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▷ em português
ùnlọ́
This ritual begins with a simple and profound gesture. I bring together white clay that comes from many lands, mostly taken from the soils of West and Central Africa. They are found here in Germany because they follow the bodies in diaspora that came from those same soils. They continue the practices of those bodies wherever they are.
Ẹfún, Nzu, Àtákéré, Úlọ́, Orhùẹ̀, Èkó, Ndom, Mabelé, Mpémba, Ayilɔ, Hyeɛre, Shílɛ́, Sere, Aɣatawoe, Èhè, Farinƙasa, Kalaba, Lɔkpɔ, Kew, Ebumba, Undongo, Poto, Mobu, Umcako. These names hold whole cosmologies.
Across much of the African continent and its diasporas, white clay is a material of care, purification, opening and memory. In many traditions it greets the body, marks purity, offers protection and signals divine presence. In others it becomes war paint, a bond with the ancestors and a guide for orientation. In Afro Atlantic temples it carries the memory of the land and the strength of those who come from it. Its roles echo across regions. It paints the body in initiation or birth, invokes divinities, marks ritual space, protects and blesses. It heals illness, sets boundaries against harmful forces, opens communication with the dead and calms body and mind. These practices cross Òrìṣà worship in Yorubaland, Edo traditions, Kongo practices, Igbo, Ewe, Ga and Akan rituals, Efik and Ibibio rites in the Cross River region, Ga Dangme along the Ghana Togo coast, Kongo related Central African peoples, Sotho and Tswana communities and Zulu ritual practices in Southern Africa. They also present, by obvious reasons, in Afro-atlantic religions in Brazil, Cuba and Haiti.
Here these soils are ground together until they become one common powder again. Lines that once divided now bring things closer. Anyone who walks on them joins the mixture. Each step shifts the drawing and carries pigment from one place to another.
The floor changes, breathes, dissolves and is traced again. At some point during the exhibition I will collect the dispersed powder and place it in a vessel on the altar. The altar will store these layers as a living archive of these encounters. A collection of footsteps, gestures and small circulations of matter.
The work tries to say what colonialism tried to tear apart. Territories are related to their people. Soils remember one another. Separation was never natural.
This is one of the places where my research, my priestly life and my artistic practice meet. I am studying how certain materials keep what history tried to erase. White clay is one of these materials. Mixing these soils in Berlin creates a reunion that contradicts the colonial logic that separated languages, peoples, rituals and materials. It reminds me that the ground is our sky. Matter holds memory. Powder responds when called. Here the clays stop being commodities and return to being bodies. They are not sterile dust. They are living remains of many worlds that survived because they recognized one another.
This activation is a counter spell. It restores complexity to things that colonialism tried to flatten. To buy this material in local Afroshops, I first meet them through their labels. Calabash chalk, Argile blanche, Kaolin, White Clay. As I study their original names, compositions, paths and functions, I discover that every packet carries territories that were forced apart and that now touch each other again. As an artist, researcher and priestess, I stand between these worlds.
The title ùnlọ́ carries the idea of movement and unbinding. In Yorùbá, lọ́ means to go and to move forward. The prefix ùn marks the action in progress and the path opening as one walks. In Afro diasporic contexts, like Brazil, where I was born, the term came to mean the actof undoing and untying. It also became a gesture of defense against misfortune. To choose this name is to say that gathering soils and drawing lines is not only about displacement. It is also liberation. It allows histories, memories and forces that were separated to circulate again. To come back home. It is the release of what was tied; the removal of a knot without breaking the thread while keeping things entangled.
In our traditions, drawing on the ground with powder is a way of speaking. The lines open paths, reorganize forces and call protection. It is a writing. When I activate this altar, I follow an ethics of care for those who came before and for those who walk now. I do not reproduce mystery. I defend a form of knowledge that does not need Western logic to be valid. Mixing the soils, stepping on them, gathering them and redrawing with them creates continuity.
This leaflet is not a manual. It is a key to follow what the work is trying to do. It shows that the earth knows the way back. Bringing together what was separated is a form of care.
Suelen Calonga
Berlin, December 6th, 2025
@SAVVY Contemporary
Desacta: Counter-spells to unravel 140 years of the Berlin Conference
Fourth Act
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