Re:assemblages Symposium

Location: Amphitheatre and Eric Kayser

Light breakfast and informal networking

Location: Amphitheatre

Artist: Adjoa Armah

Opening the symposium, Ecotones is activated in the amphitheatre as a performance conjuring the textures and liminality of Badagry beach. Part of Armah’s ongoing series Atlantic Marginalia, the work weaves scholarly, diaristic, and historical fragments, collected grains of sand from Badagry beach, exploring the Point of No Return, and the afterlives of freed enslaved people. Across 201 recursions, these grains are activated through recitation, sound, and movement, tracing symbolic notions of fullness and totality in Ifò. While most traces remain ephemeral, an accompanying booklet documents the work, creating a sensorial, liminal space to inaugurate the symposium’s ecological tonalities.

Location: Amphitheatre

Speakers: Moni Aisida, Belinda Holden, and Naima Hassan

Location: Auditorium

Chair: Moni Aisida

Discussants: Missla Libsekal, Dr. Janine Francois, Jadesola Olaniyan (Ala Praxis), and Dr. Eve Oishi

Beginning with the provocation: How will we share this earth? This roundtable examines Afro-Ecotones across the Atlantic, Caribbean, Indian, and Asia-Pacific Oceans, situating Lagos’ lagoon as an ecotonal site. Missla Libsekal explores West Nigeria’s port, mangroves, and urban ecologies through her curatorial work for ART X Lagos 2025, reflecting on entangled social and environmental histories and the artists of the forthcoming exhibition. Janine Francois considers the intersection between Ghana's and Jamaica’s landscapes, botanical heritage, and the Sacred Black Ecologies framework, using plants, gardens, and embodied knowledge as counter-archives of memory, care, and resilience. Ala Praxis presents Echoes in Fragments, a multimedia project tracing West and East African coastal ecologies, sand mining, and human-environment interactions through sound, photography, and archival material. Eve Oishi introduces Suneil Sanzgiri’s films, which trace anti-colonial struggles across the 1955 Bandung Conference, Goa, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa, layering archival fragments, interviews, and transformed footage to create transnational, sensorial narratives of resistance, disappearance, and migration. Together, the roundtable reflects on ecological care, diasporic memory, and the creative possibilities emerging at the thresholds of continents and oceans.

Location: Eric Kayser

Location: Auditorium
Moderator: Dr. Oluwatoyin Zainab Sogbesan
Discussants: Dr. Amanda Maples, Ore Disu, Samba Yonga

How can the topic of “restitutions” be engaged with from the perspectives of living artists and archives, memory work, and social justice? Conceived as the first of a two-part series, this panel brings together representatives from three institutions to discuss “archives” beyond the framework of linear and object-based preservation narratives (that can render knowledge production past and present mute in a double-absencing), and towards processual and meaningful approaches driven by human interaction. 

In this keynote panel, Ore Disu, and Samba Yonga, and Dr. Amanda Maples, present cases where human and intangible experiences brought museum practices, in particular relating to restitutions, to life, lending new insights into future policies and procedures. Disu reflects on MOWAA’s commitment to centring precolonial African value systems and practices of care that exceed object-based preservation, while Yonga draws on feminist historiography and the museum as counter-archive to foreground oral histories, community knowledge, and African epistemologies.

Part one, convened here, stages the theoretical and epistemological stakes: how archives might be unsettled, re-scripted, and reactivated as living forms. Part two, held the following week at the newly opened MOWAA in Benin City, extends the conversation into praxis through an experimental roundtable on restitutions and museum futures.

