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Libraries and Counterpropaganda

In association with OCA, we invite you to a two-day event that surveys a rich and interconnected set of themes centring knowledge dissemination as subversion and resistance against hegemonic value systems. During the events, Ethel-Ruth Tawe, Inem Richardson and Neema Githere will respectively share ideas exploring historical research with the present, coloniality and digitality, and experiments that shift accepted reality. This event is curated by Piniel Demisse, as part of her one-year position at OCA, which is supported by Arts Council Norway.

🗓️ September 26, 2026
🕛 17:00
📍 Kunsthall Oslo, Kjølberggata 21
17:00 Doors open
17:30 Lecture and Q&A w/ Inem Richardsom
18:30 Performance lecture by Neema Githere
19:00 Open gaming/listening session with Ethel-Ruth Tawe / Contemporary And (C&)

🗓️ September 27, 2026
🕛 12:00
📍 OCA Library,Wergelandsveien 17
12:00 Open library at OCA with Piniel Demisse and Ethel-Ruth Tawe

For many, libraries are associated with power structures that are visible in the built environment or subversive with supposed neutral frameworks of knowledge. In this programme, we introduce concepts that push back against problematic hierarchies embedded within conventional collections, classification and information systems. In the age of Big Data and AI, this approach includes the digital realm, as we confront algorithmic ahistoricity and distortion, and highlight decanonising digital methodologies and re-indigenisation of technology. We centre counter-hegemonic actions that turn resistance into organized political consciousness. This edition is intended to incite critical historical analysis to facilitate alternative narratives of knowing and being. Understanding history as something unfinished and dynamic, that allows us to consciously transform our realities and not accept it as a fixed fate.

We have invited Contemporary And (C&) to install a selection of their mobile reading room the C & Center of Unfinished Business, at OCA’s library, curated by Ethel-Ruth Tawe, the Editor-in-Chief at C& Magazine. The reading room explores the countless ways colonialism’s unfinished business continues to reverberate today. In a world where our relations are increasingly mediated through the lens of technology, the newest installation at the OCA Library seeks to probe and decode entanglements between digitality, coloniality, indigeneity and Blackness.

The reading room, titled counter_programming, leads with the prompts: How can hybrid libraries defy algorithmic logics of surveillance and classification? How might they offer forms of restitution by troubling static views of data and time? These questions are engaged through a curated collection of books, sounds, games, citations, and most notably a C& Cyclopedia station. Beyond a search tool, the C& Cyclopedia is an expansive digital knowledge platform mapping new epistemologies, rooted in multiplicity, unfinished stories, and transformative connections. Excerpts drawn from its online tag ‘Conscious Codes’ punctuate the physical space as an enactment of the Cyclopedia’s own rethinking of taxonomies and archival resurfacing techniques. The binaries of physical vs digital, speculative vs non-fiction, social vs parasocial are collapsed and complicated here. The reading room becomes a testing ground for experimentation, in-person activations, and listening sessions through the materials and encounters it hosts.

During the event on the 26th, Ethel will facilitate an open gaming and listening session with selected materials from the reading room. One being Warpmode: a conceptual card game and thought experiment created by artist Jazsalyn to stimulate conversations and shift accepted reality through black Metatheories. In the game, players draw cards and respond to existential prompts to reconfigure Black social and theoretical frameworks.

To ground in a prevailing example of critical pedagogy and reflective action we are joined by Inem Richardson, a cultural worker and educator from the Thomas Sankara Center for African Liberation and Unity in Burkina Faso and Niger. By combining historical research with the present, Inem’s work explores what alternatives could be possible for the future. She will lead us through the current anti-imperialist struggles in Burkina Faso and the broader Sahel region as well draw on the importance of knowledge dissemination as counter-hegemonic act against dominant and distorted consensus.

