Diasporic Life:
Black Solidarity/Towards Liberation
Thanks to everyone who joined us for the Opening of Diasporic Life: Black Solidarity/Towards Liberation, and the launch of our installation: The Internet is a Real Place. We’re grateful to everyone who interacted with the works on display and the joyful reception to the performances by Moor Mother and Aquilles Navarro. The exhibition is now open from Thursday — Saturday, 12pm-5pm.
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Contributors:
Tumelo Mtimkhulu is an artist from Johannesburg, South Africa, working between Johannesburg and Amsterdam. He employs visual and written text to grapple with questions of how to negotiate the personal and histories that one is heir to, primarily through a knowing of the body. Treating the often prescribed and singular idea of what history is as suspect. He conceives of these histories as ‘texts’ in themselves and the ‘human’ being as a site onto which these histories & experiences are written, effaced, rewritten and superimposed onto existing ‘texts’.
Milla Milla is a diasporic cultural platform operating at the intersection of football, storytelling and community. Through screenings, conversations and cultural programming, we explore questions of identity, heritage and belonging, creating spaces where perspectives can be seen, heard and connected always through the lens of football.
Timothy Yanick Hunter uses self-led research and methodologies of recording and sampling to explore the experiential and aesthetic dimensions of the Black diaspora. References culled from a range of sources suggest shifting proximities, novel interactions between material and provenance. Historical photographs from museum archives meet ephemera from obscure corners of the Internet, overlaid with shards of music and spoken recordings. The resulting works are living mélanges, invested in alternative modes of making and thinking about memory, temporality, and the unknowable facets of existence.
Madubuko Diakité is a Human Rights lawyer, researcher, writer, and documentary filmmaker born in Harlem in 1940. Diakité studied at the New York Institute of Photography but moved from the USA to Sweden in 1968 to study filmmaking and pursue a PhD in Cinema Studies. At this time he traveled frequently between Sweden, USA, and Nigeria, where he had partly grown up and would later found a film school. In 1992, he also earned a Licentiate in Law at Lund University, Sweden. Since then, Diakité has practiced law and researched Human Rights at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute in Lund and has been active in anti-discrimination organizations in Sweden.
Shertise Solano (b. 1982, Rotterdam) trained as an actor at Utrecht’s University of the Arts, specialising in Jacques Lecocq’s method, which focuses on the body and movement. After years of working as an actor and theatre maker, Solano shifted her focus to the visual arts. She works across various disciplines – collage, animation, video and spatial installations – always taking the body as a starting point.
Maureen Blackwood, of Jamaican heritage, was born in 1960. In 1983 Blackwood, along with Isaac Julien, Martina Attile, Robert Crusz, and Nadine Marsh–Edwards, co–founded the Sankofa Film and Video Collective. With Sankofa’s other filmmakers, Blackwood has produced a number of experimental narrative and documentary works that examine black life in Britain from various perspectives.
Isaac Julien KBE RA is a Filmmaker and installation artist, born in 1960 in London. His work breaks down the barriers between different artistic disciplines, drawing from and commenting on film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting, and sculpture, and uniting them to construct powerful visual narratives through multi-screen film installations.
body_hacker (aka Sall Lam Toro) is a black queer crip trans* mutant, multimedia performance artist, mover, and organiser born and raised in Portugal with Guinean, Cape Verdean and Senegalese roots, based in Copenhagen. Their practice resides within oracular encounters that seek to stimulate, disrupt, and disturb the audience’s access to imagination - from the premise that our access to imaginaries /imagination has been heavily colonised and hijacked pre-birth.
Phantom Wizard is a composer and improviser whose work blurs boundaries and reimagines traditions. Rather than controlling sound, he seeks to guide it, creating a space in which multiple truths can exist side by side. This principle lies at the heart of ‘Fribari’, a sonic philosophy. Phantom Wizard blends natural soundscapes, the timbral colours of Afro-diasporic music, experimental electronics, and the many ancient traditions that emerge from Suriname’s cultural melting pot. Phantom Wizard lives and works in Amsterdam Zuidoost.
Cate Lartey is an artist and curator based in Düsseldorf. She studied Design at the Peter Behrens School of Arts in Düsseldorf and completed a postgraduate program at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne with a focus on art and media studies. Her artistic and curatorial practice engages with aesthetics, archives, visual and material culture and an emphasis on the African diaspora and beyond.
Black Archive Germany, Cate Lartey’s project presents diasporic life in its beauty and complexity, far from clichés. It brings together photographic memories from African communities in Germany and celebrates cultural identity, resilience and community. Through public calls, Lartey collects private photographs that capture moments of togetherness: family celebrations, holidays, parties. The images date from the 1970s to the 2000s. In most cases, scans or photographs of the prints enter the archive, as their owners prefer to hold on to the originals. Lartey uses these moments of transfer as an opportunity to enter into dialogue about the stories behind the images. The visual richness of Black Archive Germany also points to an absence: the limited presence of Black communities in Germany’s cultural memory and in its official archives. Yet the project achieves more than filling a gap. It opens up a space for exchange and connection in the present. Photography is always a collective process: it emerges through the interplay of people, technology, institutions and history - and continues in the gaze of viewers.
Ibrahim Cissé (b. 1991, France) is a visual artist working across painting, photography, and experimental film, where he treats the image not as an object but as an encounter—a meeting of light, shadow, and historical residue that decides what becomes visible and what stays hidden. He holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London, and previously worked as an editor and researcher. Drawing on Jungian psychology and West African visual traditions, his paintings and light-based works treat illumination as a material—shallow and artificial, yet ethereal—that shapes the image from within.
The manifestation is generously supported by the Mondriaan Fund and Creative Europe.
Team Metro54
Curatorial team: Raziyah Heath and Idil Samatar
Guest Curators: Tracian Meikle, Rael Jero Salley, Eben Badu
Management: Amal Alhaag and Damiana de Windt
Spatial Design: Qiaochu Guo
Graphic Design: Qiaochu Guo and Niam Madlani
Production coordinator: Alec Mateo
Communications: Niam Madlani
Art Handlers: Arthur Jules, Andoni Zamara Txakartegi
Diasporic Life: Black Solidarity/Towards Liberation unfolds as the second chapter of Diasporic Life. It builds on the earlier manifestation Diasporic Life: Black Togetherness as a Lingua Franca, developed with Barby Asante between London and Amsterdam. The project continues a multi-year international and interdisciplinary research process that considers the meaning, multiplicity and complexity of Black aliveness in Fortress Europe, in relation to the African continent and its many Diasporas. Diasporic Life centers the Black imaginative world and the ways it enchants everyday Black diasporic life beyond the shadow of anti-Black violence. How do “we” keep each other alive? In what ways doesDiasporic Life manifest itself in visual and sonic cultures Black people make for themselves for each other? And what methodologies, dreams and processes (re)shape the practices and daily lives of Black artists, activists and cultural producers?