Thursday, May 30 

10:00 am – 2:00 pm

Tectonic Bones Radio

“Earthquakes in Trees” plants and earth memory 
Workshop (in German & English)
by Ina Röder-Sissoko
! Registration required until 29 May, 6 pm.

Tonight the city + + is a tectonic bone radio—, Our ancestors are on every channel + + + (2024) initiated by Suza Husse with district* school without center sounds into the seismic waves and tectonic ruptures that the multiple realities of colonial violence, of resistance and survival continue to unleash; signals that do not emerge in readable signs but tremblings and shocks, traceable perhaps more in the wisdom of plants and rocks.

Together with the healer, santera, activist and midwife Ina Röder Sissoko, we trace the connections between (medicinal) plants, memory and resistance. We will meet under the weeping beeches by the carp pond in Treptower Park. One hundred and six Black people and people of color lived and worked here from May to October 1896 as performers in the first German colonial exhibition. Many of them lived and organized resistance on site, various currents of Black and anti-colonial resistance in Germany and the occupied territories intersected here and were among the beginnings of the Black movement in Germany. In the workshop, we connect to the memory work in relation to these ancestors and their transformative legacy, which has been and is being done by Black and decolonial activists, cultural workers, and by artists such as Joel Vogel and Vincent Bababoutilabo with their audio walk “zurückerzählt” (2020/2021). Through learning from the healing, resilient and spiritual powers of trees, shrubs, herbs and mosses, we get in touch with these ancestors, their stories, their worlding that lives on in the plants.

4:00 pm – 5:00 pm

When The Jackal Leaves The Sun

Welcome Gathering

5:30 pm – 7:00 pm

Lullaby for a Small Death

Talk & Book Launch
by Renée Akitelek Mboya & Ngwatilo Mawiyoo

Performance
by Ngwatilo Mawiyoo

Lullaby For A Small Death (2023-24), by the Wali Chafu Collective in Nairobi, compiled an anthology of references which borrow words from past and present ancestors in an attempt to hark to a shared intellectual genealogy, mandate and history — centering care and community as infinite and timeless resources towards revolution, revelation and restitution. The collective gathered to think about their idiosyncratic and shared creative education; proposing and referencing alternative canons – re-tracing and re-centering the heritage of East African and global black feminist publishing practices from the 1960s to the 1990s; as well as referring to their own experiments with language, performance and images. For this celebration Renée Akitelek Mboya and Ngwatilo Mawiyoo will share and discuss a taste of these references, including a special poetry performance by Ngwatilo.

7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

We Grow Between Rocks With Our Leaves and Flowers Turned Towards Home

Talk
by Memory Biwa

We Grow Between Rocks With Our Leaves & Flowers Turned Towards Home – Processions Pedagogies (2024) by Memory Biwa brought together artists and intellectuals to re-imagine extracurricular resources on anti-colonial resistance and memorial processes. Reflecting on multiple modalities of repossession on land across the transnational geographies along the Cape-Namibian route, the group drew on imaginaries grounded in poetics of memory of resistance and embodied restoration.

Friday, May 31 

2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Blue Book Women*

Radio Talk
with Sarah Imani, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Jennifer Kamau, Willy Mungai & Memory Biwa

Mangrove Archives of the Blue Book Women* (2024) with curator Anguezomo Nzé Mba Bikoro examines ancestral healing, colonial accountability, law and human trafficking in current restitution discourses of migration and Black ecologies. Focusing on Black feminist decolonial transformational practices, they share with their collaborators intertemporal and intersectional approaches in regards to the history of Black womens’ archives through agro-ecologies of the mangrove systems, Black fabulation and holistic justice.

The participants think together on dealing through ‘emotional’ archives with injustice inside German migrant laws, issues of deportation, human trafficking tied to the historical contexts of historical testimonial narratives of forced displacement in archive reflections from the Blue Book (1918) by Thomas O’ Reilly and Elise Fontenaille (2015).

4:30 pm – 6:00 pm

OPlatzBox: The Refugee Movement Is The Movement Of The 21st Century

Radio Talk
with Jennifer Kamau, Hanaa Hakiki, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro & Willy Mungai

Jennifer Kamau and International Women* Space co-created performative architectures in public spaces in Berlin’s Oranienplatz with OplatzBox: The Refugee Movement Is The Movement of the 21st Century (2022). Together with many contributions and celebrations to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the successful two-year occupation of Oranienplatz, OplatzBox stood as a monument of the resistance and resilience of Black migrant women* refugees addressing the repercussions of the colonial enterprise with regards to migration to Europe.

