A Line Back Home: Ancestral Echoes in Seven Turns


2025

performance, offerings, mediation booklet, dinner

presented around the Berlin Stadtchloss, 
with begining and ending at Barazani.berlin (Spreeufer)
in the frame of Dissident Paths @nGbK Berlin
curated by Raphaek Daibert + Cruising Curators

Berlin, Germany
26 July 2025
Duration: 2h30min
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 is a ritual 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.

Photos: Lucia Alfaro Valencia
Photos: Lucia Alfaro Valencia
Photos: Sonja Hohenbild
Photos: Sonja Hohenbild

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Suelen Calonga

I am an artist, researcher and educator dedicated to challenging colonial legacies and reclaiming African diasporic narratives while promoting counter-colonial approaches to art and knowledge.