Adjoa Armah Portfolio

Note to DYCP panel.

Examples of images from Saman Archive are available through the ‘Selected Images’ tab of this website. I begin this portfolio with a single page course summary of Transformative Study, a writing commission that outlines my pedagogical approach, and a key lecture. After this I include examples of performance, writing, happenings, and insight into relevant work in development.

Transformative Study- A Syllabus

Transformative Study: A Syllabus

Commissioned by Black Quantum Futurism as part of an editorial project on ‘Survivance’ between e-flux Architecture and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In this piece of writing I take an alternative approach to syllabus building, exploring it in relation to my concerns with narrative and archival practice.

Can a Spiral Make the World Otherwise

Presented as part of the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design BA Fine Art Critical Studies programme in February 2021, this lecture outlines some of of my key concerns about pedagogical form and its relationship to practice.

Lecture Synopsis -

Taking my practice-based research, ‘Meeting Saman: On study with –graphy and narrative form in/as archival methodology’, as a point of departure, this lecture will present the dynamic spiral as a transformative form. Through a series of artistic and cultural examples, I will present an argument for the world(un)making potential of the spiral, particularly in its relevance for various movements for justice, freedom, and healing. Drawing theoretically from literary studies, Black geographies, anthropology, indigenous North American cosmology, African folklore, and science and technology studies, I question how the dynamism of the spiral informs questions of method and attachments to disciplinarity.

And the tears came

MAP Magazine, 2020.

609 words

This piece is excerpted from I know you’re you but can’t we just try to be me sometimes? In this section I attend to the plot to make all space free space in abolitionist geographies, exploring the position of dreamwork in this plot. This is folded into my navigation of my ancestral village, learning about my Abusua (matrilineal clan), and documenting households that are part of my clan. Eventually the clans totemic animal, the leopard, becomes a guide in my own plotting.

Fragments of this larger work are being developed in my current experimentation with sound and installation at Gasworks.

Medium x 6

Excerpt of a story presented as part of performance lectures at Ruskin School of Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and Royal College of Art, 2018 - ongoing.

This story is also excerpted from I know you’re you but can’t we just try to be me sometimes? This section focusses on my relationship with a traditional priest who once told me I should have been a powerful medium. In it I begin to take a narrative approach to exploring the various meanings of the word medium across artistic and spiritual realms. Through encounters with deities, participation in rituals, and receiving divinations, I articulate my relationship to African spiritual practice. Fragments of this story are being developed in my current experimentation with sound and installation at Gasworks.

Please see below for additional information/references for the direction this project is being developed in.

Wontumi Ntaaki

Documentation of curated event, 2018. Movie Magic, Accra.

This event was a response to the emergence of the secret as a central concern of the photographers I collect from. With many understanding themselves as the keepers of the secrets of others, my possession of these negatives means that this responsibility falls to me. Considering what it meant to accumulate other peoples secrets as material, I programmed a series of screenings and conversations in a movie house. Ghanaian movie houses have seedy reputations. Spaces where it is common for clients to take sex workers and for young couples to turn to in search of affordable privacy, these movie houses are ubiquitous, commonly known but unspoken. Across the 5 rooms of Movie Magic, I invited an audience to speculate about the secret as material.

Clean Hearts, Settled Spirits, Pure Intentions

Documentation of performance as part of Flight Mode, Royal College of Art, 2018. Asylum, London.

This performance was a response to a single image in Saman Archive. Through this image I explored my shifting relationship to the archive and what this meant for my status as a researcher. Presented as assemblage of conversation fragments, field notes, poems, and quotations from key thinkers, I ask myself, is my heart clean?

Home is…

Documentation of performance for Limbo Accra, 2018. Accra.

Limbo is spatial art platform documenting the incomplete architecture of Accra. This performance responded to these structures through my own experience building family homes in Accra and Apam. This performance folded my experiences with architecture into a work of the same title published in Niijournal(III: Family Ties).