6:00 pm onward

Opening of “Illness As A Weapon” at Kunstraum Bethanien

Invitation to Parallel Exhibition
with Anguezomo Mba Bikoro

Wednesday, June 5

1:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Weaving Workshop I

with Bino Byansi Byakuleka

This is an open workshop inviting participants to learn weaving skills with Bino and create collective forms of poetical re-imaginings of what it means to leave a system of oppression. Participants create their own stories of routes for liberation.

3:00 pm – 4:30 pm

Global Folklore and Collective Thinking

Talk
with Renée Akitelek Mboya, Memory Biwa, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Rehema Chachage, Jennifer Kamau,  Michael Bader & Suza Husse

Running during Bino’s weaving session, Global Folklore and Collective Thinking will explore the folktale of the Jackal and the Sun, examining how its interpretation and significance have evolved over time. We’ll discuss how different periods and circumstances have reshaped this story and reflect on the power of storytelling as a mode of resistance and world making. Join us to delve into the dynamic nature of folktales and their enduring impact on communities.

6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

A Home I Will Create For You With Exit Pathways

Talk & Zine Release
with Jesse Gerard Mpango, Liberatha Alibalio, Mihayo Kallaye, Rehema Chachage & Turakella Editha Gyindo

Performance
by Turakella Editha Gyindo

Nitakujengea Kinyumba Na Vikuta Vya Kupitia / A Home For You I Will Create With Exit Pathways (2023), curated by Rehema Chachage in collaboration with SOMA, was a collective intervention in Bagamoyo, the once designated capital of German-occupied East Africa. This chapter interrogated colonial cartography through the process of building a home with exit pathways for preservation, conversation, nurturing, communion, and for tracing and planting oneself within a geography. It also engaged with themes of togetherness and community building as means of survival and resistance against colonial impositions.

For the gathering and zine publication release at Flutgraben, the involved artists and thinkers created a performative space with transmissions, prompts, materials, and voices resonating from the ecosystem and collective efforts in Mapinga/Bagamoyo.

8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

“The Empty Grave” (2024)

Film Screening
Q&A with co-directors Cece Mlay & Agnes Lisa Wegner

Songea, Tanzania. John Mbano is on a mission to find the human remains of his great-grandfather, Songea Mbano, who was executed by the German colonial army. The family’s mourning has been passed down through the generations at Songea’s grave in which his head never found a resting place. Instead, it was shipped to Germany for racist research. John and his wife Cesilia embark on a life-changing journey. Buoyed by their resilience as they research, they finally decide to travel to Berlin to find the remains of John’s ancestor. There, they encounter activists whose voices are fighting Germany’s culture of denial. Along with them, the Mbanos confront those in power with their need to bring their ancestor home. What follows is a rollercoaster ride of new hopes and familiar disappointments. Even the historic visit of the German Federal President to John’s hometown fails to bring the beloved ancestor back home. The family’s search continues. Das leere Grab offers a personal perspective: behind the global debate about the return of ancestral remains, we find real people. People violated by a colonial past and its aftermath to this day. Their struggle paves a way to a future disentangled from a painful past.

Thursday, June 6 

2:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Weaving Workshop II

with Bino Byansi Byakuleka

This is an open workshop inviting participants to learn weaving skills with Bino and create collective forms of poetical re-imaginings of what it means to leave a system of oppression. Participants create their own stories of routes for liberation.

3:00 pm – 4:30 pm

Tectonic Bones Radio

“Our ancestors dreamed against the end of the world. It is the language of the cosmos // SPREK TEKST TEKTONIK / TECTOTONGUES. Contributions to an anticolonial queer*feminist glossary for transformative language work and political poetics”

Publication release, Radio Talk & Video Screening
with Verena Melgarejo Weinandt & Suza Husse

SPREK TEKST TEKTONIK / TECTOTONGUES is an anticolonial queer*feminist glossary for transformative language work and political poetics with the aim to contribute to pluralizing and decolonize modes of speaking, writing and embodiment within a German multilingual context. Copublished by Archive Books and district*school without center, it is an attempt to connect and resonate language-dissident, poetic and emancipatory proposals that emerge from anti-colonial, post/migrant and anti-discriminatory movements and multilingualisms.

