I & I: Speakeasy for Wayward Life
I & I is a tasteroom, speakeasy, listening room.—an installation drawn from the memory and momentum of radical Black sociality—those vital spaces of sound, intimacy and improvisation seeded in basements, living rooms, restaurants and street corners across cities like Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Lisboa or Brussels. Spaces that slipped into something else after dark or in the folds of the everyday, that bloom or disappear to the rhythm of economic crises and precarious life.
I & Iis a part of the manifestation Diasporic Life: A Lingua Franca of Black Aliveness and is open to the public from 22 May 2025 until 26 July 2025. This Speakeasy for Wayward Life is open on a weekly basis to visitors with its own programming of events, listening sessions, performances, readings and DJ sets.
I & I leans into what it means to be together otherwise in our complex times—attuning into the genealogy of Black spaces built on care, evasion and togetherness. This is the sound of the unsanctioned: where gossip curls against basslines, where lovers rock folds into domino clatter, where records skip across decades and laughter swells through the low bass. The kind of place made from the need to be together in ways that sidestepped and stretched beyond structural social paradigms.
In the past, as well as in the present, whenever Black people are/were unwelcome in the sanctioned nightlives of the city, they turn(ed) to the house party, the blues dance, the shebeen. These aren’t merely just escape routes—they are always evolving as sonic laboratories, social sculptures and holding spaces for rebellion, friction and pleasure. The DIY party has always been an act of infrastructural care. It is here where the speakeasy as a project looks into the ways Black people gather across shifting models of capitalist exploitation, and the ways space informs artistic practices, performances, hanging out, listening sessions, investigation and collective assembly.
I & I is a room for relation and refusal. This installation leans into the legacy of the speakeasy as catalyst, as container, as counter-narrative. A porous room attuned to the heterogeneity of Black worlds—where laughter, rhythm and refusal mix. Illicit or not, these spaces have always been alive with possibility. They allowed gangsters and artists, neighbors, kitchen-table theorists, hustlers and dancers to mingle.
I & I is seen, felt and heard, presented by Metro54 as part of the manifestation Diasporic Life: A Lingua Franca of Black Aliveness is an ongoing artistic research program that looks into the meaning, conceptualization, multiplicities and complexities of Black Aliveness across Europe. The manifestation opens on 6 June 2025.
📅 22 May 2025 until 26 July 2025
📍 Metro54 (Amsterdam) – In-person gathering