When I first stepped into a tiny silk workshop in Varanasi, the air was thick with the smell of hot metal and boiled dye, and a single electric fan stirred a tired rhythm against rows of handlooms. The place was no more than a courtyard and three small rooms, but it held something far larger than...
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Heritage
I’ve spent a long time thinking about objects: how they carry meaning, how...
Heritage
When I first heard about MemoryMap — a hypothetical neighbourhood...
Heritage
Why a digital portal feels like repair — and why it can also repeat harmWhen...
Arts
When a funder asks me whether they should back a biennial that commissions...
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...
When a funder asks me whether they should back a biennial that commissions living sacred performances, my first response is not a quick yes or no. These are projects that move between aesthetics, ritual, community authority, and legal and ethical...
I first started thinking seriously about digital provenance for ancestral ceramics after a visit to a regional museum where a drawer of unlabelled pots sat in near-darkness. The objects were beautiful, fragile and, crucially, disconnected from...
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 —...