<sup>THE SOUL STATION
July 12 - October 13, 2024

Guest curator for Danielle Brathwaithe-Shirley’s solo exhibition and performance program.</sup>

^{––  Organisation: LAS Art Foundation (Berlin) / Venue: Halle am Berghain (Berlin)}

^{––  Performance Program: New Kyd and Túskqo ; Fallon Mayanja, Michelle Samba and Sabria Bernabé (aka SABB) ; Catol Teixeira and Luara Raio ; Michelle Tshibola}

^{––  Co- and assisting curators (save for the public program): Boris Magrini ; Agnessa Schmudke}

<sup>THE SOUL STATION is Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s first solo exhibition in Germany — a speculative, game-based installation that acts as a digital rite of passage. Shaped by Black trans wisdom, the show plunges visitors into a shifting world where every gesture — including, and especially, silence — has consequences. Through past and newly commissioned works, the exhibition probes the ethical and emotional mechanics of participation, refusal, and perceived neutrality. At its core is a two-part video game unfolding across a landscape of post-revolutionary rupture — YOU CAN’T HIDE ANYTHING (Ep. I) and ARE YOU SOULLESS, TOO? (Ep. II) — forming speculative chronicles of migration, survival, and accountability. Not as guilt or punishment, but as a dismantling of the comfort of impunity, confronting the player’s own moral frameworks and embedded biases. It is not a place to win, but to reckon. Not to be redeemed, but to respond.

While Danielle’s layered, maximalist worlds — built from low-poly rendering, archival textures, and hand-crafted elements — may appear playful or glitchy, they are coded with raw memory, resistance, and emotional intensity. Their density gestures toward deeper fractures: of bodies, narratives, and collective spirit. In this sense, THE SOUL STATION might echo broader cosmogonies — Indigenous, diasporic, shamanic — where soul loss signals rupture. And lush beauty — especially when entwined with the discomfort of encountering the other(ed) — becomes a tool for unsettling what is seen, valued, preserved — and what is not.</sup>

<sup>matter gone wild
Nov. 14, 2023 - Jan. 27, 2024

Guest curator for Josèfa Ntjam’s solo exhibition and public program.</sup>

^{––  Organisation / Venue: Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard (Paris)}

^{––  Public Program: Douce Dibondo and Audrey Couppé de Kermadec ; Madiana Kané Vieyra}

<sup>matter gone wild is an immersive exhibition (and also the title of a film of the same name) by Josèfa Ntjam — artist, performer, storyteller, and speculator of insurgent futures. Conceived as a training ground for dissidence — psychic, memorial, organic — it unfolds across two entangled zones, inhabited by composite entities: Marthe Ekemeyong Moumié (a leading figure in Cameroon’s independence movement), Persona, Saturna, the Alchemist, the Mixotroph… at once witnesses, agents and guides of revolutionary narratives and altered ontologies. Here, fiction is not escape but reprogramming. A present altered by the active remnants of a future already there: alien, un-Western, unforeseen.

Upon entry: revolt incubators. Semi-biological immersive cells, where visitors are invited to sit, breathe, and warm up for resistance. Psychic survival tutorials, poetic-choice quizzes, botanical potions. Against the toxic narratives of everyday life, Josèfa offers weapons far more common — and accessible — than we are led to believe in deleterious contexts. Deeper within, the body slips into a kind of quantum sub-basement. Just as the first zone resists metaphor by restoring agency, the second refuses abstraction too. Led by Drexciyan totems, shapeshifting deities (mixing AI generation and photomontage and personal archives) and ceramic siphonophores we enter a space of experimentation, excavation, and anticipation that does not shy away from the real, but engages with concrete structures of oppression such as anti-Black police violence and the systemic targeting of BIPOC lives. There, kinetic dioramas unfold among hybrid sculptures, like scenes from a speculative cosmogony: mythic figures once relegated to metaphor now reclaim their agency — not merely observed, but self-transforming. Becoming. And angry.</sup>