Location: Eric Kayser

Buffet or seated lunch with informal networking encouraged

Delegates choose between sessions taking place at the same time

Roundtable: Sustaining the Otherwise: The Unruly Archive
Location: Auditorium
Discussants: Amal Alhaag, Selene Wendt, Quinsy Gario

As part of the collaboration between Sustaining the Otherwise and G.A.S. Foundation, The Unruly Archive is activated as a site for rehearsing restitution, self-determined knowledge, and regenerative artistic practice. Situating archives as living, performative ecologies, the session traces everyday memory work, counter-archives, and strategies that unsettle colonial and racial structures across African and diasporic contexts. Through collective rehearsal, conversation, and iterative engagement, the presenters investigate how knowledge, memory, and ethical imagination circulate when archives are danced, spoken, or rewritten in the body. The work foregrounds the active, unstable, and relational dimensions of archival practice, opening thresholds where gestures, voices, and encounters sustain archives as living forms, generating new political, epistemic, and imaginative possibilities. Together with Quinsy Gario, Selene Wendt, and Amal Alhaag will offer propositions, provocations and approaches to thinking about restitution, unruly knowledge, and the counter archive.

Participatory Film Workshop: Healing The Damned
Location: Classroom
Facilitator: Banji Chona

The intervention begins with two films, Captive River (1960) and No Conquest of Time, Nature and The Cosmos (2024), followed by a participatory space for dialogue and reflection. Together, participants will ask: What does repair look like when the wound is a river? Healing the Damned is an inquiry by artist-researcher Banji Chona into the violent colonial fractures caused by the Kariba Hydroelectric Dam on the social, cultural, and ecological life of Zambezia. Built between 1955 and 1963 by the British-controlled Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the project created Lake Kariba at the expense of indigenous life. Between 57,000 and 110,000 baTonga people were displaced from ancestral lands into “Resettlement Areas,” rupturing ecological practices and ancestral rituals such as malende (rain shrines), often tied to specific landscapes. The Kariba Dam exemplifies how colonial infrastructures violently redefined land, knowledge, and belonging.

Participatory Lecture Performance: The Library as a Divination Site: Reimagining Libraries and Library Curation through La Bibliothèque Des Possibles

Location: Dance room

Facilitator: Keren Lasme

La Bibliothèque Des Possibles (The Library of Possibilities) is a roving study space and library created by Keren Lasme, founder and steward of KOKOBA: Meeting Our Griots / À la Rencontre de Nos Griots, a literature project rooted in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Informed by over a decade of research and curatorial experimentation, the library was conceived as an altar and sanctuary dedicated to African literature and literary arts. At its core are 25 texts forming a pharmacopoeia of healing stories, curated and assembled according to an ancestral knowledge system developed by the Dagara people of West Africa. La Bibliothèque Des Possibles stands as a portal between the mundane and the sacred, the ordinary and the extraordinary. This multisensory, poetic, and participatory workshop is an invitation to imaginatively, ritually, and collectively step inside and witness the library through ceremony, speculative pedagogy, and collective dreaming. During this imaginal ecotone, the library is invoked and enacted through a video produced by Oiseau Studio and layered with archival footage of Dagara elders, still and moving images, readings, divination, embodied gestures, prompts, and conversations.
 

Location: Eric Kayser

Delegates choose between sessions taking place at the same time

Panel: The Living Archive: Propositions for collections into the future
Location: Auditorium
Chair: Ann Marie Peña
Discussants: Michelle Jacques, Azu Nwagbogu, Dr. Jago Cooper

Chaired by Ann Marie Peña, this panel explores how care and development of collections can become activations for reconceiving them as living, iterative, and performative spaces. Peña frames discussions around community engagement, participatory custodianship, and innovative approaches to collection care, examining how public and local involvement can transform institutional systems into socially responsive and dynamic spaces. The panel offers the proposal that collections are living entities,  inextricably part of our existing and future worlds, actively forming part of society and the diversity of lives within.

As part of this panel, Michelle Jacques explores ongoing collaborations with Black and Indigenous artists, compelling us to reframe memory through artistic practice.  Jacques examines the production of narrative, intervention and living histories, considering how these are addressing gaps in Prairie historiography in Canada. 

Azu Nwagbogu reflects on the Home Museum project, developed with Dr. Clémentine Deliss for the Lagos Photo Festival. This initiative shifts restitution debates from European capitals back to the African continent, re-centring citizens, families, and communities as curators of the museum of the future.

