Deeply Rooted: The Library Series

Ethel Ruth Tawe (b. Yaoundé, Cameroon) is an antidisciplinary artist and (re)searcher exploring memory in Africa and its diaspora. Image-making, storytelling, and time-travelling compose the framework of her inquiry. From photography, collage, and text, to moving image, installation and other time-based media, Tawe examines culture and technology often from a speculative lens. She is currently Editor-in-Chief at Contemporary And (C&) Magazine.

Contemporary And (C&) is a dynamic platform for reflecting on and connecting ideas and discourses on contemporary visual arts. The C& Center of Unfinished Business is a reading room that offers an extraordinary, sometimes disconcerting selection of books connected to the topic of colonialism in various ways – from German colonization to Congolese fashion to twenty-first-century capital markets, it stretches into many different areas affected. Launched in 2017, the reading room has travelled and connected in various ways with institutions from Cincinnati to Hong Kong, via Berlin, Vienna, Toulouse, Athens, Kassel, and New York. The newest installation is curated by the C& Editor-in-Chief Ethel-Ruth Tawe.

Inem Richardson is the president and co-founder of the Thomas Sankara Centre, Pan-African libraries and political education centre based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and Niamey, Niger. The centers house classic texts on African history, feminism in the Global South and global anti-colonial struggles. Inemesit is a journalist covering the Alliance of Sahel States and other Pan-African anti-imperialist movements and struggles. She is also a member of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party and the All-African Women's Revolutionary Union. Her organizing work has taken her to the Garifuna communities of the Honduran coast, to the Zapatista caracoles of Chiapas, Mexico, and to the revolutionary island of Cuba.

Neema Githere Sïphone (b. Nairobi, Kenya) is a writer, curator, and guerrilla theorist whose curatorial and research practice examines the #digitaldiaspora and networked repair through cyber-cartography, with a focus on how descendants of exile can invoke somatic attunement amidst systematized algorithmic displacement. They are the founder and lead artist at Studio Nkisi, a relational architecture practice that produces socio-spatial interventions rooted in Afropresentism -- a term/genre coined by Githere in 2017.

Her work routes decanonising digital methodologies, collective archiving, and re-indigenisation through participatory and socially engaged formats. She has been building a research-based embodiment practice since 2016, and has embarked on research pilgrimages to over 30 countries researching Black networked culture(s) and wide-webbed-world(s). Githere has performed, lectured and consulted at a range of educational and cultural institutions including Afrotectopia, Princeton University, the National Museum of Qatar, Microsoft, and Twitter. Githere was one of the co-curators of transmediale's 2026 edition, "By the Mango Belt and Tamarind Road: Compassing, Protocoling, Metaphoring" alongside Juan Pablo García Sossa. In January 2026, ArtForum listed the pair's co-curation as one of 2026’s festivals “likely to change the trajectory of contemporary art and art history.”

Olivia M. Ross is a Caribbean American information worker, documentarian, and secretkeeper from Queens. Her work practice in audiovisual and software preservation informs embodied research into the cybernetics of secrecy, power, and place. She is a 2025-2026 Archival Resident at Performance Space and a maintainer of the Cyberfeminism Index. She is a death doula in training. Current and previous collaborators include Wikipedia, Performance Space NY, NEW INC, Rhizome, the School for Poetic Computation, The Kitchen, Pioneer Works, BelleMoon Productions, and NEON. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, Documentary Magazine, Letterboxd Journal, MUBI Notebook, Them, Refinery29, Bitch Media, and more. Ask her about Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing (1987).

Haweya is a techie and writer based in Oslo. She holds a bachelor's degree in informatics from the University of Oslo, as well as a master's degree in Technology, humans, and society from the University of Agder.Her writing orbits around the political economy of technology, and how these emergent technologies either nurture or diminish self-determination. Overall, she aims to make what modern technology makes abstract more palpable. Haweya is a member of Attac Norway's research group for democratic digitization, and has written for publications such as Klassekampen, Billedkunst, Vinduet, and Teknovatøren. As part of ASSATA, she has contributed to exhibitions at Kunsthall Oslo, Fotogalleriet, and Sandefjord kunstforening.

Keitu Gwangwa is a cultural practitioner and sangoma. She is currently serving as director of the Library of The Things We Forgot. The Library is a living archive dedicated to preserving, activating, and reimagining the cultural, political, intellectual, and sonic histories of African liberation movements and the African diaspora. Founded by artist Kudzanai Chiurai, the Library emerged as a critical intervention into the fragility of memory and the urgent need to safeguard the material and immaterial inheritances that have shaped Black political and cultural consciousness across generations. Gwangwa’s work is grounded in African Indigenous knowledge systems and an understanding that memory is simultaneously historical, embodied, and spiritual. Her presence within the institution contributes an important dimension to the Library's custodial philosophy: that archives do not merely preserve information, but also hold relationships, ancestral continuities, and collective experiences that require ethical stewardship and activation.

Gwen Rakotovao is a choreographer, dancer, and researcher whose practice spans performance, pedagogy, and cultural inquiry. She is currently a PhD candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts. She is the founder and artistic director of the Gwen Rakotovao Company – a contemporary dance company rooted in choreographic exploration and embodied practice, working across movement, performance, and image-based exploration. The company explores the body as an archive - one that remembers, holds, and transmits knowledge across time and space. Current projects are informed by Gwen’s PhD research, an investigation into how dance can reframe modes of traditional knowledge production, memory, and subjectivity. The company works with a constellation of artists, performers, and thinkers who engage with choreography not only as performance, but as a tool for sensing, disrupting, and reimagining the world.