<sup>to “The Fire Next Time”
Feb. 12 - May 7, 2023

Curator for the group show to “The Fire Next Time” / The Study Room and public program.</sup>

^{––  Organisation / Venue: Villa Arson (Nice)}

^{––  With: Neïla Czermak Ichti, Kyo Kim, Aminata Labor, Fallon Mayanja, Ibrahim Meïté Sikely, Josèfa Ntjam, Olu Ogunnaike, Jazil Santschi, Sandar Tun Tun and Mona Varichon
––  Public Program: Soraya Abdellaoui, Luana Almeida, Nicolas Faubert, Célin Jiang (aka Bisou Magique), Balogun Ola-Davies, Romain Noël, Trans de Vie (Mihena Alsharif and Farrah Youssef)}

^{––  Co- and assisting curators: Rosanna Puyol Boralevi ; Daisy Lambert, Noémie Pirus-Hassid + Vítor Carvalho Rezende, Gil Lekh, Bastien·ne Waultier, Tinhinane Zeraoui}

^{to “The Fire Next Time” is a group exhibition borrowing a title, a sequence, a warning and a line, a rehearsal and a flight, a quote from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Yet, it entangles it with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study — shifting it into a collective gathering, a liberating work of rigorous improvisation. “It’s about foutre le feu and reciprocating a foyer, in stories with a friend.” What emerges then is not so much a talk of, or about, alliances — but of friendships, fractures, and un.familiarities, as possible routes toward a political co-learning-and-struggle. A f.healing in motion. The Study Room is therefore a space within to “The Fire Next Time”, imagined with the students of Villa Arson. Throughout the exhibition, it has hosted — at times — general meetings, film screenings, a book club and poetry readings, writing and dance workshops, a theory class, and activities for young audiences.}

<sup>before they were none
Feb. 12 - May 7, 2023

Curator for Danielle Brathwaithe-Shirley’s solo show and opening performance “STRUGGLING FOR COMFORT”.</sup>

^{––  Organisation / Venue: Villa Arson (Nice)}

^{––  Co- and assisting curators: Rosanna Puyol Boralevi ; Daisy Lambert and Noémie Pirus-Hassid}

<sup>As an artist, community facilitator, and video game designer, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley creates works that strive to archive the lived experiences of Black trans people. Her immersive installations and performances — often blending 3D animation with other DIY modeling practices — serve as opportunities to reverse the distorting mirror imposed upon Black trans lives: lives too often reduced to narratives of absence or suffering. Here, the reflection is turned back toward the viewer — implicated, if not directly responsible, in these very erasures. Or, as she puts it in her online bio: “I use technology to imagine our lives in environments that center our bodies... the living, the dead, and those we’ve forgotten.”

In this project (her first solo show in France), Danielle draws from Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel And Then There Were None, whose layered history of titles — from its original publication as Ten Little Niggers to Ten Little Indians, The Ten Black Figures, and Ten Little Soldiers — speaks volumes about the shifting thresholds of racial legibility and colonial discomfort. In this quasi-reality-show, Cluedo-like fiction, each character is at once executioner and prey, accomplice and witness, both an object and the subject of investigation. Yet perhaps the most unsettling dimension of this narrative lies in how each character’s identity — their depth, value, and narrative weight — is only granted in the face of death: in its looming threat, until its final consummation through disappearance. A logic all too familiar to Black trans lives — made posthumous, mediated, spectacular.</sup>

<sup>MEDIUM(S)
Feb. 7 - March 28, 2019

Curator in Residence for the group show and public program.</sup>

^{––  Organisation / Venue: La Box (Bourges)}

^{––  With: Kwesi Abbensetts, Ali-Eddine Abdelkhalek et Emile Barret, Ndoho Ange, Ingrid Baars, Raphaël Barontini, Marie-Mam Sai Bellier et Clément Lemaire, Vincent Chevillon, Jim Chuchu, Romain Cieutat, Tifaine Coignoux, Maya Deren et Alexander Hammid, Jonathan Dotse, Odendaal Esterhuyse, Louis Henderson, Alexandre Ikhide, Selly Raby Kane, Kyo Kim, Kendario La’Pierre, Emo de Medeiros, Wendy Morgan, M.Y, Clara Noseda, Nkiruka Oparah, Uriel Orlow, Nicolas Pirus, Sun Ra, Tabita Rezaire, Mirella Riccardi, SHRBR RPXR, El Popo Sangre, Momoko Seto, Justine Villermet, Elete Wright, Ezra Wube}

