection of academia, art and society. Furthermore, she has been active for the Black German Community for several years. In addition to her consulting work for various art institutions, she was the artistic director of the theater series »M(a)y Sister«, which was performed at the HAU Hebbel am Ufer Theater in Berlin from 2015 to 2018. Her award-winning debut film »Milli’s Awakening« (2018) was commissioned by the 10th Berlin Biennale and screened in national and international settings including Museum of Modern Art MMK Frankfurt, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Kirchner Museum Davos as well at venues throughout Europe, Australia and in the USA. Her youngest book is a collection of German translations of the foundational Black Feminists (from Sojourner Truth to Kimberlé Crenshaw) and marks the first in a new series of Black Feminist Readers published by Unrast Verlag Münster.
Natasha A. Kelly participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge from the 11th – 12th of June 2021.

Neo Sinoxolo Musangi reads, writes and forages in Olkejuado, Kenya. Their work-life dwells on uncertainty, failure, memory-making and the alternative articulations of queer world-making through biographical vernaculars.
Neo Musangi participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #2 – Decolonizing Nature in Reykjavík, Iceland from the 13th – 15th of September 2022, Imagining an Archive for Decolonial Knowledge, a digital conversation in December 2021 and contributed to LA PALABRE #2 — COLLECTING SEEDS with a text about their performance Dogs Hunting in a Park. 
 

With ten years experience, Nicodemus Omundo is a chef-entrepreneur, author and a systems thinker. Nic sees and uses food as a powerful tool to solve some of humanity's biggest problems as relates to food systems. He is the Co-founder of Organic Life Limited. Organic life is an agri-technology social enterprise based in Nairobi Kenya that empowers small-holder farmers to increase their yield and profit through good agricultural practices He's currently focused on reducing food loss and waste in the agri-food systems supply chain and is currently curating a knowledge collective that will facilitate conversation and action towards addressing this massive food system issue. He is the author of two books: Organic Life's Guide to Concoctions and Minimal Eats - A manifesto for the Anthropocene. He is also a 2022 East Africa Acumen fellow and a 2021 Future Food institute alumnus. (Italy). As a believer in the power of collective impact, connection and collaboration, Nic is a member of different organizations that champion sustainable food systems such as the Chef's Manifesto (UK), Social Gastronomy Movement (Br), Route to Food Initiative (KE). From time to time Nic hosts private tasting menus to create awareness on plant-based meals.

Nikita Dhawan holds the Chair of Political Theory and History of Ideas at the Technical University of Dresden. Her teaching and research focuses on global justice, human rights, democracy, and decolonization. In 2017, she was awarded the Käthe-Leichter Prize for outstanding achievements in women's and gender studies and for supporting the women's movement and implementing gender equality. She has received visiting fellowships from the Universidad de Costa Rica; the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the University of Melbourne, Australia; the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley, USA; the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain; Pusan National University, South Korea; and Columbia University, New York, USA. Selected Publications: Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007); Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World(ed., 2014); Reimagining the State: Theoretical Challenges and Transformative Possibilities (ed., 2019); Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans: Critical Theories of Decolonization (forthcoming). She has been awarded the Gerda Henkel Visiting Professorship at Stanford University for the winter quarter of 2023.
Nikita Dhawan participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #3 – Decolonizing Romantik, a digital event on December 10, 2022 in Berlin. She also participated in the Artistic LABoratory RÉ-IMAGINER LE PASSÉ from the 22nd to 24th May 2023 and in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023, both in Dakar.

Njoki Ngumi is a writer and feminist thinker who has held positions in private and public health care sectors in Kenya. She is a founding member of the Nest Collective, a Kenyan multidisciplinary gathering of artists, builders and makers, where she has expanded her practice into film, research design, and organisational, collaborative strategy.
Njoki's cross sectoral work and organising was also core to the Nest Collectives's founding and set-up of 2 now independent entities:  HEVA, Africa's first cultural and creative economy catalyst facility, in 2013; and Strictly Silk, a festival, club and multimedia entity dedicated to happiness, enjoyment, care and community with and among people marginalised by gender in 2018. Njoki is currently in post-production with the Nest's latest film work, The Feminine and The Foreign.
Njoki Ngumi is part of the curatorial team of the TALKING OBJECTS LAB.

Nnenna Onuoha is a visual anthropologist and filmmaker whose practice is informed by her Ghanaian-Nigerian heritage as well as her background in history, anthropology, and cinema. Drawing on historical exclusion and the ongoing trivialization of black experience, her research and audiovisual work documents, archives, and reimagines the lives and legacies of Afrodescendant people in West Africa, Europe, and the United States. Her recent exhibition "Cartographies of Care" with Edna Bonhomme at alpha nova & galerie futura in Berlin (2020) explored Black women's and non-binary people's encounters with health care in Berlin, focusing not only on their experiences with medical racism, but also exploring how they find care and healing through community and indigenous practices.
Nnenna Onuoha is the curator of the online film program for UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge, and she participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #3 – Decolonizing Romantik, a digital event on December 10, 2022 in Berlin.

