Heritage,
Knowledge and Solidarity
Networks of the Black Atlantic

The symposium addresses the urgent need to decolonize institutions and build a more inclusive cultural sector.

Symposium « Réseaux de l’Atlantique noir : patrimoines, savoirs et solidarités » © Nigra Iuventa

The symposium

From Monday, November 17 to Saturday November 22, 2025 in Montreal.

The symposium "Networks of the Black Atlantic: Heritage, Knowledge and Solidarity" is part of a broader movement addressing the urgent need to decolonize institutions and build a more inclusive cultural sector. By bringing together actors from diverse backgrounds, we hope to contribute to strengthening connections between communities and promoting a better understanding of the challenges associated with Black Atlantic heritage, while stimulating concrete initiatives for a future in which art and culture play a central role in social transformation.

The “Black Atlantic”, based on the concept coined by Paul Gilroy, refers to a vast network of cultural, intellectual, artistic, social and historical connections that transcend geographical borders. This approach highlights the interactions between the different regions of the African diaspora and reveals the migratory flows, cultural exchanges and resistances that have shaped these societies. It emphasizes the enduring legacies of slavery and colonization while celebrating the resilience and creativity of Afro-descendant communities. These legacies continue to shape our world today. Our initiative therefore aims to explore the connections between Afro-descendant communities on both sides of the ocean and to juxtapose French, German and Quebec perspectives on these issues.

The rich program consisting of plenary lectures, film screenings, participatory workshops, panel discussions, exhibitions and artistic performances will adress three major themes:

Events

Thursday, November 13 - Saturday, December 06, 2025 | Articule, Montreal

Exhibition

In The Wake Of Our Archives: On Transmission and Inherited Memories is an exhibition that delves into the intimacy and affective nature of family archives and oral accounts. It poses the question, “How do we relate to and embody inherited memories?”

Taking cues from Stuart Hall’s reflections on the "living Archive", the term archive here is approached not only as evidence or recount of the past, but also as a testimony to the voids in time and history. It is approached as a holistic and dynamic body that offers, in its incompleteness, the possibility to inhabit and continuously reassess the past, in search of that which was omitted.

Ⓒ Mallory Lowe Mpoka Ⓒ Mallory Lowe Mpoka
Films | Monday, November 17, Friday, November 21, Saturday, November 22, 2025 | Various locations

Film screenings

Four different films will be screened:

Monday, November 17: "So Surreal : Behind the Masks“ by Joanne Robertson and Neil Diamond (2024) | Documentary | Cinéma Public

Friday, November 21: "The Empty Grave" (2024) by Cece Mlay and Agnes Lisa Werner | Documentary | | Goethe-Institut

Saturday, November 22: "No More History Without Us“ (2024) by Priscilla Brasil | Documentary | Cinéma Public

Saturday, November 22: "True North" (2025) by Michèle Stephenson | Documentary | Presented in collaboration with Festival RIDM | Cinéma Cineplex Odeon Quartier Latin
© Neil Diamond, Joanne Robertson © Neil Diamond, Joanne Robertson
Event series | From Wednesday, November 18 to Saturday, November 22, 2025 | Various locations

Symposium

Tuesday, November 18: Day 1. Establishing cultural links

Wednesday, November 19: Day 2. The diaspora: archives, futures and decolonialities

Thursday, November 20: Day 3. Rethinking the decolonial museum & Afrosonic perspectives

Friday, November 21: Day 4. Black Canadian Art & Collective Memory

Saturday, November 22: Day 5. On Curating
© Nigra Iuventa © Nigra Iuventa

The curator

Diane Gistal © © Orphée Okito Diane Gistal _2_

Diane Gistal is an independent French curator of Haitian origin based in Canada. Through her practice, she questions the dynamics of the Black Atlantic and the processes of cultural narrative construction, exploring the intersections between visual arts, literature, and the humanities. Her work unfolds through exhibitions, research programs, and curatorial initiatives that reactivate the memory, archives, and artistic resistance practices of African and Afro-descendant diasporas.

