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Apr 11, 2023 · Megan Hoetger


Curatorial note




For Edition IX – Bodies and Technologies the grassroots media collective Black Speaks Back was invited to create a new film and podcast project, which has taken the title Zwarte Ibis: The Spirit of Black Intimacies. Built upon an interview-based creative methodology called the ‘Kitchen Table Talk’ method, the project tackles issues of hyper-sexualisation, cultural fragmentation and collective remembrance at the boundaries between intimacy and sexuality, freedom and conditioning, and myth and reality.

On Creative Methodologies

With the Zwarte Ibis project, Black Speaks Back (BSB) continues their work of establishing different creative methodologies, which can move us away from research and production structures that dehumanize and oppress. By ‘creative methodologies’ they mean to propose forms of research that are not extracitivist but, instead, embedded, engaged and built upon principles of trust and reciprocity. Through an intersectional and decolonial approach, they seek to broaden the notion of what intimacy is, and, within their communities, to co-create modes of being where intimacy and vulnerability are at the center of how Black people can show up for and with each other.

Black Life in the Netherlands

Zwarte Ibis is an exploration of different kinds of non-sexual intimacies – with self or across generations, for instance – within African and African diasporic communities around the Netherlands, taking the Amsterdam Bijlmer area as a symbolic center of Black life. With the project, BSB shines light on the interior lives of project participants and collaborators, starting (critical) conversations around intimacy that can speak to struggles in the public domain but also go beyond them. Legacies of colonialism impact both the public and private life of Black people, and most often it is the public life that becomes hyper-visibilized. Movements like BLM alongside local activist initiatives in the Netherlands (such as Nederland Wordt Beter and The Black Archives) have brought much-needed attention to topics of police brutality, as well as racism in education, the labor market, housing and health care. This work is crucial. With Zwarte Ibis, though, BSB wants to offer something back to their local communities that reflects not (or not only) a hyper-visibilized public life but, also, the vulnerability and resilience (and humor and joy and grief and anger) flowing through private conversations. These are precisely the perspectives that the group feel are being missed in most frameworks for diversity and inclusion.

The Space of Intimacy

A study of intimacy opens space to share and to talk with each other about the different layers of intergenerational trauma that are felt, as well as the strategies for processing these traumas that different members of the community have developed. Such a space reveals the innovation behind how Black individuals / families / communities understand the past, face the present and dream toward the future, organizing themselves – albeit in ways less visible for a predominantly white gaze – outside of normative structures of intimacy through extended families, kinship networks and communities of solidarity across ethinic divides. Zwarte Ibis looks to vocalize these kinds of Black experiences, centering them in the pursuit of healing and of creating the conditions for Black people to be able to show up as full persons in a world that usually does not grant them the status of full and deserving people.


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About Black Speaks Back

Black Speaks Back (est. 2016, Brussels. Based in Amsterdam) is a Belgo-Dutch grassroots media platform for multidimensional Black narratives. The group creates platforms for panels, poetry and politics of pleasure while also making short films and videos including the world’s first Afrofuturistic musical EUphoria (2018). They also facilitate conversations related to Blackness in the Low Countries and provide resources for young and/or upcoming experimental writers, filmmakers and podcasters towards building powerful Afro-European futures. The Zwarte Ibis project is led by Chris (Ci) Rickets, Emma-Lee Amponsah, Alexine Gabriela, Nohely Koeyers, and Smita James.

Ci is an Amsterdam-based audio-digital artist whose work as a music producer encompasses many genres in creating songs, recording, mixing, producing and live (DJ) performing. Ci partners with spoken word artist James to form Poetronic, exploring combinations of spoken word with electronic beats.

Amponsah is a researcher, writer, and creative producer. Her work is centered around matters related to africological blackness and cultural production in/with media and technology. Drawing on subversive methodologies she seeks to challenge hegemonic, Eurocentric, and individualistic forms of knowledge and art production. Besides being involved in the Zwarte Ibis project, she is a fellow (2023) at the racism and technology center in Amsterdam, where she works on a creative project on Black digital intimacies.

Gabriela (she/her & they/them) is a queer Afro-Caribbean femme, community organiser and researcher based in Amsterdam and interested in decolonial and intersectional perspectives on Blackness. She is co-founder of the Caribbean collective 6 ISLANDS and a grassroots archivist at the Black Archives in Amsterdam focussing on Black history in the Dutch context.

Koeyers (b. 1991, Curaçao) is a creative writer and storyteller. Through poetry and prose, photography and illustration, she tells stories as a form of expression and which people can relate to. She has worked on various film and video productions, among which Black Speaks Backs's EUphoria (2018), as a screenwriter. She is currently part of the creative studio Half & Half which has worked on video projects for Kunstinstituut Melly and Acne Studios. Nohely currently resides in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

James is a rhythmic reasoner who spins her words around love, thunder and other colli- sions, and is driven by what we dream with our eyes open and taste with our mouths shut. She turns stages into living rooms and minds into arenas. Coming up in the Roots & Routes network, her words have in recent years graced the stages of RE:Definition, Cinnamon Wednesday and the Black Magic Woman festival.


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For more information, visit the Black Speaks Back website here. Or, follow them on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram to stay up-to-date on their current and ongoing activities.