As society increasingly becomes acquiescent towards generative AI, techno-chauvinism and informed by algorithmic narratives, we turn our attention towards Afropresentism as a tool to re-indigenize technology. Coined by Neema Githere in 2017, Afropresentism is a “a genre fusing archival, documentary, and fine arts on and through new media in the expression of an Afrofuturist lived reality”. During the event Neema Githere will transact a performance lecture evolving permutations of their essay “Afropresentism: Quotidien Rituals for Quotidien Wounds” to be published in Bloomsbury UK’s “Black Feminist Theories: Transnational Perspectives” textbook (2026). In the essay, Githere emphasizes that colonialism itself can be understood as a technology; or rather a sum of technologies. They propose Afropresentism as an indigenous technology of repair, re-memory and re-pacing.

On the Sunday 27th the OCA Library will be open to the public so you can explore the C & Center of Unfinished Business installation on your own.

Ethel Ruth Tawe

Artist and (re)searcher, editor-in-chief at Contemporary And (C&) Magazine

Ethel Tawe 2 copy 2

Ethel Ruth Tawe (b. Yaoundé, Cameroon) is an antidisciplinary artist and (re)searcher exploring memory in Africa and its diaspora. Image-making, storytelling, and time-travelling compose the framework of her inquiry. From photography, collage, and text, to moving image, installation and other time-based media, Tawe examines culture and technology often from a speculative lens. She is currently Editor-in-Chief at Contemporary And (C&) Magazine.

Contemporary And (C&) is a dynamic platform for reflecting on and connecting ideas and discourses on contemporary visual arts. The C& Center of Unfinished Business is a reading room that offers an extraordinary, sometimes disconcerting selection of books connected to the topic of colonialism in various ways – from German colonization to Congolese fashion to twenty-first-century capital markets, it stretches into many different areas affected. Launched in 2017, the reading room has travelled and connected in various ways with institutions from Cincinnati to Hong Kong, via Berlin, Vienna, Toulouse, Athens, Kassel, and New York. The newest installation is curated by the C& Editor-in-Chief Ethel-Ruth Tawe.

Inem Richardson

Journalist and president of Centre Thomas Sankara Pour La Libération et L’Unité Africain

IMG 3280

Inem Richardson is the president and co-founder of the Thomas Sankara Centre, Pan-African libraries and political education centre based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and Niamey, Niger. The centers house classic texts on African history, feminism in the Global South and global anti-colonial struggles. Inemesit is a journalist covering the Alliance of Sahel States and other Pan-African anti-imperialist movements and struggles. She is also a member of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party and the All-African Women’s Revolutionary Union. Her organizing work has taken her to the Garifuna communities of the Honduran coast, to the Zapatista caracoles of Chiapas, Mexico, and to the revolutionary island of Cuba.

Neema Githere

Writer, curator and guerrilla theorist

Githere Neema width 800

Neema Githere Sïphone (b. Nairobi, Kenya) is a writer, curator, and guerrilla theorist whose curatorial and research practice examines the #digitaldiaspora and networked repair through cyber-cartography, with a focus on how descendants of exile can invoke somatic attunement amidst systematized algorithmic displacement. They are the founder and lead artist at Studio Nkisi, a relational architecture practice that produces socio-spatial interventions rooted in Afropresentism — a term/genre coined by Githere in 2017.

Her work routes decanonising digital methodologies, collective archiving, and re-indigenisation through participatory and socially engaged formats. She has been building a research-based embodiment practice since 2016, and has embarked on research pilgrimages to over 30 countries researching Black networked culture(s) and wide-webbed-world(s). Githere has performed, lectured and consulted at a range of educational and cultural institutions including Afrotectopia, Princeton University, the National Museum of Qatar, Microsoft, and Twitter. Githere was one of the co-curators of transmediale’s 2026 edition, «By the Mango Belt and Tamarind Road: Compassing, Protocoling, Metaphoring» alongside Juan Pablo García Sossa. In January 2026, ArtForum listed the pair’s co-curation as one of 2026’s festivals “likely to change the trajectory of contemporary art and art history.”