Noémi Michel is an antiracist and feminist scholar, activist and cultural worker. She is senior lecturer in political theory at the Department of Political Science of the University of Geneva and teaches on a regular basis at the Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design (HEAD) – Genève.  She is member of the European Race and Imagery Foundation (ERIF), the Collectif Faites des Vagues (based in Geneva). At the juncture of theory and artistic and collective experiments, her work is rooted in critical Black thought. It currently explores divergent understandings of antiracism in European public debates and institutions as well as diasporic Black feminist theories of political voice. Her recent writing has been published in Mirà (Nouveau Musée National de Monaco), Darkmatter Journal, Critical Horizons and Postcolonial studies. Her latest artistic collaborations include the series of radio broadcasts “la politique de la voix” (Radio 40) and a theatrical “talk show” about the Swiss (post)colonial imaginary staged at Festival de la Cité (Lausanne, Suisse).
Noémi Michel participated in Mapping Academia / The Pathways of Healing and Caring in New York, USA on the 17th of December 2021.

Nora Landkammer is an art educator and researcher in this field with a focus on the critique of racism and colonialism in education and cultural institutions. She worked in mediation in various cultural institutions and was deputy director of the Institute for Art Education at the Zurich University of the Arts until 2019. Her dissertation examined mediation in ethnological museums in a decolonizing perspective. In the project TRACES - Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts (2016-2019) she worked on the mediation of conflictual cultural heritage. Teaching positions at the Department of Art and Communicative Practice, University of Applied Arts Vienna; the Master Curatorial Studies, Zurich University of the Arts and at the Institute for the Artistic Teaching Profession, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Currently she is a substitute professor for art education at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. She is active in the collective EAR (e-a-r.net) as well as in the international network Another Roadmap for Arts Education.
Nora Landkammer participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge from the 11th – 12th of June 2021.

For the past decade, Marie Madeleine DIOUF, known as "NuNu", has passionately pursued her role as artistic director at NuNu Design. Her research into textiles and natural dyes enables her to weave the stories and experiences of people through the prism of design. Her devotion to textiles led her to set up her boutique in the heart of Dakar, where she brings her inspirations to life. The design workshops she oversees place great importance on African reality, with each material used carrying a story. Local fabrics, such as 'lepi' and indigo, are central to each of her designs. NuNu works actively with local dyers to promote our textiles and empower them. Since 2015, she has been committed to finding materials to magnify African textiles. Through the BANU space, an hour from the Senegalese capital; a space dedicated to dye vats, and to expressing the creativity of local women, weavers, and artisans. NuNu's curatorial achievements and some of the artistic projects she has carried out offer sustainable economic opportunities tending towards the empowerment of women/girls.
As part of baobab créations, NuNu is part of the Ré-imaginer le passé exhibition at the Musée Théodore Monod, Dakar and the KINDL, Berlin. 

Odome Angone is a teacher and researcher at the University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal. In the course of time, she became an international speaker for social sciences and a consultant for scientific governance.Her work is particularly concerned with the colonial legacy of patriarchy in relation to gender relations in the Francophonie. To this aim, her contributions question the construction of social representations, primarily stereotypes and clichés in the collective imaginary. Femmes noires francophones (Hermann Editions, Paris/Dakar, 2020), her most recent essay, deals with patriarchy and racism in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Odome Angone participated in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023 in Dakar, Senegal.

Olufisayo Bakare is an independent curator, researcher and art management professional who lives and works in Nigeria. Through her practice which focuses on evidence-based ethnographic research, she adopts the use of quantitative and qualitative research methods to support cultural policy. For over a decade, her research contributions continue to inform her academic and curatorial work. By engaging the works of indigenous artist and maker-communities, she actively contributes to the academic community in Nigeria with a specialised curriculum focused on Pre-Colonial art history. Her recent work for the Lagos State Government engaged with cultural policy, and the creative economy in the area. 
She is a contributor of UNEXPECTED LESSONS #4 – Decolonizing Restitution at G.A.S. Lagos, Feb 10, 2023.

Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation, born and based in London, UK. Through her work, Onyeka is animated by the question —  how do we live together? — with particular interest in the ways the sensorial, spatial and non-canonical ways of knowing can provide answers to this question. She uses embodiment, archives, narration and text to create structural ‘figure-of-eights’, a form that exposes a multiplicity of narratives. The work comprises untying strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound. Onyeka is part of B.O.S.S., a sound system collective that brings together a community of queer, trans and non binary people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism. Her works have been shown in the UK and internationally at film festivals and galleries. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019 and the 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship Award for Experimental Film. 

