

Inspired by Teju Cole’s idea of “Black listening,” this participatory walk, guided by Christian Nyampeta, invites audiences to attune to diasporic memory through sight, sound, and brief acts of description. At each of five stops, the guide shares a poem or a printed photograph as a prompt; participants respond by taking a single image that echoes the prompt’s sensorial mood, then describe it in one sentence. Across the route, these quick images and spoken lines accumulate into a collective “album” of the walk—an embodied archive of what is remembered, misheard, and carried. Drawing on kindred practices (Teju Cole’s Black Paper at Performa 2017; Okwui Okpokwasili’s Utterances from the Chorus), the piece frames looking and listening as diasporic techniques.
Co-produced by Performa and Extra Extra. Curated by Defne Ayas, Senior Curator-at-Large, Performa, and Director, Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and Samira Benlaloua, Artistic Director, Extra Extra.
A Performa and Extra Extra Project . Produced by Performa and Extra Extra.
Supported by Creative Industries Fund, Consulate General of the Netherlands, Lithuanian Cultural Institute, Mondriaan Fund, the Municipality of Rotterdam, and the Netherland-America Foundation.


