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.
 

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. 

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).

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.
 

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.

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.

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".

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".

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.

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.

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 Kenai and the United States.  Chef Kabui participated in UNEXPECTED LESSON #2 in Iceland.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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).

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.
 

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. 

hn. lyonga is a Black, Queer, multi-genre writer, and curator of words, concepts, and perspectives, MA student in American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, co-founder of the Black Student Union at Humboldt, member of the AK Museen und Sammlungen von Decolonize Berlin e.V. and of the Kuratorium of BARAZANI.berlin – Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand, the artist collective Field Narratives, with interest in Black speculative literature, fixity of land as infrastructure and storytelling as an act of memory reconfiguration.

Ibou Coulibaly Diop is a university teacher and researcher. Since his studies in romance philology and German as a foreign language at the university of Berlin and Potsdam, he has been focusing his research on contemporary literature and especially on questions of globalisation. His PhD thesis was published as Mondialisation et monde des théories dans l’oeuvre de Michel Houellebecq (2018), Berlin: Frank & Timme Verlag. His current research looks at theories of Black literature, transculturality and cosmopolitanism. In 2012 he has published La colère comme moteur de l’action politique dans la littérature noire de Césaire à Senghor. In: L. Bauer & K. Reinke (Hrsg.), Colère – force destructive et potentiel créatif. Berlin: Frank & Timme Verlag and in 2019 will be published La Négritude: une déconstruction avant-gardiste d'être au monde, DeGruyter (forthcoming). His latest publications focus on French-speaking women's literature and negritude: Aminata Sow Fall un humanisme au féminin (forthcoming), Lendemains, Tübingen : Narr Verlag and Les combattantes du quotidien (forthcoming), Lendemains, Tübingen : Narr Verlag Currently he is preparing with Susanne Gehrmann a major  project on the archives of Janheinz Jahn at the Humboldt-University.

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.

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.
 

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. Jim Chuchu is 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 multi-media works span multiple disciplines including film, stage, audio storytelling and experiential theatre

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.
 
Portrait by Snædís Malmquist Einarsdóttir

Magnus Elias Rosengarten is a writer, cultural journalist, interviewer and artist. He primarily works and thinks through Performance, Film / Video, dealing with the complex relationships between bodies and space in Contemporary Art. Central questions of his work 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?His work is driven by the rich knowledge archives and systems of the global African Diaspora. Non-western epistemologies are pillar and toolkit for his work, particularly, when it comes to the pressing task to make bodies and narratives visible, that continuously move in the Diasporas. Magnus completed his Undergraduate degree in American Studies and Area Studies Asia/Africa at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany, and subsequently pursued an M.A. in Performance Studies at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, graduating with distinction. He has published and worked, i.a.: Deutsche Welle, arte/ZDF, rbb, WDR, ContemporaryAnd Magazine (C&), Berlin Biennale, 1:54 Art Fair London, Ballhaus Naunynstraße, International Film Festival Berlin, Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at NYU, NYU Department of Performance Studies, Kraine Theatre NYC, La Mamma NYC, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Triple Canopy Magazine, and Yellow Pages Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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. 

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).

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.

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.

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.
 

Lahya (Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo) is a black intersectional artist, author, poet, curator, multiplicator, singer, teamer, photographer, and activist whose art and work reflect her social realities and identities. Lahya’s life revolves around molecules of reality, (re)arranged lovingly, yet critically, and enveloped in song, painting, collage, performance, photography and_or poetry. Their purpose is healing and/through transformative practices. Lahya knows that the acts of embodying joy and telling the story in their own words is freedom work. It is a way to hold space and take space. 
Since 2014, Lahya curates and moderates the monthly spoken-word event “One World Poetry Night” in Berlin.
Lahya’s oeuvre is published in various books and zines. In search of radical social responsibility of the heart and deed, Lahya’s doings are political, collective, and personal. Her works touch upon privilege, decolonisation, healing, individual and collective love and vulnerability. Lahya’s pronouns are Lahya and if needed she/her. Her bed currently resides in Berlin.

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.

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.

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.
 

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.
 
Portrait by Masimba Sasa

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.

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.

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 payments 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.
 

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)