Barazani Berlin
Barazani Berlin
Suelen-Calonga_A-Line-Back-Home

A Line Back Home, Ancestral Echoes in Seven Turns

July 26, 2025 4:00 PM

starting at BARAZANI.berlin | Spreeufer 6

 

They keep trying to make us forget, tangled in the winding turns of neglect. But we are stronger spellcasters, better wizards. The line has never been broken, and the voices of our ancestors are calling us back home, not without asking us to search for them, so we may return together.

 As part of the project Dissident Paths: Walking Together as a Method, Suelen Calonga is sharing an artistic intervention in three parts that confronts forgetting and draws an African-Diasporic line of memory and return.

 

Part 1: The Walk
A ritual walk, through seven counter-clockwise turns around the Humboldt Forum - Berlin’s epicenter of displaced heritage and colonial amnesia. Inspired by the forced ritual of the Tree of Forgetting in Ouidah, Benin, where enslaved people were made to walk in circles to erase their past, this walk reclaims that motion in reverse. Each turn is a refusal, a declaration that memory persists. We reweave what was never truly lost: We didn’t forget.
Through incantations, offerings, and collective presence, the walk calls upon the ancestors held captive within that building to awaken from their imposed, restless sleep and reactivate memory as a living force - a force that cannot be archived, only carried through the spiral folds of time within us.

 

Part 2: The Installation – Fetish
A shared research installation hosted at Barazani.berlin, opening a counter-device of sound, image, and symbolic memory. It exposes the historical materiality of colonial collecting and cracks the European construction of authority over the Other’s sound. Reclaiming the term Fetish, it inverts the gaze and redirects it toward the perpetrator: ancestral voices return not as artifacts but as entities that speak back, confront, and haunt the structures that tried to contain them.
The installation is composed of objects acquired through collector circuits: flea markets, antique dealers, relic traders, collectors' associations, and institutional archive catalogs. This intentional provenance restages and stretches the contemporary circuits that continue to profit from coloniality and the domestication of the sacred belonging to other cultures.

 

Part 3: The Dinner Table
The final part unfolds as a shared meal prepared together with Sandra Bello, matriarch of the African-Brazilian community in Berlin (@baixadaberlinense). A table for food and togetherness, held as a collective moment of nourishment and shared presence.

Together, walk, installation, and dinner offer a space for diasporic re-membering, spiritual presence, and radical reorientation: a line traced not to forget or divide, but to guide us back home.

 

📍All parts of the event begin and end at Spreeufer 6, directly across from the Humboldt Forum, in the space of BARAZANI.berlin. Dinner starts at 7:00 PM – registration is appreciated (though not mandatory) via barazani.berlin@gmail.com. No registration needed for the walk or installation.

—

About the collaborators

Suelen Calonga is a mother, priestess, artist, researcher, and educator whose work operates at the intersection of academic, spiritual, and artistic practices, born and raised in Pindorama (Brazil). She weaves ancestral knowledge with contemporary art and uses performance and audiovisual media as a poetic methodology to explore memory, heritage, and spiritual knowledge. As a practitioner of the Lese Orisa cult and with curatorial and community-building experience, she has developed research and exhibition projects centering African-diasporic voices. Her collaborative work with artists and community organizations focuses on decolonizing knowledge and critically reflecting on the role of museums and their colonial legacies. She is active internationally, participating in residencies, group exhibitions, and publications across Brazil, West Africa, and Europe.

Sandra Bello is steps from afar that crawled, walked/walk, ran/run, played/play, loved/love, raised/raise. Steps that flee colonial tyranny: on the lookout! Always fighting for hers, our humanity. Always Quilombola. This is the bio-resistance, bio-resilience, bio-(re)existence. A biography from the school of quilombo life. Here is the mini bio and the long struggle.
E(x)u Sandra Bello. @baixadaberlinense

 

 

 

 

Suelen-Calonga_A-Line-Back-Home

A Line Back Home, Ancestral Echoes in Seven Turns

July 26, 2025 4:00 PM

starting at BARAZANI.berlin | Spreeufer 6

 

They keep trying to make us forget, tangled in the winding turns of neglect. But we are stronger spellcasters, better wizards. The line has never been broken, and the voices of our ancestors are calling us back home, not without asking us to search for them, so we may return together.

 As part of the project Dissident Paths: Walking Together as a Method, Suelen Calonga is sharing an artistic intervention in three parts that confronts forgetting and draws an African-Diasporic line of memory and return.

 

Part 1: The Walk
A ritual walk, through seven counter-clockwise turns around the Humboldt Forum - Berlin’s epicenter of displaced heritage and colonial amnesia. Inspired by the forced ritual of the Tree of Forgetting in Ouidah, Benin, where enslaved people were made to walk in circles to erase their past, this walk reclaims that motion in reverse. Each turn is a refusal, a declaration that memory persists. We reweave what was never truly lost: We didn’t forget.
Through incantations, offerings, and collective presence, the walk calls upon the ancestors held captive within that building to awaken from their imposed, restless sleep and reactivate memory as a living force - a force that cannot be archived, only carried through the spiral folds of time within us.

 

Part 2: The Installation – Fetish
A shared research installation hosted at Barazani.berlin, opening a counter-device of sound, image, and symbolic memory. It exposes the historical materiality of colonial collecting and cracks the European construction of authority over the Other’s sound. Reclaiming the term Fetish, it inverts the gaze and redirects it toward the perpetrator: ancestral voices return not as artifacts but as entities that speak back, confront, and haunt the structures that tried to contain them.
The installation is composed of objects acquired through collector circuits: flea markets, antique dealers, relic traders, collectors' associations, and institutional archive catalogs. This intentional provenance restages and stretches the contemporary circuits that continue to profit from coloniality and the domestication of the sacred belonging to other cultures.

 

Part 3: The Dinner Table
The final part unfolds as a shared meal prepared together with Sandra Bello, matriarch of the African-Brazilian community in Berlin (@baixadaberlinense). A table for food and togetherness, held as a collective moment of nourishment and shared presence.

Together, walk, installation, and dinner offer a space for diasporic re-membering, spiritual presence, and radical reorientation: a line traced not to forget or divide, but to guide us back home.

 

📍All parts of the event begin and end at Spreeufer 6, directly across from the Humboldt Forum, in the space of BARAZANI.berlin. Dinner starts at 7:00 PM – registration is appreciated (though not mandatory) via barazani.berlin@gmail.com. No registration needed for the walk or installation.

—

About the collaborators

Suelen Calonga is a mother, priestess, artist, researcher, and educator whose work operates at the intersection of academic, spiritual, and artistic practices, born and raised in Pindorama (Brazil). She weaves ancestral knowledge with contemporary art and uses performance and audiovisual media as a poetic methodology to explore memory, heritage, and spiritual knowledge. As a practitioner of the Lese Orisa cult and with curatorial and community-building experience, she has developed research and exhibition projects centering African-diasporic voices. Her collaborative work with artists and community organizations focuses on decolonizing knowledge and critically reflecting on the role of museums and their colonial legacies. She is active internationally, participating in residencies, group exhibitions, and publications across Brazil, West Africa, and Europe.

Sandra Bello is steps from afar that crawled, walked/walk, ran/run, played/play, loved/love, raised/raise. Steps that flee colonial tyranny: on the lookout! Always fighting for hers, our humanity. Always Quilombola. This is the bio-resistance, bio-resilience, bio-(re)existence. A biography from the school of quilombo life. Here is the mini bio and the long struggle.
E(x)u Sandra Bello. @baixadaberlinense