Free State of Barackia:
Landscapes of Liberation
01.02.–16.01.2022
Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds
Free State of Barackia: 150 Years of Decolonial Urbanisms, Solidarity and Neu Berlin Utopias
01.02.–30.06.2021
ZK/U (Center for Art and Urbanistics)
Artistic Fellow Residency Programme with DaGeG collective
Free State of Barackia:
Landscapes of Liberation
09.10.–10.10.2021
Hebbel Am Ufer
Performance invocations & discursive programme
Artists: Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, MIMIMI-space (with Cintia Rangel, Kalil Joigny, Exocé Kasongo, NSHK, Eurico Ferreira, Ricardo de Paula), Thelma Buabeng & Nuuki, Elsa Mbala, Adam Bahar, Jennifer Kamau, Fetewei Tarekegn, Niloufar Tajeri, Hamze Bytyci, FOKN Bois (M3NSA, Wanlov the Kubolor), Wearebornfree! Empowerment Radio
*Nyabinghi Lab were guest curators at HAU in September 2020 with the opening programme of the redesigned HAU1 with “Radical Mutation: On the Ruins of Rising Suns”.
Barackia Square:
Care, Resistance, Heritage
29.10–22.11.2021
Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien
Interventions in public space
In collaboration with Wearebornfree! Empowerment Radio, International Women* Space, ACUD Macht Neu & Initiative Hermannplatz
Barackia Square is modelled as a squat multidimensional public space resistance heritage hub dedicated to accessible histories of freedom rights migrant and BIPOC communities of Berlin. Sister organisations working in urban developments, transmission and activism are tied to the topography of Berlin’s evolution in resistance, migrant mobilities, freedom and black cultures.
Barackia rethinks colonial narratives and memories through urban collaborations and interactive monuments to bring stories of free communities. and reconsidered utopian coexistences.
Barackia was an independent free migrant community, an intentional community continuing the legacy of self-determination, independent market and alternative living. Barackia Square may act as a mobile grassroot preservation effort led by artists, curators, and activists. The square gives a contemporary lens to activate erased histories through the presentation of innovative and experimental programming as zones of safer spaces. The notable function of Barackia as a mobile kiosk village creates alternative histories in practices of transformational justice, restitution & reparation, archiving and performance as decolonial strategies.
Free State of Barackia: Landscapes of Liberation
12.11.2021–16.01.2022
Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien
Exhibition and discursive programme
How are demands of equality interrelated with self-determined spaces in the past and present? How do free communities become laboratories for creative and visionary forms of collectivity? How can urban dwellings be designed in solidarity and equity? These questions form the starting point of our project «Free State of Barackia» which draws inspiration from an independent free state founded 150 years ago by migrant workers and disenfranchised urban dwellers in berlin, that stretched from Kottbusser Tor to Hasenheide.
In this framework, Nyabinghi Lab presents “Free state of Barackia: Landscapes ofLiberation, Self-Determined Spaces and Visions for Justice”: a performance, holistic and discursive program at HAU, which explores histories of land and space occupations, of independent communities, as laboratories of working class, anticolonial and anti-racist struggles. The program reflects on the global complexities of Barackia’s seemingly local history and intertwines it with similar movements around the world. Drawing amongst others on the histories of the formation of Weeksville in Brooklyn – one of the largest free black communities in pre-civil war America –, the occupation of the Oranienplatz (2012–14) as a result of the refugee march of rights to Berlin, and the Quilombos – independent communities of formerly enslaved people in the Americas –, the program inspires a dialogue between local and international, historical and present day struggles for equality and justice through the claiming of space and formation of community.
Free State of Barackia amplifies the practice of resistance, the urgency of refugee rights, and black feminist practices in fortifying movements for liberation in times when solidarity is becoming difficult and reflects on the process of making and unmaking independent spaces as political forces to pressure the law, dismantle police violence and abolish the federal system of division and rule.