Allan Cudicio is a multimedia artist working across interactive media, sound, and visual art. His practice explores ritual, polytheism, and diasporic systems of meaning through the intersection of West African spiritual traditions and ancient Mediterranean pagan philosophies, particularly Neoplatonism. He is the creator of The Wagadu Chronicles, an ongoing interactive world inspired by African cosmologies, mythologies, and narrative traditions, exploring systems-based storytelling and participatory worldbuilding. The project has been exhibited internationally, including at the Louvre Abu Dhabi and BOZAR Brussels. Cudicio also performs as Hermetic Rhythm, a sound project focused on ritual, ambient, and immersive sonic environments developed through performance and DJ practice. He is currently expanding into painting and small-scale sculptural and calligraphic objects, including Sacred Must Go (2026-), which explores diasporic ritual through portable sacred forms. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Maïmouna Gueye is a curator and filmmaker with international training spanning cinema, visual culture, and decolonial studies. Her practice is grounded in cinema as a tool of epistemic resistance and the recomposition of memory. Her research gravitates toward the documentary as a form of inquiry into reality. As a freelance writer, she contributes to publications with a critical focus on African and Black cinema. Alongside her critical work, she curates African Culture Archive, an online platform dedicated to the rediscovery of underrepresented postcolonial films. In 2024, she founded the Decolonial Film Fest in Genoa, Italy placing African and diasporic artistic positions at the center of cinematic discourse.
Maria Muehombo is a multidisciplinary artist and independent researcher with roots in Zambia and Angola. Mostly operating under the name M I M I, her process‐driven practice blends music composition, herbalism, ritualistic sound healing and DJing. She works across collaborative, performative, and institutional contexts, presenting internationally at major contemporary art venues and biennials — including the Venice Biennale, Dakar Biennale, and WIELS. Her practice spans exhibitions, live performances, and projects with artists such as Nikima Jagudajev and Cherish Menzo. She holds artist affiliations and residencies (Beursschouwburg, Kiosk Radio, Oroko Radio), released experimental music on independent labels (Nia Records, Maloca), and performs as a DJ on international radio and festival platforms (Nyege Nyege, Horst Music & Arts, Dekmantel).
Carole Oulato is a cultural researcher, author, sound practitioner, and anti-racist activist. Since 2018, she has co-directed the music and research project Abidjan Centrale, which investigates the impact of music on decolonization processes. She has played sets at venues such as Gretchen/Al.Berlin (Berlin), as well as at Perditempo (Naples), the Festival delle Periferie (Cosenza), Hyper Local Festival (Milan), Blackness (Milan), and the Carnevale Sonico (Naples). She has also hosted programs on Fango Radio and Radio Cavone Stereo. Her curatorial and cultural work is rooted in community-based and institutional contexts, particularly at La Casa del Mondo Adjebadia (Bologna), where she develops and coordinates programs focused on Black history, diasporic cultures, and decolonial education. For the journal Leggere Donna, she translated poems and essays by May Ayim, one of the most prominent Afro-German poets and activists, into Italian and continues to work across translation, publishing, and editorial collaborations. She contributed to the anthology "Sciroccate" (2023, Tamu Edizioni) with the short story Pomodori Amari, which builds a bridge between Africa and Europe by examining the impact of European agricultural policies on the tomato market in Ghana.In 2021, she was awarded the Premio Mutti alla Creatività for the film project Nostoi (with Anne Marie Ange Sibi).
Assia Ugobor is an independent producer and programmer. Rooted in the fields of dance and performance, her research and creative work has developed through collaborations with the Lia Rodrigues Art Center (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), MC93 (Bobigny, France), and T2G (Gennevilliers, France). She is committed to bringing marginalized narratives back to the forefront, notably through the Moteur de recherche programme with the Ballet National de Marseille in France, a curated space exploring the notions of repair and the archive through bodies. In 2024, she co-founded OYA, a production and programming platform dedicated to creating privileged spaces and supporting emerging artists. Since 2025, she has been part of a programme dedicated to future directors of cultural institutions run by the Parallèle platform and Fondation de France, and co-programmed the 16th edition of the festival dedicated to emerging international practices.
Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a Somali Italian poet, novelist, playwright and librettist. She grew up in Mogadishu but fled to Europe at the outbreak of the civil war. She is the author of three novels: Little Mother (Madre piccola, Frassinelli, 2007) and Commander of the river (Il comandante del fiume, 66thand2nd, 2014) – both published in English by Indiana University Press as part of the Global African Voices series – and Stations of the Moon (Le stazioni della luna, 66thand2nd, 2021). She also wrote the ekphrasis La danza dell'orice (Juxta Press, 2020) and the collection of short stories The Phoenix's Ashes (Le ceneri della fenice, Hopefulmonster, 2022). She has worked with Belgian artist and illustrator Goele Dewanckel on a serigraphic book, Jujube's hairs ; published in 2022 by Else Edizioni in five languages (Italian, Dutch, French, English and Somali). In July 2018 her rewriting of Antigone was directed by Giuseppe Massa in Palermo and she developed a libretto based on found stories in the Italian city of Matera for Silent City, an opera directed by James Bonas with music composed by Nigel Osborne in November 2019. In 2010, during a residency in Lagos, she wrote and performed the monologue A dhow is crossing the sea with Wale Adale (musician), Dede Kelvin Alozie (dancer), directed by Peter Badejo for the Black Heritage Festival (directed by Wole Soyinka). She holds a Ph.D. in African Studies (Università L'Orientale Napoli) and is the recipient of the Lingua Madre and Vittorini Prizes. She has participated in writing programs and held residencies across the world, incl. the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (2017), MEET (2018), Art Omi (2018), Civitella Ranieri Foundation (2019), La Marelle (2019), STIAS (Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, 2020) Kulturvermittlung (Graz 2021), Camargo Foundation (Cultural Diaspora 2022), Rhizomes (Douarnenez, 2022) and Michalski Foundation (2025). She is a UNDP consultant for a project on Oral Historiography for Peace Building in Somalia.
Jessica L. Harris is Associate Professor in the Department of History at St. John's University. Her current project, Black America and Italy: African American Women in Post-Fascist Italian Culture, explores the place of female Blackness in post-Fascist and postcolonial Italy through the examination of the positionality of African American female entertainers in Italy in the second half of the twentieth century. For this project, she was awarded the 2024 Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome. Her publications include Italian Women's Experiences with American Consumer Culture, 1945-1975: The Italian Mrs. Consumer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and articles in Annali d'Italianistica, Modern Italy, and Imago. Studi di cinema e media.
Prof. Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is a curator, author and biotechnologist, currently serving as director and chief curator of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin, Germany and chief curator of the 36. São Paulo Biennale. He is the founder and was artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, as well as the artistic director of sonsbeek20–24, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands. He also worked as curator-at-large for Adam Szymczyk's Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany in 2017 and was guest curator of the Dak'Art biennale in Dakar, Senegal, in 2018. Additionally, he served as the artistic director for the 12th and 13th editions of the Bamako Encounters photography biennial in Mali, taking on this role in 2019 and 2022. Together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finland Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019. Prof. Dr. Ndikung was a guest professor in curatorial studies and sound art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, and he is currently a professor in and head of the faculty of Spatial Strategies Master's program at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin. He was the recipient of the first OCAD University International Curators Residency fellowship in Toronto in 2020. His published works include, inter alia, The Delusions of Care (2021), An Ongoing-Offcoming Tale: Ruminations on Art, Culture, Politics and Us/Others (2022), Pidginization as Curatorial Method (2023), Voice Seeping into Time–Of Thoughts Finding Form (2025).
Johanne Affricot is an independent curator and cultural maker. Her curaorial practice centers on holding spaces for collective strategies of radical imagination and critical dialogue, aiming to foreground polyphonic narratives, build infrastructures and networks that foster collaboration, and advance cultural regeneration connected to broader social transformation. She serves as Curator-at-Large at the American Academy in Rome, and is the founder and artistic director of SPAZIO GRIOT and GRIOTMag. Her curatorial projects include: Tony Cokes: texts. tracks. (not an exhibition) (2026); Artists Making Books. Pages of Refuge (2024); Whiteface (2024), by Candice Breitz; A Plot A Scandal (2024), by Ligia Lewis; Path to The Stars (2024), by Mónica de Miranda; Il Mio Filippino. For Those Who Care To See (2023), by Lyric Dela Cruz.
Eric Otieno Sumba is a writer and editor with a background in social theory, political economy, postcolonial studies, and art criti- cism. His writing has been published in Contemporary &, Africa Is a Country, Lolwe, The Guardian, GRIOTmag, Frieze, Sleek, Nataal, Monopol, Textezur Kunst, and Camera Austria, among others. He is currently an editor for publication practices at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, and previously curated the exhibition Anche Dopo che Tutto è Finito (Even After Everything is Over), by Damiano Tata; Riverberi (2024) Rifrazioni (2023) and Sediments. After Memory (2022) at Mattatoio, Rome with SPAZIO GRIOT.