“Every regime of colonial representation is built on the erasure, the silencing, the devastation of cultural ecosystems, existential geographies, emotional cartographies. The image is preceded by sounds, the colonial gaze erases sounds, strips context and objects of representation. It strips the object off representation of its own conception of space and temporality.

Through photography, texts, sounds, performance and video, eight artists created spaces of intimacy for the everyday, collectively create tools that uncover family narratives, diasporic itineraries and archive the self in processes of self-actualisation and claiming one’s existence outside of a colonial gaze and temporality.

The artistis did it so through self/-portraiture, connecting through family objects as systems of transmission and historical recovery of counter memories. They brough this narration within a ‘home’ – the family homes, the bedroom, the photographic studio as a safe space and even the body – capturing the vernacular of the diaspora, claiming Black presence in the city entrenched within colonial narratives/monuments and to projects ‘home’ as a space for emancipatory and utopic horizons of collective living.”

Text By the curators: Cindy Sissokho & Fabian Villegas