Imagining Otherwise


4-6 September, 2026
Nordic Black Theatre, Oslo






A k u z u r u  ‘SonicSolaris’, 2025
Documentation of performance featured in  ‘Carnival as a Conjuring of History and Memory’ at Alice Yard, Port of Spain

Sustaining the Otherwise presents Imagining Otherwise, a three-day interdisciplinary program taking place at and around Nordic Black Theatre, Oslo. The program brings together contemporary art practice, sound-based art, music, and archival research into a live exhibition format.

Imagining Otherwise actively engages with the topic of restitution by centralizing performance-based artistic practices that question and confront the tensions of colonial terror and the (im)possibility of reparations, rematriation, and freedom. Inspired by the overriding concept of The Earth as a Wayfinder, the interdisciplinary program aims to highlight the importance of ancestral knowledge to the proposition of rethinking restitution.

The featured performances serve as a compelling reminder that restitution is not only about returning cultural heritage objects, but also about reconfiguring, rehabilitating and complicating the discourse around decoloniality, restitution, and reparations, and sitting with the discomfort of those propositions.

Performances that engage the public and spark critical thinking about place, history, memory, and belonging are integral to the program. Also highlighting artistic practices that engage directly with public spaces, Imagining Otherwise extends into the streets, gardens, parks and historical sites surrounding Nordic Black Theatre.  

Overall, the program conveys the importance of memory work and practices of freedom and refusal, and drive home the significance of remembering, sharing knowledge and learning (as well as unlearning) as intrinsic to rethinking restitution. Here, the power of performance as a method to negotiate the space between history, place, and self, and the choreography of sound and movement, can be seen as acts of resistance that effectively transform the topic of restitution from conversation to action.

Curated by Amal Alhaag & Selene Wendt and hosted in collaboration with Nordic Black Theatre.

With generous support from Nordic Culture Fund (Globus); Arts and Culture Norway, and The Agency for Cultural Affairs, City of Oslo.



Friday, September 4

14:00
Elechi Todd


Carnival as a Conjuring of History and Memory  
Documentary film about collaboration with  Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad in 2025
Nordic Black Theatre

Trinidadian artist and filmmaker Elechi Todd’s film features artistic activations and reflections by  Akuzuru, Shannon Alonzo, Jelili Atiko, Christopher Cozier, Quinsy Gario, Luanda Carneiro Jacoel, Syowia Kyambi, Amanda T. McIntyre, Shari Petti, and Robert Young.

15:00Helena Uambembe

A truth, a lie and a fact
Participatory performance  
Nordic Black Theatre

A Truth, a Lie and a Fact engages the audience by asking a series of questions to establish the meaning of truth, lie and fact. The performance includes props made of wood, a figure and two masks. Helena Uambembe is interested in ideas of continuation, culture preservation and to find the answer to what it means to be an African wood carving in Europe.  Will it still be seen as primitive, is it still a craft? Will it be looked at through a colonial lens? The use of repetition through words, sound and movement creates meaning and understanding. For this participatory performance the audience is not just watching and consuming, but also actively performing.


20:00Neo Muyanga

Revolting Music: The Songs that Could Have Liberated South Africa

Performance Lecture  
Nordic Black Theatre

This presentation excavates and performs a personal archive of popular protest sounds from South Africa in a state of emergency during the apartheid era. Some of the references are songs concocted in the revolutionary camps by exiled freedom fighters while languishing under the banning orders of the 1970’s and 80’s. However, this performance offers protest with a twist: where once a collective song rang against oppression, now electronic obfuscation and modulation introduces an alienating and abstracting distance in an echo of tape machine manipulation techniques. The presentation contemplates a loss of memory about the weighted meaning of yesterday's struggles due to the effects of a loss of courage and purpose today.

21:00Soñ Gweha
Libation as a Sample

Sound Ritual Performance   
Nordic Black Theatre

Libation as a Sample explores the art of DJ mixing as a practice of honoring, cleansing, and collective attunement, where samples and records selections become offerings and where listening holds an attempt at the unfolding of an erotic space for remembrance, anchoring and hopefully, transformation.