Dr. Jago Cooper reflects on the UK Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts’ recent reimagining of its collections through a new framework of Living Art, alongside an increasingly collaborative and participative approach with contemporary artists. Through projects with Yinka Shonibare, Wangechi Mutu, amongst others, he considers how museums can cultivate new kinds of exhibitions and ways of working that are relevant, equitable, and culturally regenerative.

 

Workshop: Artifice and Authenticity: A Workshop on Theatre after Negritude
Location: Dance room
Facilitator: Dr. Kanyin Ajayi and Joey Aresoa
 

Dr. Kanyin Ajayi and Joey Aresoa host a theatre workshop that restages and refigures post-Independence debates on Negritude, pan-Africanism, cultural authenticity, and the role of audience. Through pedagogy, performance, and archival engagement, the workshop will attend to a corpus of Francophone African playwrights from the 1990s to early 2000s who broke away from conventional African textuality, resisting the long-standing call to express a paradigmatic and authentic African soul, and instead created dramaturgies of abstraction and playful self-awareness. 

The workshop unfolds in three interwoven dimensions: a brief presentation situating the playwrights’ work within the context of pan-African festivals and critical polemics, aided by visual, textual, and sonic material on and of this theatre; a dramatic reading of Kossi Efoui’s La malaventure in English translation, where attendees embody scenes and witness meaning emerge through performative interpretation; and a seminar-style discussion where discoveries and curiosities generated by the performance and presentation are shared. This intervention animates Francophone African theatre, a body of work often overlooked in broader discussions on African literature, transforming texts and performances into a living archive that traverses temporal, cultural, and spatial boundaries.  Acting as an artist-interlocutor, G.A.S. Fellow Joey Aresoa contributes to the workshop and its dramatic reading, bringing a situated Francophone perspective from Madagascar. By drawing a parallel with the work of Jean Luc Raharimanana, she brings in how Malagasy dramaturgy engages with memory, colonial legacies, and oral traditions, bringing a distinctive echo to the conversations on post-Négritude theatre.

Archive Encounter: Black Feminist Archival Practices and Fugitive Art Histories 

Location: Classroom
Facilitators: Josie Hodson and Jamilah Malika Abu-Bakare

Anchored in the specificity of Black life in North America, this discussion traces two distinct yet entangled approaches to archival practice: one grounded in domestic intimacy and kinship, the other in the aesthetics of fugitivity. 

Josie Roland Hodson offers a reading of the Hatch-Billops Archives, founded in 1972 from the downtown Manhattan loft of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch. Over decades, this space became a gathering point for Black artists, filmmakers, and thinkers. The  archive hosts over 13,000 slides of artwork by Black artists, 4,000 photographs documenting artistic sociality, a library of more than 10,000 publications, over a thousand recordings, and diverse ephemera. Further, she argues the Archives’ location in SoHo and its weekly activation by artists was an incursion into ongoing displacement of Black artists from such sites, both in white historical memory-keeping practices and through the expropriative practices of New York real estate authority. Hodson positions the Hatch-Billops Archives as a model for living, socially engaged archives rooted in care, practices of friendship and kinship. Hodson connects this to Camille Billops’ feminist films Suzanne, Suzanne (1982) and Finding Christa (1991), which examine kinship politics and critique hegemonic family structures.

Jamilah Malika Abu-Bakare turns to Glenn Ligon’s To Disembark (1993), an exhibition inspired by Ligon's encounter with a 19th-century illustration of Henry "Box" Brown in public archives in New York City. Fugitives who freed themselves, like "Box" Brown, penned the first Afro-diasporic autobiographies recounting their escapes that circulated to promote the abolitionist cause. Ligon inserted a semi-autobiographical trickster figure throughout the museum through lithographs, etchings, wall paintings, and a sound installation that re-animated historical records such as runaway notices and title pages. Abu-Bakare traces Ligon’s gestures through the lens of thinkers like Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe, locating a commitment to what might now be called “wake work” by compelling gallery goers to stay with the afterlives of slavery in ways that are embodied, affective, and ongoing. Together, the facilitators invite participants to dwell in the textures of the archive, not only as a place of storage, but as a living, shifting space shaped by Black presence and futurities.

