Why a digital portal feels like repair — and why it can also repeat harmWhen I first encountered a community-run digital repatriation portal, it felt like a small miracle: images, recordings and documents that had been separated from families and communities for generations were being gathered,...
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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...
Heritage
When I first began thinking about a cooperative conservation lab in Accra, I...
Heritage
I first walked into the city museum expecting the usual: glass cases, carefully...
When I first began thinking about a cooperative conservation lab in Accra, I imagined a place that smelled of indigo and warm starch — equal parts archive, dye studio and social enterprise. But the question that quickly complicated that image was...
I first walked into the city museum expecting the usual: glass cases, carefully lit panels, a chronology that smoothed out conflict into a tidy timeline. What I found instead, a few months later, was a foyer alive with voices — not from an audio...
Why I keep coming back to height increasing shoesI've long been fascinated by the small design choices that alter how people move and how they are perceived. Height is one of those immediate, visual signals; it reshapes posture, voice projection and...
When a diasporic ritual specialist offers to loan wearable sacred regalia to a museum, gallery or cultural festival, the exchange is never just about objects. I’ve learned—through interviews, fieldwork and countless conversations with curators...
When I first began researching West African textiles, I was struck by how much of their story is written in absence: missing labels, severed oral histories, and the quiet erasure of context that turns living cultural objects into anonymous...
I first started thinking seriously about AI-powered transcription in oral history when a community archivist handed me a folder of cassette tapes recorded with undocumented migrants—hours of voices that risked being lost, misheard or left unread...
I remember the first time a ritual specialist from a West African diaspora community handed me a textile wrapped in plain brown paper and said, softly, “This cannot be looked at like other museum pieces.” The garment was a living object —...
When a ritual mask returns to its originating village, it can feel like a heartbeat found again — an object that carries memory, authority and the potential to reconnect a community with practices interrupted by displacement, colonial collecting,...
When I first stepped into a small conservation studio in Accra, I was struck by two things: the sound of conversations as much as the smell of starch and wax, and the quiet authority of a space run by a cooperative of textile artisans, conservators...
I first encountered a migrant-run radio documentary tucked away on a community station’s archive while researching oral histories for a museum project. It was raw, urgent and stubbornly intimate: the voices of seasonal workers, care workers, and...