Matter and Memory

This three-part essay first introduces Berlin’s anticolonial, Black feminist poetics through the work of May Ayim and Audre Lorde, whose poems “Blues in Black-and-White” and “East Berlin 1989” were written shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in response to racial attacks in a “reunited” Germany. Part I explores how these poetics and politics have influenced ongoing efforts to engage with the memory of German colonialism, xenophobia, and memorialization in public spaces. Part II moves the reader into close studies of two contemporary performance works by Afro-diasporic artists in Berlin who build on the Black feminist poetics explored in Part I. The first, Wayward Dust by Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, was an invited performance at the Deutsches Technikmuseum in August 2020. The second, untitled performance, by the group Black Art Action Berlin (BAAB), was uninvited, and took place in Berlin’s Humboldt Forum in October 2021. In Part III, the author discusses how these performance artists in Berlin have responded to institutional pledges to “decolonize” museums, by inverting expectations of Black performance and white spectatorship in this space. The author argues that they are important interventions for this contemporary moment of institutional reckoning that challenge expectations of Black labor and white leisure in the museum, and that they should be understood within the context of an ongoing creative struggle developed in transnational Black feminist praxis.