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, but as gestures, jokes, weathered hands and the kind...
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Heritage
I remember first hearing about archivebridge at a small gathering of curators...
Arts
Technology is reshaping education across the world, and France is no exception....
Heritage
When I first started working with diasporic makers—artists and craft...
Heritage
When a museum agrees to display living sacred regalia on loan, it is taking on...
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...
I have been thinking a lot about the ways neighbourhood apps can move beyond local listings and event calendars to become instruments of cultural restitution—practical, forensic tools that help displaced families prove ownership of cultural...
I remember the first time I stood in front of a ritual mask that had been returned to its community after decades in a European museum. The moment was thick with relief, gratitude and a fragility I hadn’t expected. That object—a carved face,...
Translating a refugee’s oral testimony into a VR experience is one of the most intimate and powerful forms of storytelling I can imagine — and one of the riskiest from a legal and ethical standpoint. When you move someone’s memory into an...
I have been thinking a lot about archives that are alive — not museums under glass but accumulations of practice, ritual and pattern that continue to breathe through people’s hands. A textile archive in Lagos, curated by a cooperative, is...