Location: Auditorium

Chair: Dr. Cheryl Finley
Discussants: Sylvia Arthur, Hon. Aisha Adamu Augie, Dr. Jareh Das

This keynote panel examines how the practice of rematriation, as conceptualized by Indigenous scholar Dr. Robin Gray, offers a framework for returning cultural property and knowledge to their rightful custodians. In contrast to the patriarchal framing of repatriation, rematriation centers on the idea of returning the sacred to the mother. The panel explores how the practice of rematriating archives cultivates approaches that resist colonial and patriarchal logics by foregrounding care, orality, embodiment, kinship, and collective memory. Within these spaces, rematriation becomes both a verb and a practice—one of listening, responding, and nurturing women’s presences in the archives.

Sylvia Arthur presents A Women's Oral History of West Africa, a living counter-archive centred on women elders, where stories circulate through orality, performance, and embodied practice, creating cycles of memory that resist erasure and foreground women’s voices.

Hon. Aisha Adamu Augie reflects on the FESTAC ’77 archive at CBAAC, tracing women’s presences across photographs, recordings, and documents often overlooked in institutional memory. She considers the work of seeing and being seen in the archive, addressing historical gaps, and preserving women’s contributions as living, resonant presences shaping Black and African cultural memory.

Dr. Jareh Das traces the living legacy of Ladi Kwali, Nigeria’s master potter, whose gestures, kinship, and material practice transform vessels into archives in motion. Kwali’s craft, transmitted across generations, embodies a continuous dialogue between past, present, and future, illustrating how women’s embodied knowledge keeps archives alive.

Location: Auditorium

Location: G.A.S. Foundation Lagos

Moderator: Temitayo Ogunbiyi
Speaker: Olukemi Lijadu

Closing the first day, the symposium drifts to G.A.S. Foundation for the screening of work-in-progress film Sister, Sister, with filmmaker Olukemi Lijadu. The film traces the life and legacy of her aunts, the Lijadu Sisters—twin pioneers of Afro-psychedelic funk whose fearless voices shaped 1970s and ’80s Nigeria, weaving Afrobeat, funk, soul, reggae, and apala into a revolutionary soundscape. Filmed within the Harlem apartment where Kehinde and Taiwo once performed rituals as Ifá priestesses, the work reimagines the home as a living archive—an intimate threshold where Ìbàdàn speaks to New York. Since Kehinde’s passing in 2019, Yèyé Taiwo carries both her own life and her sister’s presence, her body itself becoming an archive where memory is inscribed in flesh and voice. Rejecting definitive history, Sister, Sister moves toward “ecstatic truth”: grief as resonance, devotion as method, resilience as archive. The screening and discussion invites audiences into this intimate space.

Location: Amphitheatre and Eric Kayser

Light breakfast and informal networking

Location: Amphitheatre

Co-chairs: Maryam Kazeem and Naima Hassan                              
Readings: Robyn Simpson, Ufuoma Ogbemudje

Opening words from Naima Hassan and Maryam Kazeem open the second day of the symposium, followed by performative readings from the publication Annotations in Four Acts, which traces the archival afterlives of FESTAC ’77 and twentieth-century pan-African cultural festivals. Hassan and Kazeem are joined by Annotations Research Associates Robyn Simpson and Ufuoma Ogbemudje, who read narrative passages, annotations, and layered textual fragments from the publication and their own research. Rooted in the symposium theme, Annotations, the reading takes as its point of departure the marginalia, footnotes, redactions, and fragments that accumulate in the margins of African independence movements and festivals of the twentieth century.

