NKATA: Dots of Thoughts Nkata Podcast Station

You are listening to the sixteenth episode of "Dots of Thoughts" Podcast. Every episode of this podcast project originated from a thought, an idea, a persistent spark or maybe a poem. I follow the prompts, often leading to an encounter and a conversation.
Lately, I have been reflecting on the works of the critical thinkers Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant, rummaging through their thoughts for clues about the dialectics of the future. As such, I have been engrossed with the question of presence, consciousness, embodied knowledge and "re-membering".

As our world gets increasingly convoluted, it begs for new readings of Difference and new poetics of relation. An understanding of how, through our body and presence, we animate the social power of the places we traverse and the people, we meet along the way in this epic journey called life. How do we give form to the paradox(es) that makes up the contours of transitory spaces and voids of borders for which our bodies serve as delineators?

In my wanderings, I come across persons whose disposition is an embodiment of a chaos-world. Chaos, in this case, does not mean disorder. On the contrary, it means the flourishing of Difference divested of all inscription of violence. These individuals are imbued with what Glissant calls the "Poetic force", which cannot be tamed because this force is its own turbulence. This force is also the main component for creating new myths that leave the past where it belongs and points to the future shaped by the vibrancy of newness.

A few weeks ago, I visited the studio of the Berlin-based artist Dior Thiam. Our conversations about her work and her way of being and moving in the world sparked my interest. So it led me to want a more extensive discussion based on the abovementioned intention.

This episode is the outcome of our meandering yet synergic thoughts that continues my deliberation on the notion of movement, borders, being and motion. Think of it as a deliberate act of tiptoeing and floating across multiferous concepts that takes the body – specifically the Black body – as locational coordinates. 

Why Dior Thiam? The answer to that question is evident in her ability and willingness to follow, with fluttering words, all the signs of unravellings, fragmentation and collations that foregrounds the duality of her reality. Hers is a life that gives in to the porousness and osmotic tendencies animating sites of Difference within it. Art, in this case, is both the conduit and location for the interplay between notions of stability and instability that ensues. 

As with many of my podcast conversations, the gems of the discourse are scattered, like seeds, across the entire discussion. This approach intentionally borrows from the disposition of the hopeful gardener, who is often cognisant that the ground is fertile at disparate patches. The listener must find, for themselves, what part merits further nurturing and watering.

I wish you joyful and active listening.

– Emeka Okereke


Guest: Dior Thiam
Production: Atelier E.K Okereke
Music and Sound Effects: Epidemic Sound
Sonic Inserts: Dior Thiam
Host and Curator: Emeka Okereke
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In this episode of Dots of Thoughts, I am in conversation with Diana Mora. She is a ballet dancer. Her inclination to dance started from as early as the age of six, when she first watched Swan Lake. Supported by her mother, she studied and completed ballet dancing at the National Academy in her home country Bolivia. Dance became the incentive for her movement and consequent self-unravelling from then on. Finally, she moved to France to pursue her dreams as a ballet dancer. In the podcast, she takes us through the nature of the conflict she fought through in relation to her body.
"In France, I realised that Dance was not just ballet for me."
Diana Mora's is not an archetypal ballet-dance body. In France, she was shocked to realise that ballet has less to do with Dance and more with the objectification and stratification of bodies. The technicalities required to conform one's body into a form fit for ballet dancing is stretched to the point where the body is a tool with no soul. And as with every tool, value is ensured by separating the efficient from inefficient, with little room for acknowledging and valorising difference.
Since then, it has been a hard-fought journey towards reconciling the pulsating resolve to dance with the disparity of her atypical body type. This journey is also one of many border-crossings whereby, for every delimitation, self-unravelling paradoxes ensue.
Diana lives and works in Berlin today. In her first Instagram post of the year, she put forward a succinct recapitulation of her relationship with her body. It read like a manifesto for taking back one's body from the clutches of colonialism and refocusing it on the necessary work of making a home we carry with us.

- Emeka Okereke


Host: Emeka Okereke 
Guest: Diana Mora 
Cover Photo: Haze Kware (HKVisuals)
Production: Nkata Podcast Station/Atelier E.K Okereke
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See the website for extensive materials: nkatapodcast.com

