In her public talk, Nirlyn will share her research on the Latin American context through the eyes of women artists and intellectuals. Here, relationships between patriarchy, coloniality, female loneliness, and violence will be discussed to offer counter-colonial strategies to unpack such issues.

In this lecture performance, Tara will talk, walk, dance and sing through some of her recent performance projects, asking: what does it mean to mishandle an archive, to repeat an action for 365 days, to dance a not-dance, to poesy a non-poem, to find a home in homelessness, to live with uncertainty and trust disjunction, to question, to question the question.

Your language is lying to you, poetry as a territory for action is a provocation to explore the ideas, structures, and beliefs that inhabit our words. It is a poem-essay on the languages that we have inherited, the ones that we forgot, and the ones we decided to create to transform our history, name our feelings, and invent other forms of living. It reflects on embodied, contextualised, and alive writing opening questions on transformation and collectivisation, inviting us to think of poetry as an intersectional practice to intervene in our societies.

“No soy unicornio” is a lecture performance that takes the image of this mythical animal for a ‘performance-art conference’ that explores the relationship between biography, power and freedom. Using records of how the masses in Havana speak, as well as public interventions, poems, and an eccentric collection of objects, the unicorn is harnessed.

In this immersive and interactive presentation using poetry, text and song, Rah guides the audience through their multidisciplinary practice. In the process, Rah invites the audience to experience and engage with a body of work situated in the belief that art mediates change through accessibility.

A choreographic project, “Going Green Upside Down” is a laboratory about the synergy and proximity of humans and nature. By questioning how the energy of performing art could be fused with the art of nature, Ladji and his creative collaborators would like to share the experience of the existing Pocket Park in Ouagadougou as well as the joy and positive impacts of nature to everyone regardless of social class, age, religion or gender.

The process of writing and gaining control over history, over archives is the most important step in creating a colonial hegemony. How do we narrate a history made mute? The way Mona learned orally and visually was through folklore, music, idioms, jokes, fragmented stories, and even pop culture. In this presentation, she will present an experimental, horizontal, audio-visual collage consisting of these elements, which narrates a history of hope, and the power and will of a people fighting for their freedom.

How can a consistent, intentional practice of dreaming help us birth communities, towns and cities that reflect our highest hopes? In this interactive presentation we will explore how collective hope can be cultivated by deliberately defining the futures we desire. With the phrase “you cannot actualise what you cannot visualise” as its mantra, this session unveils an ethos of worldmaking that helps us reject realities that do not serve progressive futures. The goal is to regain ownership of dreaming, too often maligned as an idle waste of time, as a potent force to aid in our quest for liberation.

From discussing mythopoetic identity formation, personal attachment to formative texts, reading as a practice for freedom and the necessity for spaces of collective learning and community building, Keren engages in a personal reflection on the healing, redemptive and transformative power of art especially literature, how it served and still serves as an emancipatory tool in her journey as a being in constant search of ways to fully appreciate life in all its aspects.

A marginalised body is not just an individual body as it can become the witness to make visible connections/intersections between all historical and systematic discriminations. This piece is about women in different stories that intertwine. This story is about re-invention of creative strategies, it’s about voices, silences, images, dreams, gestures, fires and actions towards life, love and nonviolent support. It’s about collective mourning, It's about joyful militancy. It’s also about us, here and now, everywhere and every day, hand in hand cuddled in the sisterhood circle; dancing and singing: woman, life, freedom.

In this talk, Soukaina will discuss her current research The Black Sun of Renewal which takes as a point of departure Toni Maraini’s description of the trademark covers of Souffles (a cultural and poetry journal that served as a venue for experimental poetry and popular theatre, film, and debates) from 1966 to 1969. The latter displayed an intense black sun symbolising the rebellion against the artistic status quo and a manifesto for new aesthetics. Soukaina will present her line of investigation, which initially looked at the various narratives of modern art in Morocco through the developments of the Black Sun, and that is currently gravitating towards the question of how to think of a metaphor as a method of study. Leaving the rise and fall/visibility and invisibility narration behind, this research is now focusing on the image of The Black Sun as an archive and a device to narrate a historical moment.

“Noise of Time” speculates upon the afterlives of “empire” entangled in family histories, tangible and intangible landscapes, and unspoken memories. Considering retrospection as the place beyond time, the structure whereby disparate temporalities may be re-collected in one familiar place, Rola attempts to reimagine the relationship between the present moment and the traces of lost people, as well as lost places, offering possible worlds. This project is a continuum of a sisterly endeavour ‘Pieces of Us; The Intimate as Imperial Archive’ which, through a feminist re-ordering and rereading of our familial archives across disciplines, plumbs the affective and intimate spaces of empire by way of our mother’s memoir, and our maternal grandfather’s vast personal photographic archive of Aramco (formerly Arabian-American Oil Company).

This lecture is a multi-sensory meditation bridging intersectional feminism, decoloniality, crafts, and digital technologies. Central questions are: Who writes History? How biased is scientific research? And which parts of the history of science have been erased to polish the image of some scientists or render others invisible? Traveling in time and space, Aouefa will touch upon digital colonialism, the story of Sara Baartman, personal narratives, and the chemistry, ritualism, and planetary history of cacao. Aouefa will further present some of her recent collaborative projects, which attempt to decolonize "digital" technologies and to explore the blurry boundaries between art and craft, rituals and technologies, body and mind, human and non-human, History and microhistory, institutional and self-organised. 

In recent years, the standard of exhibition-making in contemporary visual art as well as in creative platforms has “streamed” subjectivities and contexts in an unprecedented speed that turns art into data, information, and facts. Such well-intentioned commitments to communication and accessibility have seemingly prioritised content production and discourse management through works of art. With these conditions, how does the artistic resist the agency of “standard” exhibitions, and how does the curatorial facilitate the normalisation of new content regimes with or without art? Renan will return to the memories of his “first” exhibitions in order to engage with these questions. He will immerse himself in the fragility of his recollection, the deception of nostalgia, and the vigour of daydreaming to disarrange his imagination of art, artists, curator, curating, and exhibitions.