Authors

Eric Otieno Sumba

Eric Otieno Sumba is a writer, editor, and independent researcher with a background in social theory, political economy, postcolonial studies and art criticism. He is currently editor (publication practices) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. Recent editorial projects include the Forgive Us Our Trespasses Reader (2024) and the Ballet of the Masses Magazine (2024) (all HKW + Archive Books). Recent curatorial projects (with Spazio Griot) include the exhibition and public programme Riverberi/Reverberations (2024) at Mattatoio in Rome, featuring Candice Breitz, Ligia Lewis, and Monica de Miranda, among others. His writing has been published in Contemporary And; Africa is a Country; Lolwe; The Guardian; Griotmag; Frieze; Sleek; Nataal; Monopol; Texte zur Kunst; and Camera Austria, among others.

Gaia Delpino

Gaia Delpino (PhD) is a anthropologist specialized in African studies and anthropology of contemporaneity. She researched in Ghana on topics related to memory, cultural heritage, the Atlantic world, the so-called roots tourism and mining. At the Museum of Civilizations she is curator of the African Arts and Cultures collections and those coming from the former Colonial Museum in Rome. On both collections she promotes participatory processes and carries out, follows and enhances interdisciplinary research aimed at studying their history, provenances, meanings and narratives. Gaia Delpino participates in national and international projects related to the study, conservation, accessibility and dissemination of the Museum of Civilizations’ African collections.

Matteo Lucchetti

Matteo Lucchetti is a curator, art historian and writer born in 1984 in Sarzana and based in Rome. He currently serves as curator for Contemporary Arts and Cultures at the Museum of Civilizations in Rome. Since 2011 he has curated (with Judith Wielander) Visible, a research and support project for socially engaged art practices promoted by Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto and Fondazione Zegna, and has been guest curator since 2022 for Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters, where she is curating two productions by Otobong Nkanga and Marzia Migliora. He worked as Exhibition and Public Program Curator at BAK Utrecht from 2016-2018 and was curator of the 16th Quadriennale in Rome. Among his most recent curatorial projects: Museum of Opacity, at the Museum of Civilizations, Rome, 2023; Climavore Italy with Cooking Sections, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2021-2023; Marzia Migliora. The Spectre of Malthus, MA*GA, Gallarate; Sammy Baloji. Other Tales, Lunds Konsthall and Kunsthal Aarhus, 2020.

Chef Binta

Fatmata Binta is a modern-day nomadic chef and an ambassador for Fulani cuisine, who was born and raised in Freetown, Sierra Leone to first generation Sierra Leonean Fulanis of Guinean descent. Connected to the biggest Nomadic group in West Africa, her work with the Fulani people has earned her multiple awards, including the 2022 Basque Nobel Culinary World Prize, the most prestigious Award in the culinary world. Chef Binta was also designated in 2023 as a United Nations ambassador for Responsible Tourism at UNWTO with the goal of promoting gastronomy tourism for the benefit of rural communities and becoming more self-sustainable. She is the Executive Chef at Dine on a Mat, a nomadic restaurant, and the Founder of the Fulani Kitchen Foundation, which aims to improve food security for rural communities, increase productivity through efficient post-harvest processing, and raise the income levels of women farmers by providing employment opportunities. 

Victor Fotso Nyie

Victor Fotso Nyie (Cameroon, 1990) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Faenza. He obtained a Higher Technical Diploma for the design and prototyping of ceramic artefacts at the Istituto Tecnico Superiore Tonito Emiliani in Faenza, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna in 2017 and then attended the Biennium of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. The focus of his artistic research is the condition of contemporary African man, alienated and suffering due to an unfinished past of enslavement and exploitation. He has participated in solo exhibitions, including: Quella terra tra le mani, Galleria comunale d’Arte, Faenza (2022), Radici aeree, Le Scuole, Pieve di Cento (2022), Memoriae, Off Gallery, Bologna (2022), Resilienza, Museo MAGA, Gallarate (2021), Museo Carlo Zauli, Faenza (2021), Rimembranza, Palazzo Turchi di Bagno, Ferrara (2021). In 2022 he will participate in the project Una Boccata d’Arte. 20 artists 20 villages 20 regions, promoted by Fondazione Elpis, in collaboration with Galleria Continua. In the same year, he participated in the exhibition SEDIMENTS. After Memory curated by SPAZIO GRIOT opened, with the support of GUCCI as main sponsor and other partners: Museo delle Civiltà, American Academy in Rome, British School at Rome, British Council, Orbita | Spellbound.  

