with Suelen Calonga
(in cooperation with BARAZANI.berlin)

Walk: 16:00–18:00
Installation at BARAZANI.Berlin: 16:00–21:00 
Dinner Table at BARAZAN.BerlinI: 19:00–21:00

No registration required for the walk or installation.
Registration is required for the dinner table that starts at 19:00 via barazani.berlin@gmail.com

Meeting point:
Walk: in front of BARAZANI, Spreeufer 6, Mitte
Installation + Dinner: BARAZANI.berlin, Spreeufer 6, 10178 Berlin
Google coordinates: Spreeufer 6

Accessibility:
Walk:
- The meeting point is next to the station Museum Insel (U5) and 13 minutes from Alexanderplatz (U2, U5, U8, S3, S5, S7, S9). Both stations offer step-free access.
https://wheelmap.org/node/8413352835
- On-site support personnel available for people with disabilities.
- The route is wheelchair accessible.
- Accessible bathrooms are available at Humboldt Forum.
- Rest points available along the route.

At BARAZANI:
- BARAZANI space is approximately 5 minutes from Humboldt Forum.
- Chairs available on site.
- Wheelchair accessible.
- Please note bathrooms on site are not accessible.
- Contact us with your access needs: cruisingcurators@gmail.com.

They keep trying to make us forget, in the infinite twists and turns of negligence. But we are better wizards. The line hasn’t been cut, and the voices of our ancestors are calling us back home, not without first going to look for them so that we can return together. 

This proposal unfolds in three-parts. The first is a walk that traces a line back home, moving in seven turns around the Humboldt Forum, a site of colonial amnesia and violent displacement. Inspired by the forced ritual of the Tree of Forgetting, in Ouidah, Benin, where the enslaved people were made to circle a tree to erase their past, this walk reclaims the motion in defiance. Each turn is a refusal, an affirmation that memory endures, retracing what was never truly lost. Through incantation, offerings to the river witness and collective presence, the walk calls upon the ancestors trapped inside that building to wake up from their restless forced sleep to reactivate our memory as a living force. One that cannot be archived, only carried within.

The second part, the installation Fetish, activates a sonic, visual, and symbolic counter-device that departs from the historical materiality of colonial collecting to open cracks in the European construction of authority over the sound of the Other. All the objects that form the set - a digital speaker in the shape of a gramophone, an original Edison wax cylinder over a hundred years old encrusted with hundreds of gramophone needles, archival images, and a selection of texts - were acquired through contemporary collecting channels: marketplaces, antique dealers, “relic” resellers, collectors’ associations, and institutional archive catalogs. This intentional provenance re-enacts — and strains — the contemporary circuit that still profits from coloniality and the domestication of the sacred belonging to others.

The final part is a dinner table made together with the matriarch of the African-Brazilian community in Berlin, Sandra Bello, starting from 19:00 serving Brazilian Food. All parts of this event start and end at Spreeufer 6, across from Humboldt Forum, to the project space of BARAZANI.berlin, an interdisciplinary collective that engages with decolonial issues and practices.

Suelen Calonga is a mother, priestess, artist, researcher, and educator whose work resides at the intersection of academic, spiritual, and artistic practices. She intertwines ancestral knowledge with contemporary art, using performance, audiovisual, and research as poetic method to engage with themes of memory, provenance, and spiritual knowledge. As practitioner of the Lese Orisa cult, and a strong background in curating and community engagement, Suelen has developed independent research and exhibition projects that center African and Afro-diasporic voices. She is PhD candidate in the Art History as Cultural History program at TU Berlin, supervised by Dr. Prof. Bénédicte Savoy and holds a master’s in Public Art and New Artistic Strategy from the Bauhaus-Univerisität Weimar. She collaborates with other artists and community organizations exploring the decolonization of knowledge and the role of museums in preserving colonial legacies in residencies, group exhibitions and publications in Brazil, Germany, Benin, The Netherlands, Portugal and France.

Bio Sandra Bello:
Steps from afar that crawled, walked/walk, ran/run, played/play, loved/love, raised/raise. Steps that flee colonial tyranny. On the lookout. Always fighting for my, our humanity. Always Quilombola! This is bio resistance, resilience, reexistence. Bio from the school of quilombola life. Here is the mini bio and the long struggle. E(x)u Sandra Bello.

From the very beginning, activists, artists, and scholars have rejected and criticized the idea of the Humboldt Forum. Through cultural and political interventions, they have succeeded in exposing the project as a continuation of colonial systems of injustice and in making its effects on today’s society visible. It is in this context that BARAZANI.berlin was founded.

BARAZANI.berlin is an interdisciplinary collective that engages with decolonial questions and practices. It has existed since 2020 and brings together actors from the fields of art, academia, education, and community work. Emerging from the “Working Group on Museums and Collections” of Decolonize Berlin e.V., BARAZANI.berlin was initially founded during the COVID-19 pandemic as a virtual space that, in protest against the reconstruction of the Hohenzollern Palace, imagined an occupation of the undeveloped Schlossplatz. Since 2021, BARAZANI.berlin has had its own action and project space, SPREEUFER 6, located in the Nikolaiviertel directly opposite the Humboldt Forum. http://blog.barazani.berlin

PATH 3: STREETS AND PROTEST (on movements and demonstrations)
With contributions from Elena Biserna, Carolin Genz, Mahshid Mahboubifar, Suelen Calonga, Rüzgâr Buşki

Protest means disturbing, interrupting, or altering social rhythms; it sets something static into motion or halts something that is moving too fast. Streets are a stage for protest, and today, they become ever more critical spaces where collective movement through public space creates a context for citizens from different backgrounds and social spheres to urgently assert their voices and seek change.

This Path explores how walking, marching, occupying, and gathering in public space become acts of resistance. From women walking at night as a gesture of reclamation (Elena Biserna), protesting gentrification and the housing crisis in Berlin (Carolin Genz); to collecting evidences of police violence against peaceful demonstrations (Mahshid Mahboubifar), disrupting the institutional forgetting embedded in colonial museum collections (Suelen Calonga), and community screenprinting of protest banners (Rüzgâr Buşki) ‒ each contribution reimagines how movement resists, remembers, and reclaims.