In 2006, I remember photographing, in Paris, the protest against killings that then took place in Isreal and Palestine. In the photo, a father is clutching his little daughter on one hand, while with the other hand, waves a placard that reads “Le meme age que ma fille” (same age as my daughter). I remember feeling deeply struck by this double emphasis aimed at reiterating what should be so obvious: the trail and ensuing threads of human violence – like mitochondria – run and connect to us all. 
In this podcast conversation, I caught up with a longtime friend and fellow artist Bahaa Abudaya to discuss the most recent eruption of violence which took place in May 2021. 
Bahaa left Gaza when he was two years old. Since then, he has roamed the earth. Yet he claims: no matter where I go, I always consider myself a Palestinian even though I do not know, from lived experience, what Palestine is as a place. He goes on to explain that this deeply inward, yet unforced identification with Palestine is constitutive of his disposition as one who is in a state of permanent temporality. 
“I am never clear where I should be. I have developed a kind of personality through this kind of exile”. 
Here, we are presented with the paradox often a fixture of border-bodies: on one hand, a solace accompanies the feeling of never being beholden to a place. On the other hand, there is something about transience that denies one a sense of continuity. Rightfully so, Bahaa concludes that his life is floating somewhere in between these unresolvable polarities. 
His Palestine is one he anchors to a memory of displacement. He recalls an anecdotal event that took place when he was ten years old. His grandmother took him to the site where her home once stood before the occupation. The most indelible moment of the visit was witnessing his grandmother shed tears profusely. As a child, he could not understand why absence meant so much for her. Her tears became symbolic of an incomprehensible, ungraspable loss that he would carry with him as a placeholder for what it means to be Palestinian. “Every Palestinian makes his or her own Palestine for themselves”, he said in the podcast. They make their Palestine out of ruins and loss. That is why the picture of young Palestinian kids throwing pebbles at Israeli armoured tanks should be read beyond its photogenic attributes. 
The Israeli army, complete with its intelligence apparatus, is one of the most powerful in the world. For that reason alone, this conflict, on the part of the Palestinians, will always be one of bringing a fist to a gunfight. But that fist is clenched tight – always ready to provoke violence as intrinsic to its resistance. 
As Bahaa concludes, both sides are complicit in the incitement of violence, albeit at disparate scales. Is there ever going to be an end to this regurgitation of violence? I asked. No, not when violence is the first resort. Violence will sell more guns and take more lives – that’s about it. 
What becomes obvious is that the method and approach to the formation of the Israeli nation-state is one forged in the crucibles of 19th-century colonialism. It is necropolitics, that is, the entitlement of a nation-state to legal power – shored up by capital and powerful alliances – to inflict death with impunity. This colonial disposition is carried over to our time, thereby sabotaging hopes of the 21st century being one of healing and reparation. 
No one is genuinely committed to a decolonial future who shou
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Eric Gyamfi (1990, Ghana) is a visual artist working with and within photography. This podcast conversation was induced by the inclusion of his work in the book, Africa State of Mind: Contemporary Photography Re-imagines A Continent “by Ekow Eshun. Rightfully so, the conversation build’s on Eshun’s central premise of focusing on photographers/works that fall within the 21st-century timeframe. Eric Gyamfi’s work, although beautifully photogenic, accounts for processes outside and beyond the frame. He considers the photographic medium as a space to be unravelled. Thus when, in the podcast, he says “beyond wanting to represent something, I have been more interested in what a photograph is composed of”, he offers what is invariably an accessible entry point into his fundamental approach to the medium. This assertion cuts through his various bodies of work from, “Just Like Us” (published in “Africa State of Mind”) to his recent work titled “The things that are left hanging, in the air like a rumour”.  
If Time is an indispensable component of photography, Gyamfi seems to be preoccupied with how space, materiality, organisms and human interactions collude to give rise to the techno-chemical reaction which becomes the photograph. “How can I organise a place (or space) as if it was a photograph?” is the question underlining his recent body of work. Yet what is unique to space if not an articulation of the crossroads between past, present and the future? What is referenced here is photography’s ability to make an event out of disparate and dispersed information, across time, some of which elude the grasp of known history and “hanging in the air like a rumour”. 
It is one thing to speak of a life-giving process and another to know how to bring such disposition into one’s artistic practice. When Gyamfi speaks of the intriguing possibility of non-human entities—enzymes, algae, bacteria—participating in his photosynthetic photographic process, my mind wanders off to many tangents of radiant connections between us and our world. I would think, for instance, of how allowing oneself to be preoccupied with such “little things”, as he called it, about the co-habitative nature of our world, helps our grasp of how seriously damaged our world has become. Another example comes to mind: John Akomfrah’s “Vertigo Sea” is a large scale, yet grisly, counterpart of Eric Gyamfi’s thoughts. I can’t help but think of these two references side by side. The former humanising us for a better appraisal of the latter. 
The podcast conversation has a lot more to offer. Especially where it underscores the much needful conversation between two photographers separated by a decade, which, if weighed against the eventfulness of the century so far, is not a mere one.
Towards the end of the podcast, Eric Gyamfi pays homage to artists and photographers—Nii Obudai, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Uche Okpa Iroha, Ibrahim Mahama, and more— without whom we wouldn’t be the sort of artist and thinker he is today. 




Host: Emeka Okereke (Berlin)
Guest: Eric Gyamfi (Accra)
Text: Emeka Okereke
Production: E.O Multimedia/Atelier E.K Okereke
Artwork(s): Eric Gyamfi
Design: E.O Multimedia 
Music: Epidemic Sounds
This Project is supported by the Stiftung Kunstfonds Germany. 
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In the second episode of Dots of Thoughts Shorts, Emeka shares a few thoughts and impulses about what the inner voice means for him. 

Duration: 9:19 mins. 

Join the conversation and leave a comment on your preferred listening platform.
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This is the debut episode of the bonus series called Dots of Thoughts Shorts (DoTshorts).  Emeka Okereke gives a glimpse of his thoughts regarding the notion of work, and what work has come to signify for him. The episode is  backdropped  by sonic “artefacts” made up of ambient sound and music. 

Listen in full at https://nkatapodcast.com
Also on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Deezer, Overcast and more. 
Support the showThank you for listening. Follow Nkata Podcast Station on Instagram @nkatapodcast and Twitter.

See the website for extensive materials: nkatapodcast.com