Location: Auditorium

Speaker: Mistura Allison

Mistura Allison presents a lecture performance that animates the margins of the 1959 Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers in Rome, a gathering often reduced to formal speeches, posed photographs, and printed proceedings. Through the integration of film footage, still images, and live gesture, Allison re-reads the Congress as a dynamic, unfinished, and diasporic conversation in flux. Drawing on oríkì (Yoruba praise poetry) as a gestural mode of visual analysis, she treats gestures, postures, and archival remnants as expressive forms beyond text, annotating the archive through movement, pause, and embodied presence. This practice challenges reductive archival narratives, intensifies silences, and foregrounds the performative and multisensory dimensions of Afro-diasporic knowledge production, making the archive a living, trembling body.

Location: Eric Kayser

Location: Auditorium
Chair: Bimpe Nkontchou
Discussants: Femi Akinsanya, Osahon H. Okunbo and Kayode Adegbola

Chaired by Bimpe Nkontchou, this panel foregrounds the practices of collectors whose commitments extend beyond acquisition into shaping and sustaining contemporary arts practice. It draws on the journeys of figures such as Femi Akinsanya, whose collection has become a vital reference point for modern and contemporary Nigerian art; Osahon H. Okunbo, whose approach reflects a deep engagement with emerging voices and narratives; and Kayode Adegbola, a lawyer, collector, and cultural entrepreneur whose Adegbola Art Projects platform has supported Nigerian artists, built curatorial and exhibition opportunities, and developed infrastructure for arts education and residencies.

The discussion explores how private collections mature into cultural legacies, functioning not only as personal archives but also as catalysts for scholarship, visibility, and exchange. Collecting here is framed as an active, generative practice, one that energises cultural ecosystems, enables sustained creative production, and underpins the institutional infrastructures that allow new African art institutions to thrive.

Location: Auditorium

Discussants: Dr. Nadine Siegert and E.N. Mirembe

Framing a discussion between Dr. Nadine Siegert and E.N. Mirembe is the publication Reading Ecologies: Transforming Publishing in Africa, which examines independent art publishing as an insurgent practice at the ecotonal edges of politics, economies, aesthetics, and epistemologies. Opening the discussion, E.N. Mirembe foregrounds Black literary cultures and publishing as a world-making practice, situating Reading Ecologies within longer trajectories of African and Afro-diasporic publishing, and the ways magazines and independent initiatives have historically shaped and unsettled knowledge production across the twentieth century. The Crisis (New York, 1910–), Black Orpheus (Ibadan, 1957–75), Transition (Kampala–Accra–Boston, 1961–), Staffrider (Johannesburg, 1978–93), and Medu (Gaborone, 1979–85), act as key points of departure in this unfinished literary tradition. 

Transitioning to the present, and drawing from the four-year We Make Books project, initiated by Goethe-Institut Nigeria in collaboration with AFRIKADAA (Paris), Mosaïques (Yaoundé), and Miss Read (Berlin), Siegert frames the publication as both a product of sustained engagement, and reflects on its transcontinental encounters through panels, workshops, and co-publishing initiatives across Senegal, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Germany, revealing unresolved tensions in the field and foregrounding co-publishing as method and metaphor.

Location: Eric Kayser

Delegates choose between sessions taking place at the same time

Participatory Workshop: In ongoing reaching for freedom
Location: Dance room
Facilitator: Miatta Kawinzi

What is the shape and feel of freedom? Where does it live in our bodies? In ongoing reaching for freedom is a participatory workshop exploring affective and embodied landscapes of pan-African freedom dreaming, inspired by Liberia’s history of becoming the first independent modern African republic upon declaring independence from the American Colonisation Society in 1847, and its symbolic resonance across wider African and Afro-diasporic histories and liberation movements.

The session incorporates historical storytelling and embodiment exercises in sound, movement, and guided improvisation. Participants will think and move through prompts related to colonisation, liberation, and the ways in which structures of power and hierarchy can manifest both externally and internally. Drawing on Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed methodology, movement activities will explore how both oppression and empowerment are enacted in, with, and through the body. Guiding questions include: What can we learn from the past to imagine more balanced futures? How might present actions reverberate across time? How can expanded modes of sensing and feeling reveal new possibilities for embodied wisdom? Participants will breathe, move, play, and reflect, collectively exploring liberation as a continuing, co-shaped process. Workshop activities include sitting on the floor (with accessible seating provided) and engaging in movement. Prior experience is not necessary, and all are warmly welcomed to this exploratory space.
 