She is the founder and director of Nigra Iuventa. Nigraiuventa.com

About Nigra Iuventa

Nigra Iuventa is a non-profit cultural organization based in Montreal that supports African, Caribbean, and Afro-diasporic artistic practices. The organization supports artists in creating, disseminating, and preserving their works while strengthening their visibility and influence on local and international scenes. A winner of the 2021 CAM Equity Award for its commitment to equity and inclusion, Nigra Iuventa organizes residencies, exhibitions, collaborative projects, and archiving programs. These programs create spaces for encounter and dialogue, where artists, partners, and audiences co-construct collective narratives and explore new cultural perspectives. Nigra Iuventa acts as a catalyst for innovative initiatives, promotes reflection on current issues, strengthens the social fabric, and values artistic heritage. The organization celebrates the historical and contemporary contributions of artists of African descent and African artists.

Participants

Mélissa Andrianasolo is a doctoral student in art history at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM). Her research focuses on the praxis of artists of African descent in Montreal's artistic spaces. She is the host of the podcast La Couleur de l'Art.
I am a 29-year-old female theorist who can remember being a 10-year old writer and who expects to someday be an 80-year old writer. I’m also comfortably reclusive – a hermit butterfly in the middle of New York – a latent sojourner, a reluctant cynic when I’m not careful, a questioning feminist, a Black African; an oil-and-water combination of zeal, lull, insecurity, certainty, and intensity.
Moridja Kitenge Banza, born in Kinshasa in 1980, is a Canadian artist of Congolese origin. A graduate of Kinshasa, Nantes, and La Rochelle, he received the 2010 Dak'Art Grand Prize for Hymne à nous and De 1848 à nos jours, followed by the 2020 Sobey Art Award. His work explores memory, history, and territories.
Lori Beavis is the Director of daphne, the first Indigenous artist-run centre in Tiohtià:ke/ Mooniyang/ Montreal. She is also an independent curator. Her curatorial work articulates narrative and memory in the context of family and cultural history and identity, art education and self-representation. Identifying as Michi Saagiig (Mississauga) Anishinaabe and Irish-Welsh settler, Beavis is a citizen of Hiawatha First Nation, Rice Lake, Ontario.
Abigail E. Celis is an assistant professor in Art History and Museum Studies at the Université de Montréal (Tiohtià:ke). Her research focuses on the afterlives of colonialism and decolonial imaginaries as witnessed through contemporary visual culture, artistic creation, and museum practice.
Mariama Conteh is an artist living and working in the Paris region. After studying at Sciences Po Paris, La Sorbonne Paris IV and Mount Holyoke College (Massachusetts), she obtained her diploma in plastic expression from the Beaux-Arts de Cergy in 2025. Her work has been exhibited in Marseille, Paris, Saint-Denis, Miami and Athens. She is a founding member of the Transplantation Project association, and has been working on the development of this Afro-diasporic cultural center since its inception in 2019. She works on the artistic and public programs of this venue established in the northeast of Paris. Since 2023, she has participated in the research and digital humanities project L'art noir: cartographies for an emerging field under the direction of Abigail Celis at the Université de Montréal.
Chris Cyrille is a poet, art critic, performer, curator, and philosopher. He regularly publishes in journals and catalogs. Winner of the Prix Dauphine for contemporary art (2017), the AICA prize (2020), the Cnap curatorial grant, and the ADIAF Émergence grant (2022), he has designed numerous exhibitions and events, including the reactivation of the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists of 1959 during a residency at Villa Romana (2023), and the exhibition — Mais le monde est une mangrovité (2021), which gave rise to an eponymous book co-written with aesthetics researcher Sarah Matia Pasqualetti and published in 2023 by Rotolux Press. His research, which combines curatorial practices and philosophical reflection, explores Afro-Caribbean philosophies and, more specifically, Caribbean phenomenology, at the crossroads of poetry, aesthetics, and politics.
Kimberley Demagny, from Guadeloupe, is a consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur bridging culture and technology. She founded arTech Education, the first Global South training center on art and tech, Caribeart mapping Caribbean creatives, and co-founded Synapse.Zone. She empowers creatives regionally and internationally to embrace innovation and shape the digital future.
Léuli Eshrāghi belongs to the Samoan clans Seumanutafa and Tautua and to the Persian diaspora, and lives and works in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His approach focuses on art and design, sensual and spoken languages, and Indigenous, Black, and Asian ceremonial-political practices.
N'Goné Fall is an exhibition curator and cultural engineering specialist. She was editorial director of Revue Noire (1994–2001). She was the general curator of Africa2020 Season, which featured more than 1,500 cultural, scientific, and educational events in 210 cities across France (2020–2021).
Dominique Fontaine is an exhibition curator committed to exploring the social role of art in a pluralistic world. She holds a master's degree in museology from the University of Montreal, as well as degrees in arts administration and visual arts from the University of Ottawa. She also pursued graduate studies in exhibition design and organization at the De Appel art center in Amsterdam. In 2024, she co-curated the Toronto Biennial. She is co-director and co-author of the collective work Making History: Visual Arts and Blackness in Canada (2023). Dominique Fontaine is the 2021 winner of the City of Montreal's Black History Month award.
Billy Fowo is a curator and writer with points of interest in various fields such as the sonic, linguistics, and literature. He graduated from de Appel’s Curatorial Programme in 2023 and lives in Berlin, where he works for SAVVY Contemporary – The Laboratory of Form-Ideas.
After a career in the media, Elisabeth “Liz” Gomis has been running MansA – Maison des Mondes Africains since 2024. A “Woman of Culture” (2022) and Knight of Arts and Letters (2023), she founded the magazine OFF TO and has collaborated with Chanel, Apple, and other international players.
Nadine Hounkpatin is an independent producer and curator. Her practice, rooted in a critical and transcultural perspective, explores how artists reinvent legacies and open new horizons. She is the co-founder of the platform TheArtMomentum, where she works to promote the visibility of African and diasporic creativity. She is the associate curator of the upcoming 2026 Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles. http://www.TheArtMomentum.com
