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 unavoidable: can such a lab export ethical textile...
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Heritage
I first walked into the city museum expecting the usual: glass cases, carefully...
Features
Why I keep coming back to height increasing shoesI've long been fascinated by...
Heritage
When a diasporic ritual specialist offers to loan wearable sacred regalia to a...
Heritage
When I first began researching West African textiles, I was struck by how much...
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...
I remember the first time I ran my hands—carefully, with cotton gloves—over a length of handwoven kente in Accra. The colours were stubbornly vibrant despite years of sunlight and handling; the weave held stories of family, ceremony and...
I first encountered a project like MemoryMap while researching community archives for a feature about contested neighbourhoods in post-industrial cities. What struck me was how a simple interface — a map, a few upload buttons, some tagging —...
I remember the first time I saw a ritual object displayed beneath pristine gallery lighting at an international art fair. It looked spectacular: lacquered surfaces, intricate beadwork, and a history that seemed palpable in its scars. But alongside...