Workshop: Inside the Postcolonial Archive: Art and Independence
Location: Classroom and Amphitheatre
Facilitator: Pujan Karambeigi

This workshop proposes an interactive session centred on the postcolonial archive of visual art in Africa after political independence, structured to critically revisit and build upon the archival ambitions of The Short Century exhibition. While Okwui Enwezor’s curatorial framework sought to position African modernity within a dual narrative of political and aesthetic liberation, critics noted that its archival sections —while pioneering—often remained disconnected from its aesthetic claims. This workshop takes that tension as its point of departure, offering participants an opportunity to collectively explore how archives might more directly inform, complicate, or even contradict our understandings of cultural production in post-independence Africa. Participants will engage in small group work using curated thematic archival portfolios with materials that I prepare using collections in Africa, Europe, and the United States. These portfolios will focus on four thematic axes: the artist after independence; art education and training; exhibitions and curatorial frameworks; and the evolution of museums and galleries in the postcolonial context. An alternative approach may group materials geographically, drawing on countries that hosted key pan-African cultural festivals. Materials include photographs, institutional documents, press clippings, and correspondence. 

Each group will be asked to consider a shared set of guiding questions: What narratives emerge from these materials? What do these archives make visible—and what do they obscure? What patterns or omissions stand out? What do they reveal about the local and transnational dynamics of cultural life after independence? After a group-internal discussion, each group will present a short analysis anchored in selected documents, allowing for a comparative conversation across different regions and themes. The workshop aims to offer a practical space for shared learning on how to work with archives—how to read them, how to navigate their gaps, and how to imagine their use beyond academic research. It is equally designed for artists, curators, and scholars, and encourages reflection on the distribution of postcolonial archives across both African institutions and Western metropoles, echoing the spatial legacies of the colonial archive. While not exhaustive, the exercise seeks to illuminate the ‘backstage’ of artistic production and presentation during this formative historical moment.

14:00-15:15
Lecture Performance: Rasta-Man and His Beloved: Afrotropes, Empire, and the Sonic Archive
Location: Auditorium
Speakers: Cosmo Whyte and Timnet Gedar

This lecture-performance and listening session, developed by Cosmo Whyte and Timnet Gedar, explores symbolic and sonic connections between post-independence Jamaica and the Horn of Africa. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s “Constituting an Archive” and Krista Thompson’s concept of afrotropes, it examines Ethiopia’s role as a Pan-African symbol within Rastafarian cultural production. Through soundscapes, archival fragments, and live narration, the session presents the sonic archive as a site where liberation is neither fixed nor complete, but remains open, unresolved, and generative. Listeners are invited to engage with contradictions, rhythms, and speculative possibilities that reimagine Black cultural memory and futures.

Delegates choose between sessions taking place at the same time

Workshop: Mapping Malcolm and the Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition: A World-Building Exercise
Location: Dance room
Facilitator: Najha Zigbi-Johnson
 

Mapping Malcolm is a participatory workshop exploring Malcolm X’s legacy as a site of radical futurity and aesthetic insurgency. Zigbi-Johnson situates Harlem following Malcolm X’s assassination as the epicentre of the Black Arts Movement, where Black institutional spaces, including the Studio Museum, National Black Theatre, and Black Studies as an academic discipline, emerged as platforms for world-making. Drawing connections to Lagos and post-independence Pan-Africanist ferment (FESTAC ’77, Mbari Clubs, Soyinka, Senghor), the session introduces “diasporic syntax,” structures of Black expression across language, visual culture, ritual, and space.