Satch Hoyt is a spiritualist, a believer in ritual and retention. A visual artist and a musician, his diverse and multifaceted body of work - whether sculpture, sound installation, painting, musical performance, or musical recording - is united in its investigation of the “Eternal Afro-Sonic Signifier” and its movement across and amid the cultures, peoples, places, and times of the African Diaspora. Those four evocative words (a term coined by Hoyt) refer to the “mnemonic network of sound” that was enslaved Africans’ “sole companion during the forced migration of the Middle Passage.” lt was, and is, a hard-won somatic tool kit for remembering where you come from and who you are - and maybe, where you’re going - against all the many odds. Of Jamaican-British descent, Hoyt was born in London and currently lives in Berlin. Having also spent time in New York, Paris, Mombasa, and Australia’s Northern Territory - all points on the many-sided and ever- expanding star that is the African Diaspora - he is an inti mate observer of the sites of convergence where the Diaspora comes together to sing, shout, and be, reflecting itself to itself. Employing the shared tool kit to connect, express, and commiserate across centuries and oceans.
Anique Jordan is an artist, writer and curator who looks to answer the question of possibility in everything she creates. As an artist, Jordan works in photography, sculpture and performance often employing the theory of hauntology to challenge historical or dominant narratives and creating, what she calls, impossible images.
Yaniya Lee is the author of Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art (2024). She has taught and written about art for universities, museums, and institutions across North America and Europe. Her recent projects include the Black Canadian Art History Scholarship Database (blackartstudy.ca) and Doing the Work: Selected Syllabi (greyzonepedagogies.com).
Mallory Lowe Mpoka (b.1996) is a Cameroonian-Belgian artist based in Montreal. Her expanded photographic practice explores memory, place, and identity through weaving, ceramics, and sculpture. Engaging personal archives and colonial legacies, her work bridges continents and histories. She has exhibited internationally and is currently presenting a solo show at Fonderie Darling during Momenta Biennale in 2025.
Edna Martinez is a DJ and curator from the Colombian Caribbean based in Berlin. She works at the intersection of electronic music, sound experimentation, and diasporic memory, engaging with Caribbean, Latin American, and Arabic musical narratives. Since 2018, she has developed curatorial projects that combine live music, DJ sets, gastronomy, and documentary audiovisual works, creating immersive experiences that connect communities, preserve memories, and foster intercultural exchange.
Melissa J. Nelson is an award-winning archivist and educator working in the field of Black archival practice. Her work centers Black being and belonging in the Archives to support collective healing and liberation movements. She is guided by critical and creative praxis to reimagine the Archives as sites of Black joy. Melissa is the Founder and Creative Director of the Black Memory Collective. She is also the Creator and Host of the podcast, Archives & Things. Melissa holds a Master of Information Studies from McGill University. She received a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in History, with a minor in Sociology, from Carleton University.
Zohra Opoku born in 1976, Altdöbern (former GDR/ East Germany); lives and works in Accra, Ghana. Zohra Opoku’s multidisciplinary practice explores identity, memory, and belonging through photography, textiles, and installation. Born in East Germany and based in Accra, she bridges her dual heritage by merging traditional craftsmanship with experimental processes. Using screen-printed images on natural fabrics, embroidery, and collage, she constructs layered narratives rooted in personal and cultural history. Her work reflects the emotional landscapes of the African diaspora, transforming intimate experiences into universal reflections. Exhibited internationally, Opoku’s art has been shown at institutions including Tate Modern, Zeitz MOCAA, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Brooklyn Museum, and is held in major public collections worldwide.
Ronald Rose-Antoinette is a Martinican scholar and independent curator interested in advancing creative experiments in decolonial, cross-cultural practice. In recent years, he has helped organize numerous talks, workshops, film programs, and exhibitions centering the practices of visual, sound and performance artists in Canada, Germany, France, Martinique, and online. He is the co-author of Nocturnal Fabulations, a book that examines the works of the Thai filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
A graduate in art history (École du Louvre and Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, specializing in African arts), she worked at UNESCO's World Heritage Center (Africa Unit), then as head of extra-European collections at the Musée d'Angoulême. Today, as Director of the Angoulême Museums, Archives and Art Library, she carries out her curatorial missions within an international collaborative framework, notably with several African countries. She is involved in research into the history of non-Western collections, their origins and the challenges of heritage restitution.
Safia Siad is a curator, scholar, and DJ with a practice centered in deep listening. As a founding member of the Afrosonic Innovation Lab, Siad operates at the intersections of the visual and audio poetics of the African diaspora. Her deep listening sessions have taken place in Montréal, Florence, Toronto, and Banff, while her writing has appeared in C Magazine and in multiple exhibition catalogues. She recently completed her SSHRC funded Master of Arts (Art History) at Concordia University and is currently a curatorial fellow with Gallery TPW.
Ethel-Ruth Tawe (born in Yaoundé, Cameroon) is an antidisciplinary artist and creative researcher 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. Her burgeoning curatorial practice took form in an inaugural exhibition titled 'African Ancient Futures', and continues to expand in a myriad of audiovisual experiments. She is currently Editor-in-Chief at the arts and culture platform Contemporary And (C&) Magazine.
Theo tyson is an intuitive and inclusive curator who invites conversations about the sociocultural implications of race, class, gender, identity, and sexuality through a lens of fashion, art, and culture. Tyson’s practice centers historiography that privileges and provides authority to the global majority – those previously labeled as underrepresented or marginalized.
Daphnée Yiannaki, museologist and historian of non-indigenous art, is pursuing a PhD in museology, mediation, and heritage, focusing on the processes of indigenization and decolonization in art museums. Recipient of a FRQSC scholarship, she is, among other things, secretary of Cahiers du CIÉRA and research assistant for the CIÉCO Partnership.