Miki Gebrelul is an independent curator and organiser. Gebrelul holds a master’s degree in gender studies from the University of Oslo. They often work within intersections of queerness and post-colonialism, exploring ways where art can enable possibilities that are normally restrained by social inequalities. They were previously curator and head of exhibitions at Fotogalleriet. Alongside their curatorial practice, Gebrelul is part of collaborative, activist spaces in Oslo offering platforms and building communities for queer– and trans people.

Dr. Myriam D. Diatta is a Japanese–Senegalese–American designer, author, and independent scholar. She’s a specialist in the private, interior, behind-the-scenes aspects of doing political and creative work. Myriam has been studying, teaching, mentoring, publishing, and working as a designer across industries for nearly 20 years. She just published a new book with Set Margins’, titled, Doing Creative Work From Your Political Body: A Guide and Process for Practice-led Research. In it, is a framework, a demonstration, and a hands-on guide for studying the inner workings of your own political practice.

C. Grace Chang (b. 1989, USA) is an artist, curator, researcher, and filmmaker based in Malmö, Sweden. Born and raised in New Jersey, she identifies as a Fourth Culture Kid, a positionality that shapes her engagement with liminality, diaspora, and political embodiment. Working across moving image (VR, film), sound, and immersive installation, her practice weaves decolonial theory with embodied experience, affect, and refusal as a starting point, examining how power is felt, negotiated, and reconfigured through visual culture(s).


Grounded equally in critical theory and lived experience, her work is attentive to grief, joy, memory, and care as political forces. Through immersive environments, speculative aesthetics, and sensorial storytelling, she explores how bodies move through, resist, and imagine worlds beyond the colonial gaze. Alongside her artistic practice, she has worked extensively as a curator, educator at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and organizer, and holds M.A.s in Literature, Culture & Media and Visual Culture from Lund University, where her research-centered practice bridges artistic production and critical inquiry.

Apichaya (Piya) Wanthiang (TH/BE living in Oslo, Norway) holds a BA from Sint-Lukas, Brussels and an MA in Fine Arts from Bergen Academy of Art and Design (KHiB). Piya constructs environments in order to study how they influence our perceptions, behaviours and interactions. She works mainly with painting and installations comprising light, sound and text. With her work she aims to address the audience’s bodies directly, activating somatic knowledge through different senses in attempt to balance out the primacy of sight and cognition. Piya has exhibited widely in Norway. She has had solo exhibitions at the Munch Museum (Oslo, Norway), Kristiansand Kunsthall (Kirstiansand, Norway) and Storage (Bangkok, Thailand). In 2026 she will have solo exhibitions at the Vigeland Museum (Oslo, Norway) and at Artipelag (Stockholm, Sweden). She worked part time as Assistant Professor at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art and the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD) in Bergen. She has been on the board of LNM, the Norwegian Painters Association and of UKS, The Young Artists’ Society.

Flexi Aukan is a socially engaged multimedia artist with roots from Chile, raised in Hauketo and Oslo South. He works mainly with music, self-publishing and visual arts. Aukan holds a bachelor's degree in graphic design and illustration and is currently doing his Masters Art in Public Space at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. His art practice is a tool he uses to process and communicate his experiences from his marginalized suburb, heritage and history as an exiled Chilean diaspora child, as well as his political beliefs and principles.

Makda Embaie is a poet and artist who focuses on languages in relation to the nation-state and the individual. Through portrayals, activations, and practicing of her own specific experiences of language she has revealed linguistic components that have to do with space, time and the specific body, which complicates the nation-state's otherwise linear way of describing people and languages. Through installation, sound, text, film and photography, Makda shifts the focus from the nation-state's narrative towards specific experiences of language, in order to dive into the question of what language would be if this is where it arose from.

Recent works include the solo exhibition Frukten Mognar (2025) at Konsthallen Blå Stället in Gothenburg, featuring the book and practice “Breaking bread and language”, as well as a presentation within The Latvian Collection at the Latvian Museum of Art with the sound installation If joy was the door, what would be the room? (2022/2025). Public commissions include I remember all of you (2024), developed in collaboration with Black Archives Sweden, and the light-and-sound installation Gravel scatters time (2023) for the city of Gothenburg.

Michael S. Bekele is a writer, director, organiser and artist who explores embodied language through performance, writing and film. Michael is entangled with the phenomenology of music and poetics while attempting to create collective experiences which are drawn from the hyper- and surreal.

Johnny Chang is a Stockholm-based interdisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher. His artistic practice and research attend to questions of care, access, and tactics for gathering, listening to resilient knowledges from below that emerge from diasporic liminality, community memory, and social-movement archiving. Through a citational practice, he works with the re/de/composition of material and symbolic-discursive residues to reflect on conditions and processes of social reproduction and relation.

Munnen (the mouth) is a miniature culture house and reading room for art, publishing, food, listening and collective making based on Byälvsvägen 18 in Bagarmossen, Stockholm, Sweden. Munnen’s initiators are artists and graphic designers who share a desire to center language and community with feminist, postcolonial, queer ethics as a foundation. They are interested in publishing, graphic design, visual arts, performance and writing/reading as different ways of engaging with the local area of Byälvsvägen. At Munnen they host a growing reading room which focuses on topics such as social organization, ecology, cooking, poetry, choreography, feminism, art, and radical pedagogy.