Patrick Maundu is an Ethnobotanist at the National Museums of Kenya and an honorary research fellow at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT. His research experience spans 30 years in Kenya and Sub-Saharan Africa.
His main interest has been identification, documentation, and promotion of African traditional and indigenous foods. Patrick led a multi-institutional team of researchers in promoting African leafy vegetables (2001-2010) in ten Sub-Saharan African countries. This work saw the return of indigenous vegetables in the Kenyan markets and diets. For these efforts, he was recognized as a guardian of biodiversity in a Global campaign for Diversity for Life and in addition received the 2006 CGIAR Outstanding Award for an innovative and highly effective campaign to promote the consumption of micronutrient-rich African leafy vegetables in Sub-Saharan Africa.
His work led to the decision by UNESCO’s sixteenth session of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage to place Kenya’s Success Story of promoting traditional food ways on the Register of Good Safeguarding Practices.
He is author or co-author of a number of books including: Indigenous Food Plants of Kenya (1999); Useful Trees and Shrubs of Kenya (2005); Useful Trees and Shrubs of Ethiopia (2007) and Traditional Foodways of the Pokot and Isukha communities of Kenya (2013); Co-author (2016) of the book ‘Recettes à base de légumes du couvert forestier, Burkina Faso. He is currently working with others on Traditional Foodways book series of various African communities (Mijikenda, Maasai, Dagara (Burkina Faso), Gumuz (Ethiopia) and developing a protocol for foodways documentation. 
Patrick Maundu participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #2 – Decolonizing Nature in Reykjavík, Iceland from the 13th – 15th of September 2022 and in the Anti-Colonial Approaches to Nature Workshop in Nairobi on the 15ht of July 2022.

Peggy Piesche, born and raised in Arnstadt/ GDR, is a literary and Cultural Studies scholar. She is heading the department of political education and plural democracy at the Federal Agency for Civic Education(bpb) with the main topics of diversity, intersectionality and decoloniality. She is also an activist at ADEFRA –„Schwarze Deutsche Frauen und Schwarze Frauen in Deutschland“ (Black German women and Black Women in Germany) and a board member ofASWAD (Association of the Worldwide Study of the African Diaspora).
Peggy Piesche participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge from the 11th – 12th of June 2021.

Renée Akitelek Mboya is a writer, curator and filmmaker. Her custom is one that relies on biography and storytelling as a form of research and production. Renée is presently preoccupied with looking and speaking about images and the ways in which they are produced but especially how they have come to play a critical role as evidence of white paranoia, and as aesthetic idioms of racial violence. She works between Nairobi and Kigali and is a collaborative editor with the Wali Chafu Collective.
Renée participated in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023 in Dakar, Senegal.

Rosie Olang is an arts writer, and visual artist based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her current artistic interests explore zines, artist's books and other unconventional book structures as a way to reimagine publishing and explore what new forms are possible when working with poetry, literature and visual arts in tandem. She has written for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Women's Studio Workshop, Enkare Review and A LongHouse  and works as the programs manager at the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute.

After completing her university studies with a Master's degree in Dakar and a postgraduate doctorate in history in Paris, she was recruited as a teacher/researcher at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar in 1984. She was seconded to IFAN-CAD in 2000 and was Head of the Human Sciences Department from 2008 to 2010. Head of the "Women, Societies and Culture" Laboratory of the Doctoral School of Human and Social Studies (ETHOS) at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar in 2009. In 2014, defended a thesis for the State Doctorate in History and from January 2015 to January 2017, head of the History Department of the Faculty of Letters and Humanities of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. From 2014 she has been involved in the work of the General History of Senegal project as deputy coordinator. Her research was oriented early on towards themes of political history, notably the question of ethnic minorities in the ancient kingdoms of northern Senegambia, as well as questions of settlement and systems of power. In addition, the study of women in their socio-political environment is another aspect of the research, as well as issues related to the slave trade and slavery, which gradually leads to global history. For some time now, my research perspectives have been broadened to include issues related not only to space, but also to identity.
Rokhaya Fall participated in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023 in Dakar, Senegal.
 