Immaculate Ruému

Chef Immaculate Ruemu is a Michelin-trained chef that staged and worked in London and Florence, before coming to Milan where she consults, creates recipes, and is the Food Editor for the popular digital fashion magazine, All The Pretty Birds by Tamu McPherson, a creative director and influencer in fashion. She enjoys all that encompasses food, fusing cuisines from small local cultures and globally loved delicacies. Woven in her heart is the desire to innovate and bring Nigerian cuisine to the global dining table, whilst celebrating its culture and authenticity.  

Johanne Affricot

Johanne Affricot is an artistic director, curator and cultural producer. She is particularly invested in creating creative spaces as re-generative devices to collectively cultivate and disseminate strategies and practices of radical imagination that have a strong cultural and social impact. She is currently Curator-at-Large at the American Academy in Rome and is the artistic director of SPAZIO GRIOT and GriOTmag. Her recent projects include the solo exhibitions Studio 1. I Miss you So Much (Italian Cultural Institute, Hoxton Arches, London, 2023) by Valerie Tameu; II Mio Filippino: For Those Who Care To See (Mattatoio, Roma, 2023), by Liryc Dela Cruz; the public programme Refractions (Mattatoio, Roma, 2023); the group show and public programme Sediments. After Memory (Mattatoio, Roma, 2022); and the public programme Chef Binta: Reframing Traditions (Museum of Civilizations, Rome, 2022). 

Bocar Niang

Orator, writer, performer, musician and visual artist Bocar Niang (Senegal, 1987) comes from a family of griots — travelling poets and storytellers that preserve and pass on the oral traditions of communities in certain parts of Africa, connecting people with their own experiences. He holds a Master’s degree in Arts and Culture from the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar and from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy. Founder of the Musée Griot in Senegal and its branches in France, he is also artistic director of the Tamba Jeunes Talents Festival in Senegal since 2008 and of the Nekkalante Festival in France since 2018. His multidisciplinary work —combining orality, installation, writing, sculpture, film, video and music— is based on collecting stories and events, which he then translates into oral performances, sound recordings, texts or sculptural installations. It has been presented, among others, at the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Fondation Ricard, Biennale de Dakar, Biennale de Cenon, Ygrec-Ensapc, Laboratoires d’Aubervillers and the Musée Théodore Monod in Dakar. 

Wissal Houbabi

Wissal Houbabi (Morocco, 1994) is an artist, writer and activist. She works in various fields, from researching hip hop feminism to writing short stories that explore the condition of diasporic culture. She is a founding member of the Trieste-based art collective ZufZone and author of Manifesto per l’antisessismo del rap italiano. She collaborates with VICE – Noisey, Jacobin and Agenzia X and writes for Future (effequ). She has realised workshops, paths, poetry projects with various cultural and artistic institutions -IUAV, Goethe-Institut, Museo delle Civiltà and Mudec, among others. His most recent works include: Offesissima at Ar/ge Kunst Bolzano; Spore – radical tenderness at Le Serre in Bologna; ph0n0museum . rome at the Museum of Civilisations, realised with Ismael “Astri” Lo and Toi Giordani during the residency Care in a World We Share with Others/Caring in a Precarious World, organised as part of the European project Taking Care – Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Spaces of Care in 2022.  

