Image: Marcela Moraga, “Zebramuschel”, from the project “Ein Fluss, ein Archiv”, 2022, Drawing with ink and water from the river Spree

How do vital forms, such as plant and water worlds, archive stories? What role do they play in political struggles and in reimagining society? How can those stories defy oblivion, alienation, and objectification? Confronting the violent material and psychic fragmentation inherited from colonial modernity and the damage of its ongoing extractivism.

Aiming at inhabiting archives collectively, intersubjectively, and in enlivening ways, Crossings is a series of encounters that opens up permeable formats to life, civic engagement and diasporic memory – including political gardens, river stories, transatlantic entanglements and Afro-sonic transmigrations – in collective readings, social displays and food-sharing.

Crossings establishes spaces to traverse knowledge divisions, rehearse forms of togetherness and engage with complex consciousness. Driven by a genealogy of feminist thinkers, these spaces recall M. Jacqui Alexander’s pedagogies of crossings that remembers the fragmented stories of the diasporic experience that still yearn to be told and pine for wholeness in the midst of dismembered life. They also invoke Gloría Anzaldúa’s strategy of crossings as the experiences of actively going beyond those (national) boundaries and the consequent diversification of consciousness and knowledge