^{––  Public Program, Workshops & Texts: Manuela de Barros, Pascal Bauer, Meriem Chabani, Jonathan Dotse, An Duplan, Amandine Nana, Christelle Oyiri (aka Crystallmess), Seumboy Vrainom :€, Nina Queissner, Black(s) to the Future collective (Fallon Mayanja, Josèfa Ntjam, Nicolas Pirus, M.Y), and Raadio Cargo (Aurélia Nardini et Chrys Aslanian)}

^{Based on Arthur C. Clarke’s formula — Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic — and fueled with Afrofuturism, MEDIUM(S) operates as a multiform apparatus (a pedagogical module, an exhibition, a publication, and an online puzzle-game) where the curatorial gesture asserts itself as a manipulation of the ‘real’ — virtual (including VR artworks), supernatural, and symbolic — thereby questioning the colonial bounds of epistemic legitimacy.}

<sup>EAU PALIMPSESTE
Jan. 22 - April 14, 2018

Guest curator for the public program of Julien Creuzet’s mirroring solo exhibitions “Toute la distance de la mer, pour que les filaments à huile des mancenilliers nous arrêtent les battements de cœur. - La pluie a rendu cela possible (…) » and « La pluie a rendu cela possible depuis le morne en colère, la montagne est restée silencieuse. Des impacts de la guerre, des gouttes missile. Après tout cela, peut-être que le volcan protestera à son tour. – Toute la distance de la mer (…)”.</sup>

^{––  Organisations / Venues: Bétonsalon - Centre d’art et de recher­che and Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard (Paris)}

^{––  With: Fallon Mayanja + Aminata Labor, Sarah Melloul, Yanisse Lalouci, and Christian Kimena (01.23.18 | I.e. « Emules-appâts ») ; Pascale Monnin and Celia Sadai + Bocar Niang (02.08.18 | Lanmè a gwonde : à nos fantômes résistant-e-s. // SANG) ; Feda Wardak and Emanuele Coccia + Inès Di Folco (03.01.18 | Acrimonia lacrimalis : l’èbe des eaux amères. // SALIVE) ; Nana Adusei-Poku and Daniela Yohannes + Josèfa Ntjam (03.20.18 | Jusqu’au lait du rire : cu(rat)ing dark streams. // LIQUEURS) ; M.Y and Tabita Rezaire + Olga Mouak (04.14.18 | H2O 3.0 : floating and flooding across fluidity. // SUEUR).}

^{EAU PALIMPSESTE is a curatorial cycle drawn from stories of water between us. Five opportunities to invite artists and researchers to breathe — in / for an evening — into a shared current, a suspended collective gathering where benevolence is summoned anew. Somewhere between gesture and fugue, like a negotiated Temporary Autonomous Zone, it consents, briefly, to partner with the Institution. Curation becomes a pretext for unprescribed “entre-soi,” where audiences, artists, and artworks drift together, inciting other narrations to surface.}

<sup>PhD in Art — On curatorial collective collage and Black studies
2019 - 2024

Inaugural doctoral fellow of the PhD-in-Practice program (Recherche-Création) of Villa Arson and Université Côte d’Azur (Nice); defended December 12, 2024.</sup>

^{––  Thesis Title: Afrofuture Poiethics: Weaving Hustles at the Intersection of Collage and Curation (Poïéthiques afrofuturistes : Trimer trames à l'intersection du collage et de la curation)}

