Elhers is an Afro-Danish artist who will present her works in regard to the Decolonial thinking movement in the beginning of this century. 

This communication traces the thread of cotton as a witness stretching from the American South to today’s fast-fashion industry. Once called “White Gold,” cotton was the foundation of America’s wealth, built on torn and stolen Black lives through the transatlantic slave trade. Recycled, the same plantation logics persist in fast fashion’s modern slavery. Today Black and brown people, mostly women and children, still wear the heaviest cost of fashion’s profits.  

Cotton binds me to these histories of survival and erasure. My lineage is woven into the stories of my African Nova Scotian ancestors who fled the South as Black Loyalists. Promised land and freedom, they were given little more than rocky soil and broken promises. A DNA test later confirmed what my mother’s oral history had already stitched together: our roots stretch back to Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, regions where Black Africans were torn and stolen into slavery, bound into the cotton economy.  

Waste colonialism continues the cycle: mountains of secondhand clothes, often unwearable, are exported to places like Ghana’s Kantamanto Market, where they are called Obroni Wawu, “Dead White Man’s Clothes.” The pattern repeats: extraction, abandonment, erasure.  

Pulling at this unbroken thread runs through my oil painting, silk screening, design, video, sound, and textile upcycling. By salvaging discarded materials, I expose hidden costs while insisting on care, accountability, and radical remembering. Cotton On is both a warning and a vision: remember, unravel, repair.

Artist, curator, folklorist David Woods examines culture of North Preston, Nova Scotia- a rural Black village on the eastern outskirts of Halifax, where because of isolation villagers were able to maintain many elements of their ancestral Africanist language and cultural practices.  

Woods explains that the people of North Preston arrived in the community between 1813-1816 from the southern US states of Maryland, Louisiana, North Carolina, Virginia and the Gullah Sea islands as Refugees of the American War of 1812.  Due to its isolation, villagers primarily interacted among themselves at home, school, church, and work well into the 20^th century and were able to maintain a culture that still carried ‘Africanist’ practices including:  

Nicknaming tradition (names such as Bammy, Dinka Boy, Duba, Gola, LaLa, Tonka) 

Sayings- ‘Talk out your mouth’ (speak up); ‘Act a monkey’ (acting foolishly), ‘Blowing doors’ (looking good) 

Unique use of tense and sentence constructions: “I been going there since last year’; “She left out the house an hour ago” 

Africanist cultural practices: Seeking (a religious practice of sending Baptismal candidates into the woods to receive a vision from God as a proof of their faith); The Shout (a religious dance) 

Woods argues that the culture of North Preston is a clear case of ‘African imprinting’, where people cut off from their ancestry and even knowledge of their history, were able to continue Africanist language and cultural practices imprinted in their cultural memory. 

Lubanda Kandolo  explores memory as a living, elusive, and irreducible force. Inspired by Bantu traditions, particularly the symbolic universe of the Luba people, my practice rejects memory as a dead archive, approaching it instead as an energy in motion, reactivated by gesture, oral tradition, and art. These “infungible narratives” survive borders and exile: they circulate in bodies, rituals, collages, and canvases, refusing to be erased. My recent projects—Kizobazoba, Chaotic Beauty, and Matrilineal—embody this quest. Kizobazoba is inspired by the urban chaos of Kinshasa and other cities, where disorder and resourcefulness become a visual language. Chaotic Beauty explores this tension further: chaos is not a threat, but a creative and political matrix, capable of transforming adversity into beauty. With Matrilinéaire, I question the transmission and power of maternal figures. In Luba culture, the maternal line is at the heart of collective memory: painting and recomposing these figures is a way of summoning their protective force while reinventing the dominant iconography. Through these themes—chaos, beauty, the maternal matrix—I conceive of painting, collage, installation, and performance as porous spaces where intimate and collective memories intersect. Each work becomes an attempt to materialize what is hidden, an archaeology of living memory. For me, creating means invoking these infungible narratives: forces that refuse to be forgotten and open up to the future, indestructible, vibrant, always in transformation. 

