Black Aquatic Entanglements in the Luisenstadt

Technische Universität, SFB 1265 Re-Figuration von Räumen. (May 2024)

With Dr. Jamie Scott Baxter

This workshop explored the ways in which water and its formations are not neutral, but rather entangled via intersectional modes of production and negotiation as raced, gendered, and classed bodies of water. The task was to consider what lies beneath, and how these dynamic relations of the aquatic are not divorced from local and global politics. As such it considered how Black life is entangled with the waters of the now defunct Luisenstadt canal. It Introduced the archive as a method for such an investigation to the students and explored how archival traces can be found in the built environment as well as in the museum. In addition participants were tasked with capturing the ephemeral and dynamic traces of water via visual, sonic, and haptic methods.  

Counter Mapping Days Berlin, With the Amo Collective at the Humbolt University department of Anthropology (July 2024)

Wayfinding workshop with Moses März

A collaborative workshop fusing the mapping practices of the Moses März with the imparted knowledge of the Akan philosophy and cosmology by Kwame Aidoo. A collective and multi-sensorial response to the anniversary of the Berlin conference 1885 and a re-visitation to the seminal work of Afro-Deutsche and Ghanaian philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo. This series of workshops traveled through the senses via music, song, dance, and taste to reconfigure how we might re imagine vocabularies of freedom. The final workshop and my contribution was on play in the creation of the “wayfinding playground” providing space to reconnect with our bodies and the socialites of play through reimainging traditional chalk games with Akan philosophy and Adinkra symbology.