On the occasion of releasing SPREK TEKST TEKTONIK / TECTOTONGUES artist and glossary contributor Verena Melgarejo Weinandt will be in conversation with “Tectonic Bone Radio” coinitiator and glossary editor Suza Husse with and through Verena’s alter ego Pocahunter. Pocahunter is a warrior who returns from the grave to seek revenge for colonial violences, interfering with peoples’ dreams and imaginaries. Pocahunter troubles the double presence of indigenous people and especially indigenous women in German culture, which is both characterised by an overrepresentation of racist and sexualised colonial stereotypes and by an imaginary absence, that relegates indigenous people to the realms of the dead and the past. Verena Melgarejo Weinandt’s zombiesque avatar acts within this disturbing gap by re-appropriating these stereotypes to craft them into bold and exuberant colonisers’ nightmares.

Verena Melgarejo Weinandt (*1986, D) is a German-Bolivian artist, curator, educator and researcher. Often intertwining different fields of practice, she uses her own being in this world as a tool to address colonial and patriarchal structures and to search for ways of individual and collective healing: methods of what she calls “arte-sana”. She works with performances, textiles, photography, video and installations.

5:00 pm

“Excavating Sleepless Beds”

Immersive Action
by Frida Iman Charara

“Tree Po itics”

Video Screening
by Φ-whyld-I studios (F.I. Charara & Maria Votti)

Excavating Sleepless Beds by Frida Iman Charara is a work installed and enacted to address internalized and embodied colonialities through the botanical practice of introducing plants from and into colonies without a regard to the impact on land and people. Digging out the roots of two protagonist and antagonist plants, this work highlights colonial en-planting as an act of invasion and spacio-cide running and continuing in slow-motion.

Tree Po itics by Φ-whyld-I studios (Maria Votti and F. I. Charara) is a dystopian poem about a walk among trees that talk politics, on contaminated soil. Salvation comes through anything that grows silently and obscurely.

6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

From the Colonies back to Berlin – Current Cultures of Protest

Film Screening & Conversation
with Dan Glass, Ghayath Almadhoun, Nahed Samour, Juliana Napier & Michael Bader

During this part of our evening program “From the Colonies back to Berlin – Current Cultures of Protest”  we will watch a documentary film about recent anti-colonial protests in Berlin and reflect on what is at stake in the current moment. Featuring activists and scholars, the film and panel discussion illuminates the enduring violence of colonial projects, the powerful activism against them and reimagines the world we aim to build through building resistance movements in Berlin and beyond.

8:00 pm – 10:00 pm

Tectonic Bones Radio

“Is the darkness thick. Never mind. Stretch out your hands carefully”* – Hader Halal [With Regards To Presence] / Anti-Geographies of Collective Desire
Radio Listening Session & Zine Release (multilingual)
with Fehras Publishing Practices, D’EST, Aziza Ahmad, Kenan Darwich, Leila Bencharnia, Nancy Naser Al Deen, Omar Gabriel Delnevo, Sama Ahmadi, Sami Rustom, Suza Husse, Ulrike Gerhardt

We will gather around Hader Halal zine and Fehras’ archival collection of the quarterly magazine Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings (1968-1993). We will be reading, listening and lively activate a spirit of solidarity memories together, histories which shaped the cultural and the publishing work behind this magazine and beyond. Hader Halal zine is a testament to the ongoing battle against colonialism and hegemonic structures. The ways in which geography and metaphor intertwine in the context of Palestine serves as a conduit that condenses the aspirations and adversities lived in both Asia and Africa over the past two centuries. More information here: https://fehraspublishingpractices.org/Dates

* Lines from Samih al Khassem’s “The Booby-Trapped Poem” (1985) in Lotus 59-1988.

Friday, June 7

2:00 – 4:00 pm

Blue Book Women*

Workshop
with Elhadji Mamadou Faye

5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Blue Book Women*

Film Screenings
with Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Anna K. Wane, Vitjitua Ndjiharine & Kantarama Gahigiri

The film screenings introduce short films made by female artistic directors dealing with testimonials of ecosystems inherent to human rest-itutions. Landscapes across Brandenburg, Windhoek and Dakar, reveals archives of nature and amplified through embodied traces and historical re-imaginings of black female resilience, climate justice, reparations and queering ecologies.