Libraries and Counterpropaganda

In association with OCA, we invite you to a two-day event that surveys a rich and interconnected set of themes centring knowledge dissemination as subversion and resistance against hegemonic value systems. During the events, Ethel-Ruth Tawe, Inem Richardson and Neema Githere will respectively share ideas exploring historical research with the present, coloniality and digitality, and experiments that shift accepted reality. This event is curated by Piniel Demisse, as part of her one-year position at OCA, which is supported by Arts Council Norway.

🗓️ September 26, 2026
🕛 17:00
📍 Kunsthall Oslo, Kjølberggata 21
17:00 Doors open
17:30 Lecture and Q&A w/ Inem Richardsom
18:30 Performance lecture by Neema Githere
19:00 Open gaming/listening session with Ethel-Ruth Tawe / Contemporary And (C&)

🗓️ September 27, 2026
🕛 12:00
📍 OCA Library,Wergelandsveien 17
12:00 Open library at OCA with Piniel Demisse and Ethel-Ruth Tawe

For many, libraries are associated with power structures that are visible in the built environment or subversive with supposed neutral frameworks of knowledge. In this programme, we introduce concepts that push back against problematic hierarchies embedded within conventional collections, classification and information systems. In the age of Big Data and AI, this approach includes the digital realm, as we confront algorithmic ahistoricity and distortion, and highlight decanonising digital methodologies and re-indigenisation of technology. We centre counter-hegemonic actions that turn resistance into organized political consciousness. This edition is intended to incite critical historical analysis to facilitate alternative narratives of knowing and being. Understanding history as something unfinished and dynamic, that allows us to consciously transform our realities and not accept it as a fixed fate.

We have invited Contemporary And (C&) to install a selection of their mobile reading room the C & Center of Unfinished Business, at OCA’s library, curated by Ethel-Ruth Tawe, the Editor-in-Chief at C& Magazine. The reading room explores the countless ways colonialism’s unfinished business continues to reverberate today. In a world where our relations are increasingly mediated through the lens of technology, the newest installation at the OCA Library seeks to probe and decode entanglements between digitality, coloniality, indigeneity and Blackness.

The reading room, titled counter_programming, leads with the prompts: How can hybrid libraries defy algorithmic logics of surveillance and classification? How might they offer forms of restitution by troubling static views of data and time? These questions are engaged through a curated collection of books, sounds, games, citations, and most notably a C& Cyclopedia station. Beyond a search tool, the C& Cyclopedia is an expansive digital knowledge platform mapping new epistemologies, rooted in multiplicity, unfinished stories, and transformative connections. Excerpts drawn from its online tag ‘Conscious Codes’ punctuate the physical space as an enactment of the Cyclopedia’s own rethinking of taxonomies and archival resurfacing techniques. The binaries of physical vs digital, speculative vs non-fiction, social vs parasocial are collapsed and complicated here. The reading room becomes a testing ground for experimentation, in-person activations, and listening sessions through the materials and encounters it hosts.

During the event on the 26th, Ethel will facilitate an open gaming and listening session with selected materials from the reading room. One being Warpmode: a conceptual card game and thought experiment created by artist Jazsalyn to stimulate conversations and shift accepted reality through black Metatheories. In the game, players draw cards and respond to existential prompts to reconfigure Black social and theoretical frameworks.

To ground in a prevailing example of critical pedagogy and reflective action we are joined by Inem Richardson, a cultural worker and educator from the Thomas Sankara Center for African Liberation and Unity in Burkina Faso and Niger. By combining historical research with the present, Inem’s work explores what alternatives could be possible for the future. She will lead us through the current anti-imperialist struggles in Burkina Faso and the broader Sahel region as well draw on the importance of knowledge dissemination as counter-hegemonic act against dominant and distorted consensus.

