Selection of Projects
In 2025, I collaborated with artist and anthropologist Melanie Garland on Lagoon – L’intreccio, an immersive sound piece that explores the layered rhythms of wetland life in Sardinia, Italy. Drawing from my field research in the Oristano wetlands, L’intreccio—Italian for “the weave”—tells a sensory-rich story of the entanglements between human and more-than-human worlds that shape these waterscapes. Using my field recordings as the foundation, we collaboratively developed the storytelling, with Melanie Garland leading the soundscape composition and post-production.
This sound piece will be featured in the exhibition On Water. WaterKnowledge in Berlin, opening on October 10, 2025, at the Humboldt Labor. The exhibition presents current research projects from the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) focused on water, alongside artistic explorations that illuminate the element’s complexity and significance.
You can learn more here: https://www.humboldt-labor.de/ausstellung-vorschau/
In early 2025, I worked together with Gabriele Pinna of the Italian League for Bird Protection (LIPU) on the installation If you take care of birds, you take care of most of the environmental problems in the world. Presented as a guest exhibition from 12 June to 19 July 2025, it was part of Muddy Measures: When Wetlands and Heritage Converse, organized by the Centre for Advanced Studies Inherit: Heritage in Transformation.
The installation draws on LIPU’s expertise to investigate what birds reveal about the health of wetlands. Birds traverse water, land, and air, linking diverse ecosystems and serving as vital indicators of environmental change. Their presence sustains biodiversity, controls pests, and maintains ecological balance within wetlands. Yet, as elusive and sensitive “muddy measures,” birds demand patient observation and attentive care, embodying the fragile interdependence between human and more-than-human ecologies.
In 2024, as part of Amo Collective Berlin, I helped shape the reimagined ground floor of the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie (IfEE) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as Amo Salon—a space honouring Afro-German Enlightenment philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo. The project brought together transdisciplinary collaborators including artists, researchers, students, and community members.
The core exhibition highlights Amo’s legacy and the local street renaming initiative, featuring a new portrait of Anton Wilhelm Amo by the Black Student Union and introducing Amo Salon. Our first temporary exhibition (Nov 2024–May 2025) framed the Amo Collective Berlin archive as a vibrant space inspired by Stuart Hall’s concept of a “living archive.”
The project was curated by Melanie Garland in collaboration with myself, Carla J. Maier, hn. Lyonga, Ingri Pavesi, Nicole Pearson, Regina Römhild, Adela Taleb, Alejandra Atalah, Paula Kaniewska, Eryn Staiblin, Flora Ohlberger (booklet translation), Imad Gebrael (poster design), Elisabeth Luggauer, and Coopdisco architects (exhibition design).
Since 2019, I have collaborated with the Museum Europäischer Kulturen – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (MEK) in both research and teaching. In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I co-convened the course Makermuseum with curator Sofia Botvinnik, which contributed to the ALL Hands on: Flechten exhibition. Through my partnership with MUA – Museo e Archivio Sinnai, the exhibition also featured a collaboration with Italian artist Catarina Meloni.
The Makeshift Europe MA project, which I co-convened in 2023 alongside MEK curators Franka Schneider and Susanne Boersma, represents a first experimental and provisional step toward problematising Europe in the MEK’s permanent exhibition. At a critical juncture of the European project—shaped by post-utopian, post-Brexit, post-pandemic, and post-colonial realities—museums like MEK must respond to these shifts. Employing applied collection research, the project transformed the MEK gallery into a laboratory for critical inquiry. Students developed new perspectives through diverse interventions from research through filmmaking to making objects. A student-led research publication is currently in preparation.
In 2016, as part of the Reinventing Learning City project, I developed a range of collaborative, multimodal outputs—including drawings, films, a quilt, and the exhibition Learning City: A Self-Portrait at Coexist Gallery, Hamilton House in Bristol.
For this project, I collaborated with Barton Hill Settlement, Countering Colston, Dhek Bhal, Easton Community Centre, Bristol Bike Project, Coexist Community Kitchen, Refugee Women of Bristol, St Mungo's, Workers' Educational Association, Wild Walks for Wellbeing, and artists Eleanor Shipman, Joff Winterhart, and Tom Stubbs, Biggerhouse Film.
In 2014, I co-curated an exhibition with Alexandra Urdea and Gabriela Nicolescu at the Constance Howard Gallery in London. This collaborative project brought together anthropologists and artists to transform the gallery into a laboratory for experimenting with "folklore." Together, we reimagined the archive as an open resource and a site of contestation.
Visitors could follow three distinct paths through the gallery space. One used archival photographs to invite a re-assembly of the archive itself. Another introduced objects that sat in tension with the idea of the archive, challenging its boundaries. A third took the folk pattern as a springboard for inventive forgeries. Through these approaches, we explored new forms of ethnographic representation and collaborative curatorial practices.
Contributions from artists and scholars—including Rebecca Miller, Oana Pârvan, Gitanjali Pyndiah, Savitri Sastravan, and Clare Stanhope—engaged with the "folkloric" as a relational terrain, opening up multisensory, multimodal, and politically ambiguous encounters with its materiality.