Brito presents the trajectory and critical foundations of the Black Brazil Art (BBA) institution, which for more than a decade has operated as an independent platform dedicated to promoting Brazilian art with a specific focus on creating opportunities for Black artists—especially women—in dialogue with the African diaspora. The text emphasizes how BBA is structured upon a decolonial logic, questioning Eurocentric linearity while creating spaces of visibility, memory, and creation that value ancestral practices, traditional knowledge, and contemporary experimentation. By highlighting concepts such as “non-fungible narratives,” the essay demonstrates how Black artistic production resists the logic of substitution and commodification, preserving unique narratives rooted in orality, Afro-Brazilian religions, and community experiences. 

The reflection also addresses the centrality of BBA’s artistic residencies as environments of process rather than product, privileging collective experimentation, knowledge exchange, and insurgent writing in diverse formats—diaries, oral records, zines, and collaborative texts. This focus on process connects to the thought of Nêgo Bispo, especially the notion of “beginning, middle, beginning,” which inspires a cyclical and continuous vision of existence and creation. 

The essay concludes by highlighting the Bienal Black as a natural extension of these movements, a space of international amplification that reaffirms identities, revival, and the transformative power of Black art in Brazil. In this way, the text articulates decolonial critique, artistic practice, and curatorial strategies as pathways of resistance and the re-enchantment of the world.” 

This presentation reflects on Pamela Edmonds’ curatorial practice at Dalhousie Art Gallery in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on unceded Mi’kmaq territory, as an act of witnessing where Black embodiment, cultural memory, and institutional accountability converge within a region also shaped by centuries of African Nova Scotian presence. With more than twenty-five years of experience as both an independent curator and an institutional leader, Edmonds returned to Dalhousie in 2022 to revisit formative histories and articulate an ethics of curating grounded in care and accountability.
Beginning with the contested exhibition No Laughing Matter (1992), in which Carrie Mae Weems’ Ain’t Jokin’ series provoked protest, Edmonds examines how ruptures reveal the political and emotional stakes of displaying Black critique in Canadian art institutions. Rather than framing such events as failures or victories, she positions them as formative, illuminating the limits of institutional legibility and the need for practices rooted in opacity, reparative memory, and cultural sovereignty. Through exhibitions such as Black Body: Race, Resistance, Response (2001), The Secret Codes: African Nova Scotian Quilts (2022), Allen D. Crooks’ Family Matters (2023), As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (2024), and Oluseye’s By Faith and Grit (2025), Edmonds explores what it means to curate Black life as infungible: irreducible to metaphor or tokenism, and grounded in communal, ancestral, and spiritual knowledge. Drawing on Édouard Glissant, Tina Campt, Fred Moten, and Rinaldo Walcott, she argues that curating within colonial institutions requires a reparative ethic that resists extractivism, while cultivating spaces of refuge, resonance, and remembrance. Positioning the curator not as interpreter but as witness, Edmonds proposes that curatorial work can create conditions where Black narratives are not merely displayed but held, protected, and honoured on their own terms.

The three authors explore cultural resistance in Guadeloupe through the occupation of the Center for Arts and Culture (CAC) by the Kolèktif Awtis Rézistans. Around the leitmotif “Kilti-la pli gran ki nou” (“Culture is greater than us”), Laurence Maquiaba highlights how this militant action symbolized the rejection of colonial institutions and the reappropriation of a living cultural heritage. 

Joris Lechêne approaches the brutalist architecture of the CAC as a tool of coloniality, imposing a foreign modernity and denying local ways of life. The collective transformed this place into a space of indigenous resurgence, reintroducing relationships to time, space, and power rooted in Guadeloupean traditions. Practices such as the Creole garden explored by Pauline Cabidoche, where community rituals illustrate an “indigeneity” capable of resisting assimilation. 

The authors defend the idea of an ‘infungible’ culture—unique and unalterable—nourished by an “epistemic echo” common to oppressed peoples. This text shows how, in the face of institutional failure, the occupation of the CAC embodied a vital reconnection to collective memory and local indigenous wisdom, affirming the ability of Guadeloupeans to flourish in adversity.

