The Black Archives

This seminar series is part of “A Season of Black Study” and curated by the research project FutureBrownSpace, an initiative of Afro-Diasporic practitioners, based in Black Studies, dedicated to creating nourishing spaces for people of the global majority to develop their projects (of art, of being, of activism or community) and for anyone who wishes to appreciate, and join in its significance for a more coalitional, less neo-colonial future; whether your access to Black Study is through the brown, the decolonial, the neurodivergent, whether you find black affinities with your class struggle, gender battles or variously abled superpowers, if you can move with it, tremble with it, let it break you out of abstraction and shake some non-censored sense into you, then you can be with us in Black Study.

This Season brings together artists, researchers and organizers from Sweden, performance art and theatre from South Africa, and scholars from the U.S, to share the interdisciplinary, aesthetic and transcultural nature of black study.

The Black Archives

Jonelle Twum (Black Archive Sweden), 
Israa Elkogali Häggström (Filmaker) on Healing the Sudanese Archive at Etnografiska Museet and Levi Appleton on Black Trans Archives (Uppsala University)
Jonelle Twum is a filmmaker, artistic director, researcher, and producer who works using archives and film to explore the perspectives and the narratives of minor/disregarded/unacknowledged figures. She often explores conditions of in/visibility, memory, and historiography from a Black feminist perspective. Twum is the founder of Black Archives Sweden, a contemporary archive with starting point in Afro-Swedish experiences.

Issraa Elkogali Häggström is an award winning Sudanese-Swedish writer and filmmaker with an MFA in Film from Boston University. Her debut documentary short, IN SEARCH OF HIP HOP (Official selection IFFR and DIFF 2013) was shown in more than 14 countries and purchased by BBC Arabic. Executive producer and screenwriter of the award winning short fiction film A HANDFUL OF DATES (2020), and Co-Producer of  feature film Goodbye Julia (2023), Issraa is currently developing multilingual feature length film projects. Furthermore Issraa has experience with creating award winning plays, films and art installations as a director, producer, and writer, in Sweden, Norway, the UK, USA, Egypt and Sudan. 

Levi Appleton is an artist/activist/organizer who recently completed his Masters in Gender Studies at Uppsala University with a thesis exploring the trans black archive as a restorative tool for the future.

Read more about the research project: FutureBrownSpace

Read more about the Seminar serie: A Season of Black study