I’ve spent a long time thinking about objects: how they carry meaning, how they travel, and how their meanings can be transformed — or damaged — when they move into different contexts. When a sacred headdress, a carved reliquary or ceremonial garment is requested for use in a commercial film,...
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Heritage
When I first heard about MemoryMap — a hypothetical neighbourhood...
Heritage
Why a digital portal feels like repair — and why it can also repeat harmWhen...
Arts
When a funder asks me whether they should back a biennial that commissions...
Heritage
I first started thinking seriously about digital provenance for ancestral...
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...
I remember the first time I saw a polished prototype from a cultural-tech startup — an elegant interface that promised to “democratise access” to remote collections. It was irresistible: high-resolution images, immersive narratives, instant...