As society increasingly becomes acquiescent towards generative AI, techno-chauvinism and informed by algorithmic narratives, we turn our attention towards Afropresentism as a tool to re-indigenize technology. Coined by Neema Githere in 2017, Afropresentism is a “a genre fusing archival, documentary, and fine arts on and through new media in the expression of an Afrofuturist lived reality”. During the event Neema Githere will transact a performance lecture evolving permutations of their essay “Afropresentism: Quotidien Rituals for Quotidien Wounds” to be published in Bloomsbury UK’s “Black Feminist Theories: Transnational Perspectives” textbook (2026). In the essay, Githere emphasizes that colonialism itself can be understood as a technology; or rather a sum of technologies. They propose Afropresentism as an indigenous technology of repair, re-memory and re-pacing.

On the Sunday 27th the OCA Library will be open to the public so you can explore the C & Center of Unfinished Business installation on your own.

Ethel Ruth Tawe

Artist and (re)searcher, editor-in-chief at Contemporary And (C&) Magazine

Ethel Tawe 2 copy 2

Ethel Ruth Tawe (b. Yaoundé, Cameroon) is an antidisciplinary artist and (re)searcher exploring memory in Africa and its diaspora. Image-making, storytelling, and time-travelling compose the framework of her inquiry. From photography, collage, and text, to moving image, installation and other time-based media, Tawe examines culture and technology often from a speculative lens. She is currently Editor-in-Chief at Contemporary And (C&) Magazine.

Contemporary And (C&) is a dynamic platform for reflecting on and connecting ideas and discourses on contemporary visual arts. The C& Center of Unfinished Business is a reading room that offers an extraordinary, sometimes disconcerting selection of books connected to the topic of colonialism in various ways – from German colonization to Congolese fashion to twenty-first-century capital markets, it stretches into many different areas affected. Launched in 2017, the reading room has travelled and connected in various ways with institutions from Cincinnati to Hong Kong, via Berlin, Vienna, Toulouse, Athens, Kassel, and New York. The newest installation is curated by the C& Editor-in-Chief Ethel-Ruth Tawe.

Inem Richardson

Journalist and president of Centre Thomas Sankara Pour La Libération et L’Unité Africain

IMG 3280

Inem Richardson is the president and co-founder of the Thomas Sankara Centre, Pan-African libraries and political education centre based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and Niamey, Niger. The centers house classic texts on African history, feminism in the Global South and global anti-colonial struggles. Inemesit is a journalist covering the Alliance of Sahel States and other Pan-African anti-imperialist movements and struggles. She is also a member of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party and the All-African Women’s Revolutionary Union. Her organizing work has taken her to the Garifuna communities of the Honduran coast, to the Zapatista caracoles of Chiapas, Mexico, and to the revolutionary island of Cuba.

Neema Githere

Writer, curator and guerrilla theorist

Githere Neema width 800

Neema Githere Sïphone (b. Nairobi, Kenya) is a writer, curator, and guerrilla theorist whose curatorial and research practice examines the #digitaldiaspora and networked repair through cyber-cartography, with a focus on how descendants of exile can invoke somatic attunement amidst systematized algorithmic displacement. They are the founder and lead artist at Studio Nkisi, a relational architecture practice that produces socio-spatial interventions rooted in Afropresentism — a term/genre coined by Githere in 2017.

Her work routes decanonising digital methodologies, collective archiving, and re-indigenisation through participatory and socially engaged formats. She has been building a research-based embodiment practice since 2016, and has embarked on research pilgrimages to over 30 countries researching Black networked culture(s) and wide-webbed-world(s). Githere has performed, lectured and consulted at a range of educational and cultural institutions including Afrotectopia, Princeton University, the National Museum of Qatar, Microsoft, and Twitter. Githere was one of the co-curators of transmediale’s 2026 edition, «By the Mango Belt and Tamarind Road: Compassing, Protocoling, Metaphoring» alongside Juan Pablo García Sossa. In January 2026, ArtForum listed the pair’s co-curation as one of 2026’s festivals “likely to change the trajectory of contemporary art and art history.”