Talk I felt your spirit when you came Adjoa Armah

In this talk, Adjoa Armah explores what it means to treat a journey, through time and space, at all possible scales of movement, as an artistic and instructive medium. She takes as her central journey the first of a series of trips made along the Ghanaian coast. For Archipelagos in Reverse Armah narrates her ongoing attempt to spiritually map all that has happened between us, black people, from this stretch of sandsoilrock along which stand more sites of slave forts than anywhere else on the African continent.

From these sites we can track our journeys outwards and inwards, across the Atlantic and the African continent. In her narration she invokes a series of fellow travellers: family, friends, elders, ghosts, ancestral totems, sand, migrating birds, scholars, and artists, raising questions about orality, descriptive science, and how to navigate intimacies and asymmetrically connected knowledge systems in our voicing.

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Biography

Adjoa Armah is a Ghanaian British artist, educator, writer and editor, with a background in design and material/visual anthropology. She lives between London and Cape Coast. Her practice is concerned with the entanglement between art making, design thinking, narrative, the archive, pedagogy, black ontology, spatial consciousness and the political.

Armah is editor and research fellow at Afterall, where she is responsible for Afterall Art School, including key projects the Paul Mellon Centre-funded Black Atlantic Museum and educational (re)turn, developed with the support of Kunstverein Nürnberg. Armah is founder of Saman Archive, through which she explores models of institution building grounded in Akan temporalities and West African technologies of social and historical mediation. She is also a practice-led DPhil researcher in Fine Art at Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford with a project provisionally titled, Meeting Saman: On Study with Narrative posture and -graphy in/as Archival Methodology.

Image Caption - Footprints in Ningo, Adjoa Armah (2021)