When I first began talking to textile workers in Lagos about the idea of an archive, the question that kept coming back was not simply whether their work could be sold internationally, but whether the act of archiving might extract something vital from the people and practices it sought to...
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Heritage
I remember the first time I stood in front of a protest banner that had been...
Heritage
When a ritual mask returns to the village from which it was taken—whether...
Essays
I remember the first time I watched an oral testimony translated into an...
Essays
When designers reach into archives for inspiration, they are touching more than...
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...
I still remember the first time I stood alone in a reading room, a stack of colonial-era glass plate negatives before me. The images were beautiful, infuriating, and utterly opaque in different measures. Like many objects of empire, photographs...
I have spent years watching cities argue with themselves over paint. A wall that one group calls an act of vandalism can be, to another, a living archive of community feeling, a landmark of identity, or a potent political statement. The friction...
When I first began researching collections for museums and independent projects, one encounter changed how I think about authority in museums. I sat in a cramped community centre with a woman who had spent thirty years working in a food-processing...
When I first set out to co-curate a city-wide biennial, I resisted the usual playbook: glossy press releases, international list of star artists, and a roster of white cube institutions. What felt more urgent to me was listening—really...
When museums claim to “save” objects from neglect, they too often inherit stories of dispossession. I’ve listened to elders in Caribbean parishes, artists in Lagos and curators in provincial British towns who asked me the same question: how do...
I’ve been thinking about sound a lot lately — the small, stubborn noises that stick to you: a vendor’s call at dawn, the rattle of a tram, a lullaby hummed in a kitchen you no longer own. For diasporic filmmakers, these vernacular sounds are...
I inherited my first West African textile the way many people inherit objects: a box that had been in the attic, a faded wrapper folded around a family story. For years it was simply beautiful linen in my life — a Kente-like striping that belonged...
I first stumbled upon the cooperative by accident, on a rain-washed afternoon in Lisbon when the city's usual postcard charms felt suddenly thin. I was looking for something rawer than the Alfama tourist loop — a place where the past didn't just...
There’s a peculiar dissonance I keep returning to whenever I encounter so-called "outsider art" in auction catalogues, glossy market reports or gallery press releases: the work that once sat beyond institutional gaze is now being used to define...