When I first began working on exhibitions that included living ritual specialists lending their sacred regalia, I quickly realised that a standard loan form from a museum’s collections team wouldn’t cut it. These objects often carry active meanings, prescriptive uses, and social obligations...
Read more...
Heritage
Why this question mattersWhen I first visited a community-run conservation lab...
Features
I remember the first time I sat with a displaced family clutching their phones...
Heritage
When I first heard about a cooperative in Lagos wanting to surface its textile...
Heritage
When I first started spending time in Accra, it was the small, peer-run repair...
When I first heard about a cooperative in Lagos wanting to surface its textile archive under the evocative label àṣẹ threads, I felt an immediate mix of excitement and caution. Excitement because the name nods to a living spiritual and...
When I first started spending time in Accra, it was the small, peer-run repair shops and studio-labs tucked between markets and art spaces that kept pulling me back. These were places where knowledge circulated not as files or fetishised objects,...
I remember first hearing about archivebridge at a small gathering of curators and community archivists in Lisbon. Someone passed a phone around and pulled up an interface that looked deceptively simple: photos, place names, oral notes, and a...
Technology is reshaping education across the world, and France is no exception. From interactive whiteboards to digital homework platforms, the modern classroom in France is evolving quickly. What was once a system known for chalkboards, notebooks,...
When I first started working with diasporic makers—artists and craft practitioners who had migrated or whose families had moved across borders—I was eager, idealistic and, frankly, inexperienced. I believed that connecting their work to new...
When a museum agrees to display living sacred regalia on loan, it is taking on a responsibility that extends far beyond transport logistics and label copy. These objects are not inert artifacts; they are embedded in ongoing practices, relationships...
I remember the first time I held an ase thread in my hand — a slender, hand-twined cord whose colours and knots carried meanings that were whispered more than written. In Lagos markets I watched makers stitch small orders for tourists and priests...
I’ve watched, too many times, an object with a fraught past slip through the formal checks of an auction house and reappear decades later under a new catalogue number and a glossy photograph. It’s painful because the path that led that object...
I remember the first time I sat in a cramped apartment in London listening to field recordings made half a world away. The songs carried weather and kinship and the scent of ceremony; the recordings themselves were brittle, their provenance scrawled...
When museums or galleries ask to borrow wearable sacred regalia from living ritual specialists, I always feel a mix of exhilaration and responsibility. These objects are not just artifacts; they are active participants in belief systems, embodiments...