7:00 pm

Blue Book Women*

Music
by Nane Kahle

In Nane Kahle’s artistic universe, sound becomes a conduit for transcendence—a bridge between past and future, seen and unseen. Through her music and performance, she invites audiences on a journey of self-discovery and collective healing, reminding us of the enduring power of music to unite, inspire, and transform lives.

All sound production and radio transmissions are produced with Refuge Worldwide Radio & SoundSysters.

Donnerstag, 30. Mai

10:00 Uhr – 14:00 Uhr

Tectonic Bones Radio

Pflanzen-
und Bodenworkshop (Deutsch + Englisch)
mit Ina Röder Sissoko
! Anmeldung erforderlich

16:00 Uhr – 17:00 Uhr

When The Jackal Leaves The Sun

Willkommen

17:30 Uhr – 19:00 Uhr

Lullaby for a Small Death

Gespräch & Buchveröffentlichung
von Renée Atikelek Mboya

Performance
von Ngwatilo Mawiyoo

19:30 Uhr – 21:00 Uhr

We Grow Between Rocks With Our Leaves and Flowers Turned Towards Home

Gespräch
mit Memory Biwa

Freitag, 31. Mai

14:00 Uhr – 15:30 Uhr

Blue Book Women*

Radio-Diskussion
mit Sarah Imani, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Jennifer Kamau, Willy Mungai & Memory Biwa

16:30 Uhr – 18:00 Uhr

OPlatzBox: The Refugee Movement Is The Movement Of The 21st Century

Radio-Diskussion
mit Jennifer Kamau, Hanaa Hakiki, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro & Willy Mungai

Ab 18:00 Uhr

Eröffnung der Ausstellung „Illness As A Weapon“ im Kunstraum Bethanien

Einladung zur parallelen Ausstellung
mit Anguezomo Mba Bikoro

Mittwoch, 5. Juni

13:00 Uhr – 18:00 Uhr

Weberei Workshop I

mit Bino Byansi Byakuleka

15:00 Uhr – 16:30 Uhr

Global Folklore and Kollektives Denken

Gespräch
mit Renée Atikelek Mboya, Memory Biwa, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Rehema Chachage, Jennifer Kamau,  Michael Bader & Suza Husse

18:00 Uhr – 19:30 Uhr

A Home I Will Create For You With Exit Pathways

Gespräch & Zine-Veröffentlichung
mit Jesse Gerard Mpango, Liberatha Alibalio, Mihayo Kallaye, Rehema Chachage & Turakella Editha Gyindo

Performance
von Turakella Editha Gyindo

20:00 Uhr – 21:30 Uhr

“The Empty Grave” (2024)

Filmvorführung
Q&A mit Co-Regisseurinnen Cece Mlay & Agnes Lisa Wegner

Donnerstag, 6. Juni

14:00 Uhr – 18:00 Uhr

Weberei-Workshop II

mit Bino Byansi Byakuleka

15:00 Uhr – 16:30 Uhr

Tectonic Bones Radio (auf Deutsch)

“Our ancestors dreamed against the end of the world. It is the language of the cosmos”
Radio-Diskussion & Videovorführung
mit Verena Melgarejo Weinandt & Suza Husse

17:00 Uhr

“Excavating Sleepless Beds”

Immersive Aktion
von Frida Iman Charara

“Tree Po itics”

Videovorführung
von Φ-whyld-I studios (F.I. Charara & Maria Votti)

18:00 Uhr – 20:00 Uhr

Von den Kolonien zurück nach Berlin – Aktuelle Protestkulturen

Filmvorführung und Gespräch
mit Dan Glass, Ghayath Almadhoun, Nahed Samour, Juliana Napier & Michael Bader

20:00 Uhr – 22:00 Uhr

Tectonic Bones Radio

Hader Halal [With Regards To Presence] / Anti-Geographies of Collective Desire
Radio Listening Session & Zine-Veröffentlichung (mehrsprachig)
mit Fehras Publishing Practices, D’EST, Aziza Ahmad, Leila Bencharnia & Omar Gabriel Delnevo

Freitag, 7. Juni

14:00 Uhr – 16:00 Uhr

Blue Book Women*

Workshop
mit Elhadji Mamadou Faye

17:00 Uhr – 18:30 Uhr

Blue Book Women*

Filmvorführungen
mit Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Anna K. Wane, Vitjitua Ndjiharine & Kantarama Gahigiri

19:00 Uhr

Blue Book Women*

Musik
von Nane Kahle