Drawing on a range of experiences and territories, Olivier Marboeuf examines the conditions of resistance of Afro-diasporic minority infungible narratives in situations of coloniality. Moving away from the idea of their ontological infungibility, he proposes instead to focus on the way in which these narratives maintain deep and reciprocal links with their places of inscription and practice, thus highlighting the need for sovereign spaces to resist the patrimonialization and cultural extraction of neoliberal capitalism. He notes in passing the fragility in the contemporary art scene of the strategies of artists from Afro-descendant diasporas—notably the impasse of resorting to the right to opacity—and the need to engage in a materialist approach to reclaiming land and rebuilding cultural communities capable of “making place” and thus maintaining ownerless narratives.  

In this communication, Firmin proposes an articulation of the infungible narrative concept in context. Based on an event in 2017, rich in insights, which gave birth to the academic research space in which we find ourselves today, he proposes an interpretation of what could be a fungible practice and one that is not, a narrative that is and one that is not. .  

Claudine Bonner investigates the underexplored history of Caribbean migration into and out of Atlantic Canada between 1861 and 1931. By tracing the movements of African-Caribbean individuals and communities through key Atlantic ports such as Halifax, NS and Saint John, NB the project explores the social, political, and economic conditions that shaped mobility, belonging, and diaspora-building in the region, with consequences that persist today.  She seek to reconstruct the primary migration routes, motivations, and mechanisms that shaped these movements, paying attention to both physical mobility and the circulation of ideas. The study examines how Caribbean migrants experienced life in Atlantic Canadian port cities, maintained diasporic and transnational connections, and navigated local racial, class, gendered, and imperial hierarchies.  She try to analyze the responses of state institutions, churches, schools, and labour recruiters to Caribbean migration. Employing a transimperial and diasporic analytical lens,  she examines migrants’ navigation of multiple colonial regimes, racialized labour markets, and shifting national borders.  

Boukari-Yabara presents infungible narratives as necessary in the face of economic, cultural, and technological imperialism. Pan-Africanism represents one of the last frontiers, one of the last defenses against globalization. 

Francophone Caribbean crime fiction represents a reconfiguration of the Western crime genre, incorporating narrative dimensions specific to the imaginaries of resistance, memory, and the magical-religious. Considered a space for literary marronage, this genre draws on narratives rooted in oral, spiritual, and religious traditions, thereby destabilizing the dominant rational frameworks originating in the West. The incorporation of elements such as Caribbean quimbois or Haitian voodoo brings about a structural transformation of the classic detective narrative. This phenomenon is addressed here through the prism of the “infungible narrative,” an emerging concept referring to a literary discourse that escapes cultural dissolution and colonial appropriation, while challenging the mechanisms of erasure inherent in postcolonial structures of domination. 

Clette offers a reinterpretation of the work The Souls of Black Folk (DU BOIS, 2007), particularly the chapter entitled On the Death of the Firstborn, in which W.E.B. experiences the traumatic death of his son. This intimate space filled with suffering allows the author to reflect on and “resolve” the deep conflict caused by double consciousness. 

Gefen show how our societies force everyone to tell their stories according to prefabricated models, and I seek to describe an era of storytelling in which social media, marketing, and personal development standardize life stories and exhaust individuals. Yet self-narratives are never free: they are inherited (family, gender, class), subject to the gaze of others (Goffman, Butler), and framed by institutions. This constraint is most acute for asylum seekers, who are required to produce credible testimony according to the criteria of the Geneva Convention, often at the cost of crafting strategic narratives designed to convince. The film L’Histoire de Souleymane (Boris Lojkine, 2024) illustrates this: a young Guinean prepares a false narrative of being a political opponent before confessing that his economic migration was motivated by his mother’s illness. Similarly, the novel Assommons les pauvres ! (Shumona Sinha, 2011) denounces the industrialization of asylum stories and the dehumanization it entails. I return to the concept of infungible narrative: an authentic and singular narrative, irreducible to dominant formats, which carries aesthetic (as opposed to sanitized narratives), moral (restoring the dignity of marginalized lives), and political value (resisting narrative norms). Literature and cinema thus appear as places capable of restoring complexity and opacity to human experiences in the face of the uniformizing frameworks of narrative.