Partners

The symposium is a project by Nigra Iuventa, organized in partnership with the Consulate General of France in Quebec City and the Goethe-Institut in Montreal, and made possible thanks to the generous support of the Franco-German Cultural Fund. Curated by Diane Gistal, this event is a testament to the international collaboration between Quebec, France, and Germany. It encourages cultural and intellectual exchanges around the heritage of the Black Atlantic, promoting transnational dialogue.

Heritage,Knowledge and Solidarity Networks of the Black Atlantic

The symposium

Restitution of cultural heritage

Co-construction of knowledge

Building solidarity networks

Events

The curator

About Nigra Iuventa

Participants

Mélissa Andrianasolo

Afi Venessa Appiah

Moridja Kitenge Banza

Lori Beavis

Abigail E. Celis

Mariama Conteh

Chris Cyrille

Kimberley Demagny

Léuli Eshrāghi

N'Goné Fall

Dominique Fontaine

Billy Fowo

Elizabeth Gomis

Nadine Hounkpatin

Satch Hoyt

Anique Jordan

Yaniya Lee

Mallory Lowe Mpoka

Edna Martinez

Melissa J. Nelson

Zohra Opoku

Ronald Rose-Antoinette

Emilie Salaberry

Safia Siad

Ethel Tawe

Tyson Theo

Daphnée Yiannaki

Partners

Heritage,
Knowledge and Solidarity
Networks of the Black Atlantic