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A Conversation with Melody Howse and Nnenna Onuoha
Melody Howse (MPI) in Conversation with Nnenna Onuoha (University of Potsdam/Harvard University) on Black Art in Berlin Melody Howse is research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Berlin, where she joined the Department ‘Anthropology of Politics and Governance’ in January 2024. She holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Leipzig University, Germany, which she completed in 2023. She received her MA in Visual and Media Anthropology from the Freie Universität Berlin and completed a BA in visual communications from the Surrey Institute of Art and Design.
Howse’s postdoctoral research focuses on racialized experience in Europe, and specifically on the Black experience in Germany. This project takes multiple positions – entering the experience via the body, space, images, and sound – in an endeavor to understand how race becomes articulated within the social spaces of cities and within the imaginaries of their inhabitants. The community-based project uses visual, sonic, and collaborative research methods to produce a critical phenomenology of the Black experience in Berlin. Highlighting the counter practices and counter narratives which are developed and honed within the Black diaspora, Howse’s work engages extensively with Black diaspora practices of ‘Refusal’ to widen the vocabulary of how Black experience is both understood and theorized.
Nnenna Onuoha is a Ghanaian-Nigerian researcher, filmmaker and visual artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her research explores monumental silences surrounding the histories and afterlives of colonialism across West Africa, Europe and the United States, asking How do we remember, which pasts do we choose to perform, and why? Her work has shown at the Galerie im Turm, ACUD Galerie, the Zitadelle Spandau Museum, the Museum of Modern Art Shanghai, and the Johannesburg Art Gallery among others. And she has published chapters in: “Doing Diversity in Museums and Heritage: A Berlin Ethnography,” “Censored? Conflicting Concepts of Cultural Heritage,” and “Owned by Others: A Map to Possession Island.” She is recipient of a 2023-4 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, a 2023 Flaherty Film Seminar Fellowship, and the 2023 Amadeu Antonio Foundation Prize. Nnenna is currently a binational doctoral researcher in Media Anthropology at Harvard University and Global History at the University of Potsdam, and a 2024-5 Krupp Foundation Dissertation Fellow