Ruth Nyambura is a Kenyan feminist and organizer whose research interests are primarily on
the agrarian political economy/ecology in Africa, as well as other parts of the Global South. She recently finished her term as the global coordinator of the Hands off Mother Earth Campaign (HOME) – a global movement supported by over 200 grassroots organizations resisting geoengineering technologies as well as other false solutions to the climate crisis. Previously Nyambura worked as the head of advocacy and communications for the African Biodiversity Network (ABN), one of the founding members and initial host of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA).
Nyambura has written extensively on various aspects of the current agrarian transformations in Africa with her overall work focusing on the ideological underpinnings of the ‘New Green Revolution in Africa’ and its ties to philanthro-capitalist organizations such as the Gates’ Foundation and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Ruth’s research also analyzes the rapidly changing policy and legislative frameworks across the continent related to biosafety and Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) regime which are not only criminalizing the rights of small-holder/-peasant farmers to use their traditional/indigenous seeds but are also opening up the space for foreign agri-business companies on the continent. Ruth is part of the No REDD in Africa (NRAN) Collective which challenges forest related carbon markets and documents the impacts of these schemes on local communities in Africa.
Nyambura is the founder and convenes the African Ecofeminist Collective. She is also a board member of the Climate Justice Fund (CJF) and the Blue Planet Project (BPP). Ruth holds an LL.M in Comparative Law, Economics and Finance from the University of Turin (UNITO), Italy and has been a judge on the International Tribunal on the Rights of Nature.

Sarafadeen Bello is a Design Architect, researcher and creative based in Lagos, Nigeria. He holds a degree in Architecture from Ivanovo State Polytechnic University in Russia. In 2016, he won the Ships and Ports Essay Competition; was shortlisted for the Ken Saro Wiwa Book Review Prize at the Lagos Book and Arts Festival in 2019 and placed second in the “How can we obey the law against war” essay competition in 2020.
He participated in the Remote Research Residency “Memory and Memoricide of Land” – Reimagining alternative models of Museums cooperated by Co.iki (Japan), supported by KOFICE (South Korea) in 2021 as part of “Project The Great Museum”. And received a Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation Fellowship Award in 2022. As part of his residency at G.A.S. Foundation, he conducted research into Technoheritage and Archives; and curated an exhibition titled “Artefacts (Re)connecting…Can you sense them?” (2022)
Currently, his practice explores the notion of access in relation to the discourse around decolonization, restitution and repatriation of cultural artefacts, objects and heritage materials (Benin Bronzes) with interests in archival materials and the Pan-Africanist movement. His medium of expression is through text, essays, research, design and installations. And his areas of interest operate within the overlapping boundaries of architecture, urban design, food systems, theatre, culture, social inclusion as well as public realm participation.
His writings and contributions can be found in African Union ECHO digital magazine 2017, Lagos Development Envision Lab 2017 Publication, The Great Museum website etc. Currently, he is co-curating and working on a Cross-Cultural Digital Exchange and Research Residency Project between Nigerian & Dutch Artists scheduled to take place in 2023.
He is a contributor of UNEXPECTED LESSONS #4 – Decolonizing Restitution at G.A.S. Lagos, Feb 10, 2023.

Sascia Bailer is a feminist researcher, writer, and curator working at the intersection of care, contemporary art, and social transformation. In her practice-based curatorial PhD at the Zurich University of the Arts & University of Reading, she explores the activist potential of curating as a form of care. She is the author of Curating, Care, and Corona (2020), the co-editor of the anthology Letters to Joan (2020), and the artist monographs Re-Assembling Motherhood(s) (2021) by Maternal Fantasies and What We Could Have Become: Reflections on Queer Feminist Curating (2021) by Malu Blume. She has worked internationally within the Arts including MoMA PS1, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In 2019/20 she was the Artistic Director at the M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, today she works as an interdependent curator and educator. She holds an MA from Parsons School of Design, and a BA from Zeppelin University.
 

I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Iceland.
I studied philosophy in Boston and Berlin, and did my doctorate on the philosophy of Nietzsche. I continue to do Nietzsche-research, but have also done work in feminist and environmental philosophy. I am interested in the intersection of philosophy of embodied life and phenomenology, and have been working on the relation between Nietzsche´s philosophy and the philosophies of Arendt, Beauvoir, Irigaray and Butler. The issue of embodiment is one of the main philosophical discoveries of the 20th century and Nietzsche as a philosopher of the body and feminist philosophies of the body have laid the ground for the idea of the human being as embodied and hence relational, contextual and therefore individual in a more profound sense. Within feminist thought, I have been interested in transnational issues as one of the founders and first chair of the board of the United Nations University GEST-Programme at the University of Iceland (now Unesco,  www.grocentre.is/gest). I was part of the group that ran the Nordic Gender and Philosophy summer schools. I am presently working on a book project on the philosophy of the body as principle investigator of the international research project Embodied Critical Thinking (www.ect.hi.is) and of "Training Embodied Critical Thinking", a Erasmus+ funded training program for methodologies of embodied critical thinking. Ultimately it is about embodied philosophical thinking as transformative knowledge, as knowledge that changes us and as a way of thinking that is needed in times of the environmental challenges we are faced with. Feminine wisdom is also part of that transformative power, but one of my research areas has been the contribution of women thinkers to the history of philosophy. I recently co-edited a collection of essays on methodologies of the study of women in the history of philosophy, and I have published three calendars with short entries on women philosophers from the beginnings of philosophy to the present, one of them for the World Congress of Philosophy in 2018 in Beijing as chair of the committee for gender issues of FISP that sponsors the world congress. I am interested in politics in a global sense, but my politics presently is very much about transforming the field and discipline of philosophy itself in light of feminist knowledge. For I believe that embodied, philosophical thinking has much to contribute to education in general, and I have been learning and researching the methods of embodied philosophical thinking developed by Eugene Gendlin and within micro-phenomenology for that purpose. And yes: academic philosophy is a field that is both professional and personal for in philosophy we have to be our own laboratories.
Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #2 – Decolonizing Nature in Reykjavík, Iceland from the 13th – 15th of September 2022.

