SPECIAL PROJECTS · 2024–2026
Contested Desires:
Constructive Dialogues
Artists, living archives and the legacies we carry.
Nubuke in the dialogue
How do colonial histories continue to shape the objects, places and stories through which we understand ourselves?
As a Ghanaian partner in Contested Desires: Constructive Dialogues (CDCD), Nubuke Foundation brought this question into conversation with contemporary artistic practice. We supported and coordinated the participation of two Ghanaian artists—AFROSCOPE (Isaac Nana Opoku) and Elisabeth Efua Sutherland—while welcoming international artists into our own communities and networks.
CDCD is a three-year programme of residencies, exhibitions and exchange involving 22 artists across Europe, Africa and South America. Co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe programme, it explores the relationships between colonial legacies, cultural heritage and contemporary identities.
For Nubuke, this exchange connects our commitment to Ghanaian artists with the work of opening up archives, sharing knowledge and making space for dialogue across different contexts.
HOSTING & CONNECTING
Exchange in Ghana
Our role extended beyond supporting artists travelling abroad. Through residencies at Nubuke, visiting artists encountered Ghanaian archives, artistic practices and communities, with research moving between Accra, Wa and other sites.
Archives, clay and shared knowledge
Gloria Oyarzabal examined photography, archives and the ways colonial perspectives have shaped knowledge. Her research included museums, libraries and photographic collections, alongside conversations with Ghanaian cultural practitioners.
Nicolás Kyrillou explored clay and the transmission of craft knowledge, working with Samuel Lovi and potters in Kpando and Charia. Workshops with children in Accra and Wa brought making and learning into the exchange.
Three artists, three evolving enquiries
In 2025, Laís Andrade, Bona Dyssou and Sümer Erek undertook a two-week residency at Nubuke, concluding with a seminar and exhibition.
Laís developed My Ray of Sunshine, connecting the history of the Tabom community with Portuguese colonial legacies. Nubuke facilitated introductions to Fritz Baffour and Allotey Bruce-Konuah. Bona filmed a scene for The Very Secret Story of XYLMNOPQ, exploring diplomacy, friendship and betrayal through female figures. Sümer’s Tears of Gold brought local fibres, kente and living plants into an enquiry into extraction and environmental justice.
Read about the hosted residencies ↗
Explore the 2025 residency ↗
THE ARTISTS WE SUPPORTED
AFROSCOPE
Isaac Nana Opoku
Textiles as memory. Objects as witnesses. Imagination as a way to reconsider inherited histories.
Rome · 2024
At the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome, AFROSCOPE encountered collections and storage spaces shaped by colonial collecting. His October–November 2024 residency, alongside Bona Dyssou and Rafael Guendelman Hales, prompted reflections on displacement, grief and the meanings that objects carry beyond their museum descriptions.
His digital reflections bring together photographs, writing and research from Rome and subsequent travels. They trace an ongoing enquiry into textiles as repositories of knowledge and into how imagination might be decolonised.
Newcastle & South Shields · 2025
During his D6 residency, AFROSCOPE developed a folded-paper tapestry of handwritten reflections and sketches, treating each folded square as a vessel for memory. His work was presented in the CDCD group exhibition at the Great North Museum: Hancock.
At the conference at The Word on 17 July 2025, he also led a collaborative tapestry workshop, inviting participants to contribute their own stories, memories and experiences.
From research to a material archive
The artist’s documentation reveals how looking, writing and making feed into one another: a photographic research archive, sheets of handwritten reflections and drawings, and the repeated work of folding and assembling. In Newcastle, the individual black-and-gold units became a suspended, curved surface, holding fragments of text and imagery within a larger whole.
THE ARTISTS WE SUPPORTED
Elisabeth Efua Sutherland
Performance, embodied histories and living archives
Newcastle · 2024–2026
Elisabeth’s residencies with D6 in October 2024, June–July 2025 and March 2026 explored Black African histories in North East England through archives, walking, architecture and performance.
Her research followed figures including Henry Box Brown, Frederick Douglass and Arthur Wharton. Working with local researchers and community organisations, she considered how these histories can be encountered through the body and through places in the present.
Her digital project Sidenotes combines illustration and text. In March 2026, Acts of Witnessing at the Tyne Theatre & Opera House drew on research into Black performers, music halls and the difficult histories of minstrelsy and abolition. A video of the performance was subsequently presented at D6 during The Late Shows.
Amsterdam · 31 January–14 February 2026
Hosted by H401 and Creative Court, Elisabeth joined Emiddio Vasquez and Mohamed Ben Slama for a group residency exploring the movement of textiles, histories and identities.
Her enquiry connected Dutch Vlisco fabrics, Indonesian batik and West African wax prints, considering how cloth carries changing meanings across these contexts. The residency included encounters with The Black Archives, Sites of Memory, the Wereldmuseum and Guave, and a public sharing of work in progress at Kunstfort Vijfhuizen.
THE FINAL GROUP RESIDENCY · SEPTEMBER 2026
Coming together in Kalavasos
The artists’ residency journeys converged in Cyprus, where research and exchange opened into public presentations at Xarkis Festival, 11–13 September 2026.
All 22 CDCD artists gathered in Kalavasos for the final group residency. Encounters with local histories and practices—including the Neolithic site of Tenta, copper mining, silk, wheat weaving and herbs—offered ways of learning from the village and its communities.
For the two Ghanaian artists supported by Nubuke, the festival brought their developing enquiries into memory, material and living knowledge into a shared public setting. Both presented work at the festival’s Shop venue.
AFROSCOPE
Material Rememberings
An evolving documentary-essay film and web archive exploring stone and silk as repositories of memory. Extending his interest in textiles as living archives, AFROSCOPE considered how materials hold practical, artistic, symbolic and spiritual knowledge—and what is transmitted or lost as that knowledge changes.
ELISABETH EFUA SUTHERLAND
saltwater air
An exploration of histories carried through lives, traditions and imaginations that outlast empire. Drawing on songs, stories, books, maps and family histories, Elisabeth brought official records into dialogue with the living archives of care, memory, creativity and resilience.
Read about the Cyprus residency ↗
Explore the Xarkis Festival programme ↗