Neighbour - Nomad
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| free admission |
| English |
| Mechanical Arena in the Foyer |
| Part of: SPÄTI |
| Belongs to: Family Matters |
The SPÄTI at the Humboldt Forum opens every other Friday in the Grand Foyer and offers not only the obligatory drinks but also conversations and music. Here, artists provide insights into their work, DJs play new and historic tracks, and designers present innovative designs. SPÄTI is a small stage for the unfinished, unusual concepts, and unplanned encounters— no registration required and free of charge.
On January 30, poet Logan February invites you to Neighbour – Nomad: Presence Out of Place, an afternoon of readings, conversations and music with young Berlin-based voices from West and Central Africa. Interdisciplinary poet and artist hn. lyonga shares their visions of community, kitchens and care, alongside queer activist Matthew Blaise presenting the Obodo Nigeria Foundation and its artist program, all musically accompanied by DJ mokeyanju.
Participants
Logan February is a Nigerian poet and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores desire, psychospirituality, and Afro-queer identity. Their poetry collections include In The Nude (Ouida Poetry, 2019) and Mental Voodoo (Poesie Dekolonie/Engeler Verlag, 2024). Their short film, Thrall, was an official selection at the 2025 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. February received the Future Awards Africa Prize for Literature and recent fellowships from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, the Berlin Senate Department for Culture, Literaturhaus Wien, and Akademie der Künste, among others. Presently a poet-in-residence at the Humboldt Forum, Logan February lives in Berlin.
Matthew Blaise is a Nigerian human rights activist and cultural organizer, and the Executive Director of Obodo Nigeria, a youth-led arts and culture nonprofit advancing queer visibility, cultural rights, and narrative change. He is currently a Master’s student in Human Rights at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), where his research explores Human rights, queer counterpublics and nightlife in Lagos.
hn. lyonga is a writer, curator and a Human Maschine Fellow at E-Werk Lückenwalde and Akademie Der Künste, Berlin. His work gathers words, neighbours, silences. He writes for the page, ear, circle, and community that refuses erasure. He turns toward migrations. Those journeys born of dispossession and yet marked by invention that continue to shape the lives of the colonised, marginalised, and ones who endure. lyonga is a neighbor, a member of “BARAZANI.berlin – Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand”, and Field Narratives collective, where the work is remembering and refusing, where rural biographies, ancestral speech, and cross-continental intimacies find new breath.
mokeyanju (Jumoke Adeyanju) is an interdisciplinary sound artist, multilingual writer, dancer and vinyl collector and is living in Berlin. She is the founder of ‘The Poetry Meets… Series’ and hosts her own radio show “Sauti ya àkókò” on Refuge Worldwide.