November 4-5, 2025  
Re:assemblages symposium
G.A.S. Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria

During this session, we will think through the complexities of ongoing discussions about restitution, aiming to foreground important spaces, conversations and practices within Africa and its diasporas.  In what ways does the discourse around restitution and policymaking, including prevailing notions of reparative futures, mirror the systemic and structural colonial and racial status quo? Rehearsing together means unpacking the ways in which existing practices, toolkits, strategies, and networks either reinforce current power structures or succeed in challenging structures of exploitation and domination. It involves a collective effort to understand how to undo or shift power structures and to foster a more nuanced conversation about the intricate interplay between knowledge, power, and societal structures.

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In this gathering, our focus was on alternative artistic processes and materials, and what’s lost and dispossessed in the afterlife of colonialism. Across East Africa and its diasporas, there’s an ongoing investment in linking restitution with questions of land, dispossession, and ancestral lifeworlds. Many artists and designers have developed practices that extend beyond the Eurocentric notion of ‘sustainable practices’, foregrounding rituals of memory-keeping and memory-making as intrinsic to these practices.  These topics were highlighted also within the wider concept of re-routing/decoding knowledge.  

 
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This program took the shape of an experimental research forum, organized around several interrelated themes: Practices of Freedom and Refusal; The Earth as a Wayfinder; Exploring the Sonic Archive, and Restitution as a Practice of Care. This program also highlighted the concept of reparative futures and (im)material culture in relation to artistic and design strategies, methodologies and practices.  The multidisciplinary approach foregrounded the importance of artistic and design practices in relation to reimagining restitution — and aims to stretch the notion of what restitution is or can be (beyond the objects).    

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This collaboration and program  brought Sustaining the Otherwise to the Caribbean region,  where the topic of ‘carnival and the carnivalesque’ was used as a point of entry for critical engagement.  We explored the importance of mask making in relation to artistic practices within the region, and in relation to West Africa.  This was an opportunity to engage with the notion of  ‘a carnival space’, touching upon topics of ritual/memory, history/memory in terms of thinking about carnival as a conjuring of history and memory, highlighting the links between these topics/practices within a Caribbean context and as understood in relation to Africa.    

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This two-day program was was developed as an experimental research forum designed to foster meaningful dialogues around restitution, with particular emphasis on the importance of transformative ecosystems.  

The Earth as a Wayfinder was organized around four basic themes: (Un)rooting Knowledge, Sonic Memory Work, Transformative Ecosystems in Practice, and Becoming at One with the World. By focusing on pluriversal narratives, histories, and perspectives, with this forum we sought to create a fertile ground for local and international discussions on restitution, as considered in relation to spatial and architectural histories, land (dis)possession, and reparative futures.

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This four-day program was developed by Amal Alhaag and Selene Wendt in collaboration with Pascale Obolo, Afrikadaa, and the African Art Book Fair and aimed to explore how artists, designers, thinkers, activists, and communities in Africa and its diasporas address the concept of epistemic restitution, and the return of knowledge. The Unruly Knowledge sessions were conceived as a pluriversal call and response to the African Art Book Fair program.

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The collaborative research chapter of Sustaining the Otherwise was launched with a two-day symposium at Nordic Black Theatre, Oslo. This gathering was organized around four interrelated themes: (Un)learning Decolonial Curating; Disrupting the Archives; Performing Decoloniality and Artistic Practices of Storytelling, which were discussed in a workshop environment where participants and guest speakers exchanged ideas, strategies, and reference points.

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