Lahya (Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo) is a Black intersectionally interwoven and also interdisciplinary artist whose social realities are reflected in all the art and political work. Lahya's life includes the One World Poetry Night, the books "Kalunga's Child" (2009), "Letter Feelings - A Poetic Intervention" (2018), some zines, the e-book "Barrier Lines" (2022) and much more. Content touches on De:privilege, body healing, decolonisation, healing as well as collective love, practice and vulnerability, and biographical creative writing. Lahya is aware of one's existence at the intersection of identities that society seeks to marginalise, and knows that embodying emotions and delicately telling stories of freedom touches more than just ancestors. Lahya's pronouns are Lahya, if need be she/her. Lahya's bed lives in Berlin. FB & IG: lahya_aukongo
Lahya participated in LA PALABRE #3 — TELLING TALES at Vierte Welt.

Syowia Kyambi (b. Nairobi) is an interdisciplinary artist and curator who works across photography, video, drawing, sound, sculpture and performance installation. She holds an MFA from Transart Institute (2020) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002). In Kyambi’s artistic practice history collapses into the contemporary through the interventions of mischievous and disruptive interlocutory agents who interrogate the legacy of hurt inflicted by colonial projects that still frame the wider political conjuncture of now. The work is messy, complex and uneasy requiring its viewers and participants to bear witness to an embodiment of collective experiences, and a constant search for links between the present and the transformed present that is encapsulated in her work while asking essential questions about what is remembered, what is archived, and how we see the world anew. Rooted in her practice is a deep connection with the land, the earth and the idea of home. Along with exhibiting her works throughout Europe, Africa and the United States, Kyambi has received a number of awards including the FT/Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Awards (2016) and the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts Award (2004). Artist residencies include PRAKSIS, Norway (2019), CAD+SR Italy & Mexico (2018), HIAP, Finland (2018), IASPIS, Sweden (2013), and Delfina Foundation, UK (2016). In her curatorial work she has collaborated with Ostrale Centre for Contemporary Art Biennale, Dresden, Germany (2019, 2016) and Goethe-Institute, Kenya (2012, 2010) as well as working with collectives and individual artists in East Africa. Her work is held in a number of private and public collections including the Robert Devereux Collection, London, the Kouvola Art Museum Collection, Finland, the National Museum of Kenya and with the Sindika Dokolo Foundation.
Syowia Kyambi participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge from the 11th – 12th of June 2021.

Tabita Rezaire is infinity longing to experience itself in human form. Her path as an artist, devotee, yogi, doula, and soon to be farmer is all geared towards manifesting the divine in herself and beyond. As an eternal seeker, Tabita’s yearning for connection finds expression in her cross-dimensional practices, which envision network sciences - organic, electronic and spiritual - as healing technologies to serve the shift towards heart consciousness. 
Embracing digital, corporeal and ancestral memory, she digs into scientific imaginaries and mystical realms to tackle the colonial wounds and energetic imbalances that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits. Through screen interfaces and healing circles, her offerings aim to nurture our collective growth and expand our capacity for togetherness. 
Tabita is based near Cayenne in French Guyana, where she is currently studying Agriculture and birthing AMAKABA - her vision for collective healing in the Amazonian forest. Tabita is devoted to becoming a mother to the world.
Tabita Rezaire participated in Mapping Academia / The Pathways of Healing and Caring in New York, USA on the 17th of December 2021.

TDD is a nomadic supper club founded in 2007 by Gülsüm Güler & Inci Güler. The gatherings usually take place in temporary spaces where a restaurant atmosphere is created. The team members are artists working in the fields of photography, sculpture, education, graphic design and visual arts – with a passion for food, urban interventions and interdisciplinary dialogues. Bon Appétit! TDD served delicious Mercimek Köfte for the event LA PALABRE #2 - COLLECTING SEEDS at Vierte Welt. 
 

