When I first began researching West African textiles, I was struck by how much of their story is written in absence: missing labels, severed oral histories, and the quiet erasure of context that turns living cultural objects into anonymous commodities. Kente cloths, bogolans, aso-oke pieces—each...
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Interviews
I first started thinking seriously about AI-powered transcription in oral...
Heritage
I remember the first time a ritual specialist from a West African diaspora...
Heritage
When a ritual mask returns to its originating village, it can feel like a...
Heritage
When I first stepped into a small conservation studio in Accra, I was struck by...
When designers reach into archives for inspiration, they are touching more than fabric and silhouette: they are engaging with lived histories, forms of labor and systems of power. I’ve long been fascinated by the moment a utilitarian garment...
I’ve been watching the surge of virtual exhibitions from grassroots collectives for several years now, and each project seems to ask the same, quietly provocative question: can a loosely organised group, working outside museum walls and finance...
I’ve spent years working between museums, independent presses and community projects, and one question keeps coming up whenever public art meets shifting neighbourhoods: what should you actually ask before commissioning a piece where people’s...
I remember the first time I stood in front of an object whose label told me almost nothing. A carved figure, beautiful and worn, with one sentence: “Unknown origin. circa 19th century.” I felt cheated—not because I wanted every forensic...
When I first encountered a community-led language class in the Highlands of Scotland, I thought I was attending a local revival project: elders teaching syllables to kids, a few hand-stitched primers on the table, the hum of tea and conversation....
When I first encountered the slim pamphlet on a rainy afternoon in a secondhand bookshop, I almost missed the name of the press on the back cover: Hearth & Margin Editions. The pamphlet itself—an uncluttered chapbook of poems by a woman I'd never...
When a group of community musicians, archivists and cultural workers sat around a scarred kitchen table in east London two years ago, we didn’t set out to change council funding. We wanted to make visible what our ears already knew: that diasporic...
Handling sacred objects from other cultures is not an abstract curatorial puzzle — it’s a set of human relationships, obligations and risks that I have learned to take seriously through years of research, fieldwork and conversations with...
When I first encountered a stack of refugee-crafted zines at a small pop-up in a Parisian community centre, I thought I knew what I was looking at: homemade pamphlets, photocopied pages, hand-drawn covers. Aesthetically they belonged to the long and...
When a single carved mask returns to a village after decades — sometimes centuries — away, the ripple effects are rarely limited to the object itself. I've watched this happen in places where I’ve researched collections and oral histories: a...