You Better Say Our Names: Public Talk on Decolonizing the Art Field

Yaa Addae (she/they) is a participatory curator, writer, and community researcher. Their practice is informed by the liberatory power of the imagination, play, and restorative love economics: bringing love to the systemically underloved. Yaa works to reimagine cultural infrastructure and in 2019 co-created ‘Black Diaspora Literacy: From Negritude to Drake’, a 10 week course supported by Tufts University’s Experimental College. Later, they were a researcher for Ano Institute’s Mobile Pavilion and Cultural Encyclopedia of African Art.

They are the founder of the anticolonial art history platform Decolonize The Art World and art futurist studio, KRA. They have spoken at the Southbank Centre, Nubuke Foundation, The Barbican, Somerset House and led workshops with Autograph ABP, The Church of Black Feminist Thought, The Library of Africa and The African Diaspora, Queer Britain and more. Currently based between London, Accra, and New York, Yaa is stewarding Open Heart Clinic, an embodied research programming series on the future of care.

Lara Okafor (they/them) is a writer, software developer, and organiser. They are interested in prison abolition, speculative fiction, and how those two topics overlap with technology. Lara has written a master’s thesis about digital security for queer people of colour, a short story, ‘Sevenfold’, which was published in the Norwegian sci-fi anthology ‘A line through gravity’, and has writing published in the magazines Fett, Samora Forum, and Billedkunst. Lara was also one of the project coordinators for the documentary film project ‘Loud and Proud: a celebration of Black queer voices’.