Tímea Junghaus is an art historian and contemporary art curator. She started in the position of executive director of the Berlin-based European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture in September, 2017.
Previously, Junghaus was Research Fellow of the Working Group for Critical Theories at the Institute for Art History, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2010-2017). She has researched and published extensively on the conjunctions of modern and contemporary art with critical theory, with particular reference to issues of cultural difference, colonialism, and minority representation. She is completing her PhD studies in Cultural Theory at the Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest.
In recognition of her curatorial activities Junghaus received the Kairos – European Cultural Price from the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S., in 2008. Her curatorial works include the Roma component of the Hidden Holocaust - exhibition in the Budapest Kunsthalle (2004), Paradise Lost – the First Roma Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Contemporary Art Biennale (2007), the Archive and Scholarly Conference on Roma Hiphop (2010), The Romani Elders and the Public Intervention for the Unfinished Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Murdered Under the National Socialist Regime in the frame of the 7th Berlin Biennale (2012), the (Re-)Conceptualizing Roma Resistance – exhibition and education program in Hellerau, Dresden (2015) and the Goethe Institute, Prague (2016). She is the curator of the Visual Art Section for RomArchive – Digital Archive of the Roma, funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, (2015-2018). Junghaus was founding director of Gallery8 – Roma Contemporary Art Space (www.gallery8.org) in Budapest (2013-2017), the winner of the 2014 Catalyst Contemporary Art Award (of Tranzit Hungary) and the 2014 Otto Pankok Prize awarded by the For Roma Foundation of German writer and Literary Nobel Laureate, Günter Grass.
Tímea Junghaus participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #3 – Decolonizing Romantik, a digital event on December 10, 2022 in Berlin.

TRVΛNIΛ is a multilingual Haitian poet, performer and social worker currently based in Berlin. Her affinity for writing helps her give expression to her inner turmoil and reflect on the societies she lives in by exploring and playing with notions of identity, vulnerability and sexuality. She is also a co-founder of Poet & Prophetess, a Berlin and London-based collective that works to promote and create a platform for writers/artists of colour. She has performed in two solo works at Ballhaus Naunynstraße, "An object is an object is what" (2019) and "TRVΛNIΛ" (2019).
TRVΛNIΛ participated in LA PALABRE #5 - REFUSING EMBRACING LETTING GO at Vierte Welt.

Tolulope Ami-Williams is a performance artist, art educator and songwriter based in Lagos, Nigeria. The vision for her general practice is to make globally relatable and impactful work, addressing narratives that centre on the factors that influence social change. She explores using her body, materials, installations and multimedia methods to stage symbolic statements addressing themes relating to identity, empowerment and self-affirmation. Inspired by the Nigerian contemporary art performance scene, she draws in particular from Jelili Atiku’s political engagement and Odun Orimolade’s performances’ inclusiveness and intentionality. Internationally, she draws inspiration from Marina Abramovic’s mastery of emotional and mental strength. Considering art as a catalyst for change, Ami-Williams uses her performances to trigger questioning and conversations among her audience and challenge the status quo. With a particular emphasis put on the younger audience, she empowers her public with a sense of purpose, community and self-worth, deconstructing piece by piece the invisible frontiers erected by society. Using her traumas to express her vulnerability and fears, she presents the opportunity for others to transcend their mental barriers. She creates a separation between the message and the messenger by applying the symbolism of materials and items such as the” veil” In delivering the concepts of her work.
She is a contributor of UNEXPECTED LESSONS #4 – Decolonizing Restitution at G.A.S. Lagos, Feb 10, 2023.
 

Tracian Meikle is a Jamaican curator based between Lagos and Amsterdam. Her work focuses on diasporic blackness, place-making and community-building. She has worked in the field of art and culture as a researcher, moderator and educator in a number of institutions including the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In Lagos, she served as lead facilitator of the first artist accelerator programme by 1952 Africa dedicated to the support and development of young African artists, and she is currently Curator in Residence at the experimental arts space, The Treehouse.