Participants engage in collaborative world-building: designing a shared aesthetic grammar through sound, image, gesture, or language. Small groups create entries, words, phrases, symbols, or images, capturing liberatory concepts related to memory, aesthetics, geography, or spirituality. Contributions are shared in a collective “diasporic syntax lexicon” and documented for future circulation. Archival images, maps, and sound clips supplement the workshop, inviting participants to explore how Black radical traditions function as both critique and creation, foregrounding the affective, living, and transnational dimensions of the Black Atlantic archive.

Participatory Performance Workshop: Unentitled [shortcenturybody]: a poethic rehearsal in living archive
Location: Classroom
Facilitator: sadé powell

unentitled [shortcenturybody] is a participatory performance workshop that approaches The Short Century archive as a living, relational, and illegible body. Powell engages the archive as a compositional site, using a 1930s Royal typewriter to layer pan-african movement ephemera and political speeches that are typed, interrupted, blacked out, and re-lined as haptic, sonic, and grammatical residue. Participants actively co-compose the archive through the “blackout chorus,” contributing annotations, erasures, and new texts in response to prompts. Others engage at material-poetics stations, experimenting with DIY monoprinting and mark-making directly over archival fragments. Through these gestures, participants disrupt the historiography of the archive, producing a provisional communal document of relational memory, refusal, and improvisation. The workshop is accompanied by a soundscape of diasporan music and an audio recording that captures the collective texture of the room. No prior knowledge is required, only a willingness to dwell in uncertainty, improvise, and co-create with the archive. Powell’s practice, rooted in Black feminist poethics, typographic play, and dissemblance, continues her work in wordtomydead // a rehearsal in (∞ - ∞), and draws inspiration from Okwui Enwezor, Moses März, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Fred Moten.

15:30-16:30
Lecture Performance: Remember Black Mania(s): Notes Toward a Living Archive of Psychic Rupture
Location: Auditorium
Speaker: Achille Tenkiang
 

Remember Black Mania(s) takes the form of a lecture-performance and annotated visual essay exploring Black life, memory, and the archives of psychic rupture. Tenkiang situates mania not as a disorder but as inheritance—a language of overstimulation, vision, and survival transmitted through ancestral bodies and shaped by migration, memory, and the aftershocks of struggle. Through photography, self-portraiture, and image-text annotations, the project constructs a speculative future archive where silence becomes evidence and mental health is reframed as a political terrain. Drawing on historical and literary figures, including André Blouin and Christopher Okigbo, and influenced by visual artists like Zanele Muholi and Samuel Fosso, Tenkiang examines how interior wreckages left by revolutions remain unpreserved in conventional archives. Moving fluidly between mediums, the work treats the body, images, and language as interconnected archival strategies, foregrounding what resists conventional preservation. Rooted in the symposium themes of Annotations and Living Archives, Black Mania(s) interrogates how neurodivergent frameworks can reveal the hidden contradictions, excesses, and generative potentials of memory, insisting that the unruly, disordered, and excessive be preserved, studied, and honoured.

Location: Auditorium

Chair: Serubiri Moses

Discussants: Tumelo Mosaka, Kemi Ilesanmi, Oyindamola Faithful  

The keynote panel extends the question of African archives and the “short 20th century” to the topic of curation. The panel seeks to engage with the silences, gaps, and zones of the African archive  in order to rethink curatorial history. With his monumental exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994 (2001), the late curator Okwui Enwezor aimed to create a ‘critical biography of Africa’. Yet this formative ecotonal space, a zone of encounters, is only in the making. Chaired by curator, editor, and author Serubiri Moses, the panel draws on the critical historiography of the African art exhibition through what he calls a “critical inter-exhibition discourse”. Looking towards the potent idea that “African Curators Matter”, curators Tumelo Mosaka and Kemi Ilesanmi use oral histories as a model for recovering and reinterpreting curatorial history. Building on the comprehensive library of the CCA, Lagos, with 7,000 titles on contemporary art, critical theory, and curatorial practice, CCA director Oyindamola Faithful argues for ways to close the gaps of the African archive.

Location: Auditorium