^{––  Supervisors: Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Sophie Orlando, Jean-François Trubert
––  Jurors: Maboula Soumahoro, Emmanuelle Cherel, Marina Nordera, Jean-Paul Fourmentraux
––  Colleges and Laboratories: EUR CREATES; École doctorale SHAL (ED 86); CTELA (UPR 6307); Villa Arson (ENSA Nice) – Idex UCA JEDI / ANR-15-IDEX-01}

^{Through essay, poetry, quotes, and translation, this research unfolds a lianescent corpus at the crossroads of Black studies, Afrofuturism, and alternative (particularly queer-feminist) counter-phenomenologies, aiming to question our diverse ways of “making image.” Encompassing representational, identity-based, economic, epistemological, ecological, technological, metaphysical, and prospective considerations: it engages with the trajectory of minoritized forms and protocols — both artistic and conceptual — that intertwine a syncretic renewal of imaginaries and aesthetic canons with profound ethical motivations; toward the development of collective and intersectional strategies of emancipation.}

Black(s) to the Future
since 2015

––  With: Sybil Coovi-Handemagnon, Kyo Kim, Fallon Mayanja, Joséfa Ntjam and Nicolas Pirus

––  Exhibitions: QUIET REFUSAL @ Beursschouwburg (Brussels, 2023); FUTURIBLES @ Artothèque de Strasbourg (2018); B(S)TTF - FESTIVAL @ Petit Bain, Le Comptoir Général, La Colonie (Paris, 2017 & 2016)
––  Organisation / Venue: Musée du Quai Branly, MAC/VAL, Université de Strasbourg, Mairie de Paris ; R22/Khiasma, Africultures, TV5Monde (le 64 minutes), France Culture (Les Nouvelles Vagues), ARTE (Tracks), Belleville-en-vue, #BLACKLIVESMATTER, Queer Week, Diamètre, Diorama…

We are a French art and research collective. Since 2015 we’ve been engaging with afrofuturism, blackness and afro-perspectives with fellow BIPOC artists, activists, and researchers. Some of us have left and some others may arrive, reflecting the dynamic nature of any form of collectivity. Online and AFK, publicly and behind the scenes: our aim is never simply to be visible, but to make and do things together. At our core, we are way more than just collaborators — we are family.

The Dark School
since 2018

––  With: Romain Noël, Lucas Garcia Banari, Rosanna Puyol Boralevi, Star Finch, Ethan Assouline, Léa Rivière, Daniela Jacob Pinto, Ariane Temkine, Nadir Khanfour and many more

––  Publication: kafar, n°0 - LAMES (2018)
––  Venue: La Tilia (Herblay-sur-Seine)

It ain’t so much a matter of fixing a damaged world (Tsing), clearing some contracted debt (Moten & Harney), and repairing colonial alienation through restitution (Fanon) — or, in other words, producing knowledge according to capitalist norms (Stengers & Pignarre). Rather, it’s about gathering around resistant practices that allow us to believe in the world (Deleuze), to anticipate it (Muñoz), to engage in it (Labou Tansi), and to narrate it otherwise (Sun Ra). Our role as teachers — and forever students — is not to educate in order to (re)produce or (re)enforce, nor even to “open up” the (Western) academic space to new gestures and visions, but to let those gestures and visions take its place. To step aside, and dive into the concrete experimentation of collective alternatives.

SAAY/YAAS
2020 - 2024

––  With: Patricia Anahory, Anna Abengowe and Tuliza Sindi

––  Grants / Awards: Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (2022); la Saison Africa2020
––  Organisations / Venues: arc-en-rêve (Bordeaux), African Future Institute (Accra)

Because architecture authenticates (or negates) value by relying on canons that assign meaning and worth through (pre)established transactions and exchanges, :her(e) otherwise is a platform for rethinking and reshaping these (infra)structures. Drawing on “calls and responses” — a diasporic, African-rooted form of democratic participation — it invites a community of womxn to think freely: to agree, contradict, expose, and (re)assess multiple acts of worldmaking. In doing so, their exchanges cut through Western systems of validation designed to reproduce socio-political and economic hierarchies of knowledge — in architecture and beyond.