Saturday, September 5

15:00

A k u z u r u

Luminescent Body - Eternity in the Moment / Moments in Eternity
Site-specific performance
Botsparken

This performance is created to absorb, filter and transmit the cosmic energy of an ancient arboreal system as a living expression of the Earth. Alluding to ecological restitution and repair through the prism of healing and transformation, this mystical intervention, in essence, is an ode to ‘returning to the source’. Within the natural surroundings of Botsparken,  the artist and co-performers activate the ancient energy force of the trees, as a tableau vivant sculpture in and among the trees. The gestures of the co-performers are meant to mirror the root system of the trees. It’s a transcendental work that evokes an interdimensional quality through the agency and anciency of the ‘Earth body’.


16:00
Luanda Carneiro Jacoel

Kalunga Entities [KLGA ENttS]
Site-specific Performance
Middelalderparken

This ritual performance relates to a body in transit that carries entities; traveling through temporalities, evoking archives, and playing with the unknown. Her artistic practice conveys the importance of memory, ancestry and living archives, drawing on Afro-diasporic knowledge and embodied forms of transmission as the foundation for what she describes as ‘install–actions.’ These are interdisciplinary performances which merge movement and visuality to reference temporality, embodiment and transformation.

Please note, this is a one-hour durational performance in which the artist explores the space as the work unfolds. Audiences are invited to enter and leave freely, engaging with the performance at their own pace. Rather than following a linear narrative, the work unfolds as an ongoing exploration of space, presence, and time


17:00

Waldane Walker  

MAS Spiral
Street Performance
Grønlandsleiret 30

MAS Spiral ruminates as an immersive performance action and performance lecture combining ritual, African-Caribbean masquerade practices and ancestral technology. The encounter seeks to facilitate an active manifestation of decoloniality, in so, instigating an introspective discourse.  



18:00Damien Ajavon

A Tangled Loop
Sonic Knitting Performance
Nordic Black Theatre

This sound-based performance draws from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being and Tina Campt’s Listening to Images to explore how histories of labor, craft, and care can be felt through sound and movement. Sharpe speaks to the social and historical conditions that shape lived experience, while Campt’s perspectives invite a deeper engagement with craft beyond the visual, expressed through soundscapes evoking weather, tools, and machines, which serve as symbols of endurance, creation, and survival.

Here, the processes of weaving or knitting are approached as living archives that carry memory, skill, and resilience. Using a domestic knitting machine, live sound amplification, and immersive visual elements, the performance brings these ideas into a tactile and sonic space. Through repeated gestures and layered textures, the performance invites the audience to listen attentively and reflect on the connections between labor, care, and collective memory.

19:00 DJ session with
Selecta Harmony
+ Trinidadian food by Simone Belfon
Nordic Black Theatre








Sunday, September 6

15:00

Robel Temesgen Namesake
Site-specific Performance
Botanisk hage/Victoriahuset

This performance unfolds through a series of handmade foldable parchment books. Their expanding forms echo the broad surfaces of the giant Victoria water lilies. Activated through movement and contact with the pond water in Victoriahuset, a greenhouse at Botanisk hage, the books become surfaces for traces, paintings, and gestures that emerge in dialogue with their surroundings. Bringing together questions of place, naming, displacement, and memory, the work treats the greenhouse as a vessel where distant geographies and temporalities briefly meet, overlap, and fold into one another.


 16:00
Rehema ChachageOut of Bone
Multisensory Performance  
Nordic Black Theatre

This performance builds on a five-part embodied attempt at crafting a counter-institution, one that emerges from the margins—from spaces where bodies historically rendered invisible or excluded from formal institutions such as museums, archives, and libraries have continued to live, labour, remember, and make meaning through what Tina Campt calls “everyday survival practices.”

Drawing from the materiality and textures of domestic and communal spaces—kitchens darkened by soot, fingers dragging through the ground, waterways that guide our navigation, bones that clatter when stories are silenced—this work proposes a different kind of institution: one that holds space for the untranslatable, the interrupted, the unsayable… an institution made of breath and bone, motion and mark, refusal and return.

Through mark-making, activations, call, movement, and voice, Out of Bone refuses to replicate dominant institutional forms. Instead, it seeks to remember and reanimate other ways of holding and transmitting knowledge—ways that (re)produce life and community through ancestral, cyclical, collective, and living practices.



18:00Live concert with Bafana Isaac Nhlapo
Solo Diarra
in collaboration with Neo Muyanga Nordic Black Theatre

19:30 DJ session with
Cliff Moustache
Nordic Black Theatre