Decolonial Contemporary African Diasporic Visions | Exocé Kasongo at May-Ayim-Ufer

The multidisciplinary afrocentric artist Exocé Kasongo will walk the ground at May-Ayim-Ufer in Berlin-Kreuzberg, he will move, dance, act, read and sing. He will wear clothes created by Souleyman, which feature the fabrics visualizing Exocé’s collage work. The performance is the culmination of Exocé’s five-month project D.C.A.D.V (Decolonial Contemporary African Diasporic Visions), a search for identity and heritage, artistic manifestation of ‘last rebel’.

This performance will be streamed on Oyoun's  YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and Instagram channels.

The project “D.C.A.D.V (Decolonial Contemporary African Diasporic Visions)” by Exocé Kasongo was able to be realized by collaborative works of Astan Meyer, Etsuki, Ibrahima Ndiaye and Souleyman.

About the location:

May-Ayim-Ufer is a street in Berlin-Kreuzberg, which was re-named in 2010 after the Afro-German poet, educator, and activist, May Ayim.

May Ayim was born in 1960 in Hamburg, the child of a German student and Ghanaian medical student. She wrote her thesis at the University of Regensburg, "Afro-Deutsche: Ihre Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte aus dem Hintergrund gesellschaftlicher Veränderungen" (Afro-Germans: Their Cultural and Social History on the Background of Social Change), which was the first scholarly study of Afro-German history. Combined with contemporary materials, it was published as the book Farbe Bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (1986). This was translated and published in English as Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (1986). It included accounts by many women of Afro-German descent. She published many other writings and worked as an activist to unite Afro-Germans and combat racism in German society. She co-founded Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (Initiative of Black People in Germany) to that purpose in the late 1980s.

EMBODIED ARTS FESTIVAL

Curators, artists and cultural practitioners have been exploring identities, belonging and embodied memories through diasporic, decolonial and queer perspectives as part of Oyoun’s first curatorial focus: EMBODIED TEMPORALITIES. The outcomes, encounters and queries will be presented and celebrated during the EMBODIED ARTS FESTIVAL from 8th - 18th April. View all events here.