Uriel Orlow’s practice is research-based, process-oriented and often in dialogue with other disciplines. Projects engage with residues of colonialism, spatial manifestations of memory, social and ecological justice, blind spots of representation and plants as political actors. His multi-media installations focus on specific locations, micro-histories and forms of haunting. Working across installation, photography, film, drawing and sound his works bring different image-regimes and narrative modes into correspondence. Uriel Orlow’s work has been presented at major survey exhibitions including in 2022 at the Berlin Biennale, British Art Show 9, Kathmandu Triennale 2077 and Dakar Biennale and previously at the 54th Venice Biennale, Manifesta 9 & 12, B, Lubumbashi Biennial VI, 13th Sharjah Biennial, 7th Moscow Biennial, 8th Mercosul Biennial  amongst others. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Nairs (2021), La Loge, Brussels; State of Concept, Athens (both 2020), Kunsthalle Mainz (2019-2020), Tabakalera, San Sebastian and Villa Romana Florence (2019), Kunsthalle St Gallen, Market Photo Workshop Johannesburg and Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers Paris (2018). Monographic publications include Conversing with Leaves (Archive Books, 2020), Soil Affinities (Shelter Press, 2019) and Theatrum Botanicum (Sternberg Press, 2018). Uriel Orlow is a research fellow at University of Westminster London and a docent at University of the Arts, Zurich. The Federal Office of Culture (BAK) has honoured Uriel Orlow with the Swiss Grand Prix Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim 2023. 
Uriel Orlow participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #2 – Decolonizing Nature in Reykjavík, Iceland from the 13th – 15th of September 2022. He also participated in the Artistic LABoratory RÉ-IMAGINER LE PASSÉ from the 22nd to 24th May 2023 in Dakar. Uriel is one of the artists being shown in the Ré-imaginer le passé exhibition at the Musée Théodore Monod, Dakar, and at the KINDL, Berlin.

Vanessa E. Thompson is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in comparative social and cultural anthropology at European University Viadrina, teaching and working in the fields of black studies (especially black social movements), critical racism studies, postcolonial feminism, critiques of policing and abolition. She has published on blackness and black movements in France and Europe more broadly, black abolitionist struggles and Fanonian thought. She has co-founded an intersectional cop-watch collective in Germany, is a member of the International Independent Commission on the Death of Oury Jalloh and organizes within international abolitionist collectives.
Vanessa E. Thompson participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge from the 11th – 12th of June 2021.

Andrea-Vicky Amankwaa-Birago is a "Booga Ba” (a child of Ghanian migirants from Hamburg), a cultural scientist, a facilitator, trainer, and consultant in the empowerment of women of color and diversity-oriented organizational development. With nearly two decades of experience, Andrea-Vicky has worked with governmental and non-governmental organizations, specializing in international exchange programs in the field of development education. Having held teaching positions across Europe, Andrea-Vicky has deep knowledge on topics such as discrimination, memory culture, and colonial histories. Currently, she is writing her dissertation at HTW Berlin and is affiliated with Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth, where she is part of the esteemed team “Anthropology of global inequalities.”
In addition to her academic pursuits, Andrea-Vicky has recently embarked on an artistic journey, drawing inspiration from Tricia Hersay and Ester Armah. She combines African Yoga and vocal training, focusing on the movement of energy through the body to connect with one's higher intelligence and the divine. As a member of the Kuratorium Barazani Berlin and the founder of the transnational knowledge network Anton Wilhelm Amo alliance, headquartered in Berlin Global Village, Andrea-Vicky is dedicated to fostering transnational connections and promoting critical analysis of categories of difference and their social efficacy. Vicky participated in LA PALABRE #4 - LEARNING LESSONS at Vierte Welt. 

a world steadily synchronizing in real-time requires a wide-ranging competence of various visualization strategies and tools. the fundament of »visual intelligence« is an anthropological approach, which assumes that designers not only act socially responsible themselves, but are able to help shape transformation processes in terms of sustainable developments. design is craftsmanship and form of expression, which enables to deal operationally with the variety existing knowledge(s) and to actively contribute to the visualization of complex environments. as designers, informationdesigners and sociologist we act as visual experts in order to make information, data, knowledge, identities and ideas accessible, legible and experienceable. depending on the context, we design and generate a visual grammar that enables us to visualize in an informing, narrating, linking, legible, opposing, programming, poetic, (de-)constructing or mapping way. »visual intelligence« was founded by danielle rosales & robin coenen in 2020. amon others, our visual languages unfolded in »dekoloniale. memory culture in the city«, »talking objects lab«, »museums and society«. we also worked at »critical mapping in municiplaist movements«, visualising and structuring counter data. between 2021-2023 we designed and produced the exhibitions »Looking Back | Schaut Zurück«, »Trotz Allem — Migration in die Kolonialmetropole Berlin« und »Solidarisiert euch! Stand in Solidarität! Schwarzer Widerstand und Globaler Antikolonialismus in Berlin, 1919–1933«.

Viyé Diba was born on 31 December 1954 in Karantaba, Senegal. He graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure d'Education Artistique in Dakar and from the Villa Arson International Pilot School of Art and Research in Nice, as well as obtaining a postgraduate degree in geography at the University of Nice on the theme of "urban health and aesthetics". He was a professor at the National School of Arts in Dakar where he participated in the training of several generations of artists.His work is presented in numerous exhibitions around the world and is included in several individual and institutional collections. Winner of the Grand Prix Léopold Sédar Senghor at the Dakar Biennale in 1998, Viyé Diba has nevertheless continued his quest for meaning in an environment where the natural environment and public space are threatened by various forms of aggression. Giving new life to domestic and industrial waste, restoring discarded materials becomes an action of public health. Viyé chooses to show how transformation can be socially or economically useful and how it is possible to derive a clear aesthetic value from it. Viyé Diba lives and works in Dakar.
During his residence at the Museum Théodore Monod in Dakar, Senegal, Viyé Diba participated in Le Langage des Objets on the 4th of December 2021. He also participated in the Artistic LABoratory RÉ-IMAGINER LE PASSÉ from the 22nd to 24th May 2023 and in the Dakar Think Tank – Decolonizing Knowledge from the 25th to 27th May 2023, both in Dakar, Senegal. Viyé Diba is one of the artists being shown in the Ré-imaginer le passé exhibition at the Musée Théodore Monod, Dakar, and at the KINDL, Berlin.

