Category: Panels

When the silent song rises

Posted on by Melody Howse

The short film ‘Joy’ featuring Beverly D. Renekouzou and Exocé Kasongo will be part of the exhibition ‘When The Silent Song Rises’ at ArtCo Gallery, Berlin from the 27th April – 10 June 2023.

WHEN THE SILENT SONG RISES is a group exhibition presenting works by Beverly D. Renekouzou, Exocé Kasongo, Melody Howse, Thomias Radin, Selassie and Elihu Ashong presented at ARTCO Gallery Berlin.

Building up on their shared history in music and dance, the collaborating artists release their energy in both individual artworks and a collaborative performance that push the limits of human awakening. An interdisciplinary demonstration of ‚contemporary ancestry‘ and an opportunity to witness the unfolding of a transformative experience.

The show builds up a on a curatorial concept by Beverly Renekouzou and her recent work series ‚Honorer le sacrifice‘.

https://www.artco-gallery.com/exhibitions/168-when-the-silent-song-rises-beverly-d.-renekouzou-exoce-kasongo-melody-howse-thomias/overview

Black Visual Intonation Workshop with Nnenna Onuoha

Posted on by Melody Howse

The exhibition AFTERLIVES by Nnenna Onuoha shows four of her recent video works centering Afrodiasporic voices in processes such as collective re-membering, archiving of Black experience and (self-)care, Onuoha approaches histories of colonialism across West Africa, Europe and the United States. By carefully and repeatedly applying these methods, the artist generates histories of the past that can be shared collectively and thus may work as a means to repair.

Workshop: Black Visual Intonation
with Melody Howse
2023 01 25 | 18.00 – 20.00

Talk: Black Ways of knowing and being

Posted on by Melody Howse

8th November 2022

Univesität Luzern, Invitation by Faduma Abukar Mursal

What could we know differently if we understood sweat as vocabulary, sound as empowerment and voice as archive? These are the questions I consider in this work which focuses on Black embodied experience in Berlin which I explore through a Black feminist lens. I take this approach to make visible the ways in which the sensory and embodied dimensions of experience can be read as more than sensation. Here I argue that they are an embodied grammar which if we learn to read can tell us something of ourselves as well as something of the society and the moment in which we live.

‘Black ways of knowing and being’ are essential to my understanding of racialized experience therefore I weave quotidian experiences of racism and racial othering with practices of joy, healing and space making or what Katherine Mckittrick has called “Black livingness” (2020).

https://www.unilu.ch/fakultaeten/ksf/institute/ethnologisches-seminar/veranstaltungen/archiv/melody-howse-universitaet-leipzig-black-ways-of-knowing-and-being-6975

‘pose fatigue’ with Anike Joyce Sadiq, Laurie Young & Leo

Posted on by Melody Howse

Together with Anike Joyce Sadiq, Laurie Young & Leo a public moment was staged putting the sculptures, sound and video works of Anike, into conversation with Laurie’s dance practice and Leo’s sound practice. Using text from my piece ‘expansive sounds’ we created a ‘call and response’ to activate and extend the notion of ‘tremble’ and the resonance of ‘vibration.’

Link to exhibition/performance

The Expansive Sounds of BLM.

Posted on by Melody Howse

Talk presented at the University Bayreuth Anthropology Lecture Series (June 2022) Organised by Prof. Katharina Schramm & Dr. Nasima Selim.

This talk brings together a multi-modal approach to ethnographic inquiry through exploring sonic encounters at the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Berlin. In doing so it reveals how sound functions at the demo and how these functions have wider repercussions, extending beyond the spatial limits of the demo challenging both State and society.  

BLack Reminist Remix Lab

Posted on by Melody Howse

Workshop: Breath & Ambivalence

With: Melody Makeda Ledwon

In this workshop we explored how breath is a resource and a Black feminist practice which is at once archival as it is restorative. Via different mediums and methods we discussed how to make the long breath, in not just our activism but our lives. This workshop was on the invitation of Francesca Sobande & Akwugo Emejulu.

Playlist from the workshop

Resource Folder

Round table discussion

Posted on by Melody Howse

10. December 2021

I will be joining Prof. Akwugo Emejulu (University of Warwick), Prof. Leah Bassel (University of Roehampton) and Fania Noel for a round table discussion on the ‘Women of colour resist report‘ a six-nation comparative research project exploring how women of colour activists organise and mobilise against austerity, against the far right and for migrants’ rights in Germany, France, Denmark, Spain, Belgium and the United Kingdom.

Posted on by Melody Howse

2021
Methodologies of care: Undisciplining and methodologies of care: Rethinking the politics of knowledge in postcolonial landscapes – A Workshop organized by Katharina Schramm (Bayreuth), Memory Biwa (Windhoek) and Eleanor Schaumann (Bayreuth) at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, University of Bayreuth, July 8-11, 2021
Paper: Remembering Violence: Reading Refusal as a methodology of care.

2019
3rd Political Imagination Laboratory – “What [Not] can be Said: Fieldwork as Witnessing? 6 – 7 December 2019. UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI PERUGIA DIPARTIMENTO DI FILOSOFIA, SCIENZE SOCIALI, UMANE E DELLA FORMAZIONE,
Paper: Crossing over – From witness to activist

Anticolonial Month Berlin
Panel: Fighting to Survive: Black and Indigenous Liberation Struggles Against State Violence
Featuring: Melody H., Gabriel Silva & Edna Bonhomme.

2017
Voicing Experience’ the 4th British Conference of Auto ethnography, Sussex University – June 2017
Paper: Up All Night

German Anthropological Association
Paper: The Edge of a Feeling