Cooking Sections

Cooking Sections is the artistic duo formed in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe. Their practice encompasses installation, performance and site-responsive video, and uses food as a lens and tool to observe changing landscapes, thus exploring the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. Since 2015, they have worked on several iterations of the long-term CLIMAVORE project. Their work has been exhibited at the 58th Venice Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, Sharjah Art Biennale, Performa17, Manifesta12, Tate Britain, Serpentine Galleries and HKW – among others. They have published three books: The Empire Remains Shop (2018), Salmon: A Red Herring (2020), and Offsetted (2022).  

Justin Randolph Thompson

Justin Randolph Thompson (U.S.A., 1979)  is a new media artist, cultural facilitator and educator. Living between Italy and the US since 1999, Thompson is co-founder and Director of Black History Month Florence, a multi-faceted exploration of African and African Diasporic cultures in the context of Italy founded in 2016. Thompson received a research grant from the Italian Council and is the recipient of the Louise Comfort Tiffany Award, Franklin Furnace Fund Award, Visual Artist Grant from the Fundacion Marcelino Botin, two Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants, a Jerome Fellowship from Franconia Sculpture Park and an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Botin Centre and is part of the collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem and the MADRE Museum.His life and work seek to deepen the discussions around socio-cultural stratification and hierarchical organization by employing fleeting temporary communities as monuments and fostering projects that connect academic discourse, social activism and DIY networking strategies in annual and biennial gathering, sharing and gestures of collectivity. 

Dudù Kouaté

Dudù Kouate –percussionist, musician and cultural mediator–  was born in Senegal into a family of griots, singers entrusted with carrying on the stories of their people, preservers of the African cultural and musical tradition. A multi-instrumentalist musician, he interprets tradition in a modern and multicultural key. He lives in Bergamo, where he teaches African percussion and holds seminars on the history of traditional African instruments, trying to trace the territorial boundaries of populations. Part of his practice is also meeting with schools by means of disseminating African cultural traditions through tales of set to music and cross-cultural musical experiences. A versatile and eclectic musician, he conducts constant research on sound (sound of elements) for new experiences in the world of music. 

Adelita Husni-Bey

Adelita Husni-Bey (Italy, 1985) is an artist and pedagogical expert interested in topics ranging from anarcho-collectivism to theatre, from law to urban development studies. She organises workshops, produces publications and curates radio broadcasts, archives and exhibitions, using non-competitive pedagogical models through contemporary art. Her work in various contexts with activists, architects, lawyers, schoolchildren, poets, actors, urban planners, physiotherapists, athletes, teachers and students focuses on deconstructing the complexity of the concept of collectivity. Her work was part of the Italian pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, Venice, 2017. Her most recent solo exhibitions are These Conditions, 2022, Brooklyn Army Terminal, New York, for the Vera List Center fellowship program, with a project centred on the radical changes in social relations brought about by responses to past and current pandemics and Maktspill, Kunsthall Bergen, 2020. She has participated in Trainings for the Not Yet, BAK, Utrecht, 2020, Being: New Photography 2018, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018; Dreamlands, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2016; The Eighth Climate, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 2015; Really Useful Knowledge, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, 2014.  

Gala Porras-Kim

Gala Porras-Kim (Colombia, 1984) interrogates the processes and ethics of museum conservation and, more broadly, the collections and institutions within which contested artefacts are housed and preserved. In her artistic practice and research, she is interested in the politics and policies museums adopt in the contemporary moment and how they negotiate with problematic pasts. She also uncovers and proposes innovative tactics through which artefacts can be liberated and escape from museum vitrines, archives and storage facilities. Her most recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2024); Pitzer College Art Galleries (2024); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2023); Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2023); Fowler Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla (2023); Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2023); Gasworks, London (2022); Amant, Brooklyn (2022); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019). 

Rosa Anna Di Lella

Rosa Anna Di Lella is a cultural anthropologist specialized in museum studies and North African collections. She has collaborated with several public and private institutions in participatory museography projects. At the Museum of Civilizations, she is the curator of the Collections of the former Colonial Museum of Rome and head of Educational Services.