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Ùnlọ́


2025
durational performance, offerings, installation

in the frame of Desacta: Counter-spells to unravel 140 years of the Berlin Conference
SAVVY Contemporary
Berlin, Germany
06 December 2025
Duration: 4h + 6 days

Photos by Martin Systermans

→ SAVVY page
→ The text I wrote for the mediation material of this performance
It is known by many names: ẹ̀fún, nzu, orhue, calaba chalk, ndom, ayilo, hyile, shile, ayilor, ferinkasa, agátáwē, mabele, mpemba, ebumba… A white mineral drawn from the earth, carrying similar functions across cultures: caring for the body, tending to the spirit, and opening communication with the invisible. Found in Berlin in Afro-shops and informal marketplaces, this element arrives from different lands; countries whose names are not the same as they used to be, divided by colonial cartography. Here, they are brought together once more. Their differences are grated, pounded, and slowly dissolved into a single fine powder; a temporary common ground made of many soils. With this dust, lines are drawn across the floor. So that lines that once marked division become lines that soften, loosen, and call what was fractured back toward relation.



It is known by many names: ẹ̀fún, nzu, orhue, calaba chalk, ndom, ayilo, hyile, shile, ayilor, ferinkasa, agátáwē, mabele, mpemba, ebumba… A white mineral drawn from the earth, carrying similar functions across cultures: caring for the body, tending to the spirit, and opening communication with the invisible. Found in Berlin in Afro-shops and informal marketplaces, this element arrives from different lands; countries whose names are not the same as they used to be, divided by colonial cartography. Here, they are brought together once more. Their differences are grated, pounded, and slowly dissolved into a single fine powder; a temporary common ground made of many soils. With this dust, lines are drawn across the floor. So that lines that once marked division become lines that soften, loosen, and call what was fractured back toward relation.

The activation unfolds over time. As the grinding and drawing take place, visitors may walk over the lines, letting the dust spread and blur. Footsteps become part of the work, part of the unmaking and remaking of these traces.

Ùnlọ́, a word carried from Yorùbá into diasporic memory, evokes both movement and release. The act of going, the act of untying, undoing. Here, it speaks to the gesture at the heart of this activation: a quiet counter-spell, inviting fragments of a land arbitrarily cut and reassigned to find one another again, without breaking the thread that still binds them.


The powder was collected from the floor on the 12th of December 2025 and carefully placed at the altar.



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