Thinking with the Sunken Tusks

Name: Thinking with the Sunken Tusks
Start: 2026-05-30T13:00:00+02:00
End: 2026-05-30T19:00:00+02:00
Location: Astrid Noacks Atelier

Schedule

Sat May 30 2026 at 01:00 pm to 07:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Astrid Noacks Atelier | Copenhagen , SK

Join us on Saturday, May 30 (13.00–19.00) for the event “Thinking with the Sunken Tusks” curated by roda – soft water on hard stone (Katarina Stenbeck & Carla Zaccagnini) in conjunction with Jonelle Twum’s exhibition “In the wake of waiting, the sea remembers” in ANA.

Thinking with the Sunken Tusks gathers artists and theorists to engage in stories unfolding from two elephant tusks submerged in the ocean for more than two centuries. These and another 820 tusks were being transported from London to Bombay onboard an English East India ship when they sank in the Cape Verdean archipelago in 1743. Corroded by salt water, they are now exhibited in the Museum of the Sea in Mindelo. What stories might these tusks hold, which worlds and times might they announce? Through lectures, performances and conversations this one-day event will speculate on human and more-than-human entanglements and colonial histories of the sea. As the current hegemony of capitalist modernity is rapidly decreasing the possibilities for life, this day is dedicated to thinking with two elephant tusks to engage in our collective colonial histories and imagine other ways of being.

The event is free but registration appreciated: [email protected]

PROGRAMME
13–13:15 Katarina Stenbeck & Carla Zaccagnini, Introduction

13:15–14:00 Jonelle Twum, On Hold
A performance lecture that listens to the frequencies of waiting in the wake, exploring how it is differentially structured within Black subjectivities through the afterlives of slavery and coloniality, and attending to potential breaks within the archive.

14:15–15:00 Marie-Louise Richards, Fugitive Songs
Fugitive songs offer a meditation reflecting on how memory is not held in objects alone, but in material, relational, and environmental processes, inviting reflections on forms of knowledge that resist capture.

15:15–16:00 Oyindamola (Fakeye) Faithful, What the Tusk Cannot Say
This workshop examines the separation of elephant tusks from the bodies and histories they once formed part of. Drawing on Yoruba Oríkì, praise poetry that accumulates names, attributes, and relations, the workshop contrasts a system that insists on full recognition with colonial and museum practices that isolate and reduce. Beginning from the proverb that “an elephant cannot be partially seen,” the project traces how the tusk shifts from living extension to extracted object. It asks what is lost when a layered, relational archive is replaced by a singular form, and what it means to attempt to reunite them through language.

16:15–17:00 Gene Ray, Scatter Patterns: Ghost Elephants, Salvage Commonism and the Wreck of Modernity
Meditating on the sunken tusks recovered from the 1743 wreck of the Princess Louisa, this talk considers various thought-images evoking socio-ecological polycrisis in late capitalist modernity. We have learned to imagine “wreckage piled on wreckage” (Benjamin), “capitalist ruins” (Tsing) and, this year, “ghost elephants” (Herzog). Perhaps we might also think of late modernity itself, all acceleration and flow, as a speeding wreck breaking up in time-history, scattering fragments of itself across the space of lands and waters. “Salvage commonism” would then be the local work of recovering anything useful to the rescue of bioplurality and planetary livability.

17:15–18:00 Adjoa Armah, White Elephant/Beached Whale: On Impossible Metaphors and the Architectures of Ruination
In this lecture performance, Adjoa Armah stages a meeting between two families of great mammals, a herd of elephants and a pod of beached whales. Here, between worlds, sea and land, life and mass death, majestic creatures atop minuscule grains of sand, Armah asks that we think differently about encounter. From an unnamed littoral, Armah reflects on the utility and impossibility of metaphors, thinking with the White Elephant metaphor in architecture, an exceptionally expensive structure that provides little value, and proposing the Beached Whale as a metaphor for architectures only thinkable as assets in the ruination of racial capitalism: from former slave forts to coastal developments only made possible through mass eviction. Engaging with the sublime, as unthinkable horror and indescribable beauty, this lecture performance collapses the distinction between the circulations that sustain animal bodies, knowledge economies, and financial systems.

18:15–18:45 Neo Muyanga, Revolting Music - a Brief Survey of the
Songs that Liberated South Africa
This lecture performance attempts to reimagine some of the struggle songs activist South Africans chanted and sang collectively as an expression of refusal against the system of apartheid during the era of the states of emergency, 1985-1990.

BIOS
Adjoa Armah is an artist, educator, and writer. Her work spans archive-making, photography, sculpture, installation, performance, and sound. Her practice meditates on memory and the layered realities inscribed on land and carried within bodies. Drawing on personal and collective histories, she navigates the intersections of grief, cultural memory, and resilience; particularly as they emerge within African diasporic and post-colonial contexts. By exploring how identity is metabolised generationally and reconstituted in response to shifting cultural conditions, Armah mines the circumstances under which political desires and promise are navigated. She is interested in how one may engage asymmetric knowledge systems and what a Black descriptive and inscriptive science could entail as a formal and critical provocation. Key amongst the questions of her practice is, how can Black spatiotemporal consciousness be articulated and Black geographies staged?
Oyindamola (Fakeye) Faithful is a Learning and Participation Producer, Curator and Consultant working to improve cross cultural collaboration, champion wellbeing through the arts and improve learning through aesthetic education. Her practice centres embodied and participatory art experiences, place based pedagogy and creative health practices. Oyindamola is the Director of the Àsìkò Art School, a roving Pan-African residency and learning programme, and Associate Executive Director of the Global Arts in Medicine Fellowship, a virtual training program for art and healthcare practitioners.

Neo Muyanga is a composer, musician, artist and philosopher. His research and performance interests include the aesthetics of protest song, opera within the black community in South Africa and more broadly the history of musical story-telling in the global south. He has composed chamber operas, music plays and works with a large, mixed ensemble using a syncretic mesh of genres, including those used in traditional Basotho and Isizulu war and praise song, free jazz and western baroque music.
Gene Ray is a teacher and writer working at the intersections of art, critical theory and planetary politics. He is author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palgrave Macmillan 2005, 2010), After the Holocene: Planetary Politics for Commoners (Autonomedia, 2024) and Making Now-Time: Essays on Art & Politics (MayFly, forthcoming 2026).
Marie-Louise Richards' work traverses art, architecture, social practice, and writing. She is the founder and leader of the experimental platform and art project Reconstructions –operating as a postmasters-course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her work examines the reconstructions of "black feminist spatial futures," and by centering affect, labor and care her practice is largely relational and process-based.
Jonelle Twum is an artist and filmmaker working across film, installation, sound, and text. Her practice engages migration, memory, and the body through Black feminist thought and the rhythms of the everyday. Moving between fiction and memory, she uses speculation, silence, and abstraction to attend to the obscured. Language operates as a form of protection, resisting the full legibility of Black life within systems of surveillance and consumption.
roda – soft water on hard stone is a curatorial programme generating conversations with artists and thinkers that unfold in various formats on three continents and the ocean in between. In the face of accelerating interlaced crises birthed by colonial, capitalist and extractivist logics, roda – soft water on hard stone searches for ways to develop sensibili-ties of co-existence across human and more-than-human worlds that can guide us to-wards better ways of living, learning, making and believing. www.roda-softwateronhardstone.org. roda – soft water on hard stone is funded by the Bikuben Foundation.