Wairimũ Nduba is a multidisciplinary creative whose work dances between the intersections of music, ballet, sonic-visual research, and archiving. Having graduated with a degree in music, she has worked as an educator in the dance and music fields for the past several years. This work has evolved over time to include establishing and building the digital archival platform, Wer Jokenya, a space that celebrates Kenya’s nuanced and layered music history and its conversational nature stretching across time and imperial borderlines.
Her multifaceted practice is rooted and is guided by African sonic principles which hold music to be a site of communal gathering, healing, joy, and beauty. Wairimũ’s work can be found on platforms such as Pan-African Music, Amaka Studio, and Book Bunk, and her archival work on Twitter and Instagram under the handle @werjokenya. She is happiest, at home, surrounded by flowers/plants, sipping tea, and reading a juicy book. 
She is part of African Digital Heritage and a member of the TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE TEAM.

Wale Lawal is the Founder of The Republic, a startup building business and creative tools for creators across Africa. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Republic’s award-winning magazine covering news, debates and ideas on politics, culture, science and more from a Nigerian lens. Wale is a co-founder of GatePass, a digital payment and community management platform for real estate providers. He is an ex-KPMG management consultant and a graduate from the University of Oxford, where his research focused on the politics of tech startups in Nigeria, and he graduated top of his class. In 2019, Wale was selected by Quartz as one of Africa’s top 30 innovators. In 2021, he was selected by Reuters as a global thought leader and by Forbes as one of Africa’s 30 Under 30. Wale has published short fiction and has exhibited artwork at several venues including the Venice Biennale. Wale has also written the Future Yoruba exhibit for the forthcoming John Randle Center for Yoruba Culture and History.

Wanuri Kahiu is a Kenyan filmmaker. Her first feature film FROM A WHISPER, based on the real events surrounding the 1998 twin bombings of US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania won Best Narrative Feature in 2010 at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, as well as five awards at the African Movie Academy Award, including Best Director and Best Screenplay.   
In 2009 Wanuri produced TV documentary FOR OUR LAND about Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Professor Wangari Maathai for MNET, a Pan African cable station. 
In 2010, her short science fiction PUMZI premiered at SUNDANCE film festival and went on to win best short film at Cannes Independent Film Festival and the silver at Carthage Film Festival (Tunisia). PUMZI also earned Wanuri the ‘Citta di Venezia 2010’ award in Venice, Italy. 
She is currently writing an Animation Film in conjunction with TriggerFish, South Africa. Wanuri is also in post production on a feature length documentary GER about UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Ger Duany, WHO AM I, a short documentary about National Identity and a fractionally fictional documentary about an Nairobi based indie-pop group JUST A BAND.  
Wanuri is part of AFROBUBBLEGUM a collective of African artists whose ambition is to create fun, frivolous and fierce work.
Wanuri Kahiu participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS #2 – Decolonizing Nature in Reykjavík, Iceland from the 13th – 15th of September 2022.
 

Nadia Yala Kisukidi was born in Brussels, from a congolese (DRC) father and a franco-italian mother. She is Associate Professor in philosophy at Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis University. She was vice-president of the Collège International de Philosophie (2014-2016). Member of the Critical Time (Duke University), Les Cahiers d’études africaines (CNRS, Ehess) and Multitudes editorial committee, she is now, co-curator of the Yango II Biennale, Kinshasa / RDC that will take place in Kinshasa in november 2021 and january 2022.
Yala Kisukidi is specialized in french and africana philosophy. She taught in Switzerland, France, contributed to the creation of a « Global South » research network between Haïti, France and Colombia. She has published Bergson ou l’humanité créatrice (Paris, CNRS, 2013), directed collective essays ( Afrocentricités (Kisukidi, Guedj dir.) for the revue Tumultes in 2019 ; Kinshasa Star Line (Kisukidi dir.)  for the revue Multitudes in 2020) and written many articles in frenc and africana philosophy.
She is now preparing a book on Africana philosophy (Le Seuil).
Nadia Yala Kisukidi participated in UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge from the 11th – 12th of June 2021.