Yaa Addae

London! It’s Libra SZN, cost of living is going wild and it’s cold outside in more ways than one. What better time to contemplate the care we need to undo structural lovelesness? Join me over the next month for Open Heart Clinic, an experiential research workshop series on the politics of love. October 21st - Opening Dinner @ustwo (FREE) October 27th - Grounding Practice: Restorative Love Economics @somersethousestudios November 12th - Care Histories/Care Futures @queerbritain (FREE) Additional details and registration in my bio! Spaces are limited to allow for engagement 🫶🏾 Logo + Poster Design @yadichinma ❤️‍🔥 Catering by @sisterwomanvegan 🍽 Supported by @aceagrams

The Unseen Guests Digital Pavilion is now live and along with it, my interactive essay : As Above/So Below. I’ve been deep in this research spiral exploring the relationship between colonial cartographies and internet infrastructure, and what has surfaced is some possibilities for imagining what more liberatory networked practices might look like. The essay exists in two parts, Side A and Side B inspired by the structure of cassettes/records with an ‘intermission’ in the form of a digital meditation to encourage awareness of who/what makes our virtual encounters possible. I’m grateful for the numerous artists who informed this, the citations are plenty (check the are.na) but to name a few @uzzzoma ,@aliceyuanzhang , @arayveeohen and Tabita Rezaire especially 🦋 A big heartfelt thank you to @iniva_arts for commissioning this, Renee Mbokoya and @johnimonlydancingagain for the guidance, @_leannepetersen_ for producing the project and @erre.ene.erre for coding the site and bringing my words to life spatially. Link in my bio to both the interactive and static versions of the piece for reading! Please do play with/ feel through/ read the interactive version but it is only viewable on a desktop and requires patience and presence on your end - if you’re up for it, use the video as a guide (excuse any glitches 🫶🏾) oh, and allow pop-ups for the website ✨

I turned 29 and had a dinner party dedicated to beauty as a method. Beauty as in “Attentiveness whenever possible to a kind of aesthetic that escaped violence whenever possible” (Christina Sharpe) Beauty as in “a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure…a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.” (Saidiya Hartman) Beauty as in “the unique offerings we came to share with the universe” (Miyuki Baker) Beauty as in I create the loving world that I want to see in my own communities, and though I love all things lush and leisurely, I resist the seductive capitalist vision of individual ‘soft life’ / ‘luxury’ and instead, choose to work toward a sweeter reality for all. As the child of a Libra and granddaughter of a Taurus, I am intimately familiar with the importance of beauty in an aesthetic sense - be it my Maa’s affinity for gold or my mum’s insistence of dressing up no matter what or where, the women in my family have harnessed beauty as a strategy for self-fashioning and taught me to do the same. That being said, I’ve had to confront the patriarchal and white supremacist ideals that sneak into our understanding of beauty and let them fall by the wayside, but what I’ve carried with me is the belief that I have the power to make myself anew - make *life* anew even - by focusing on what I can change. I’m thankful for coming across @zoedlg ‘s blog many years ago, and learning that the root of glamour ties the word to ‘illusion’, ‘magic’ and ‘learning’. She writes, “I’m interested in glamouring specifically as it can be understood and lived by Black queer women…glamouring as the pursuit of beauty and sweetness in spite of and from within the ruin by which we refuse to be defined; glamouring as the practice of living a life of one’s own design.” and really that’s where I’m at this year, getting clearer on my desires to shape how I design my life and cherishing the beauty that already exists all around me Thank you to my friends for celebrating me. You keep me open-hearted and I will do my best to stay that way 🤲🏾❤️‍🩹 and if you read all the way to the end, thank you for coming to my impromptu TED talk 🗣️

🗺️Sharing my last piece of writing for the year, an interview with Edward George on his latest film and ongoing accompanying exhibition, Black Atlas - on view at @the_warburg_institute until January 31st This was a really exciting one for me because Last Angel of History (1996, Black Audio Film Collective) meant a lot to my younger self and how I came to build my own research practice. We talked about his relationship to archives, protecting yourself while dealing with difficult histories and what cultural institutions can do to repair their role in colonial violence beyond inviting artists to respond to collections. Thank you to editor extraordinaire @artofetheltawe for the support 🤍 The Q&A is live on Contemporary And, and is one of their most read pieces of the year! Link to read is in my bio/ on my website writing page 🕸️ 📸 credits: Theodore Wright

🖊️🪩 Three years ago I went to my first queer strip night. Emboldened by a shot and (loving) peer encouragement, I temporarily pushed aside my self-consciousness and journeyed to Dalston on a piercingly cold December night, bundled up in way too many clothes for the shenanigans ahead. What was supposed to be a quick ‘hi and bye’ situation unravelled into the first time in a long time that I returned to my body. While awkward at first, I slowly shed layers (both figuratively and literally) and experienced the freedom of being in a space where desire outside of the male gaze was not only encouraged, but cultivated. In this personal essay for @casualreadersbookclub ‘s new literary mag, The Casual, I explore the liberatory potential of queer nightlife to expand our capacities for intimacy. I’m not exaggerating when I say that night kicked off a healing process for me in relationship to my desire / body so thank you to @fazahthemazza for bringing us all together to celebrate your birthday in this way and to @indiaindyinds and @practicalmyth for giving me space to write about it. Special shout out to Varaidzo’s amazing illustration as well and @axx.qqq for capturing the essence of that night! I love reading memoirs and personal writing but never ever (explicitly) write about myself so this is a big deal for me! Maybe I’ll do it more You can read a scan of my piece through my website or order the whole magazine through Casual Readers Book Club to read all the contributions which I highly reccomend. 📷 Slide 1 Credit: @axx.qqq 🎨 Slide 2 Illustration Credit: @practicalmyth

👻 In September, I went to Basel,Switzerland on behalf of @friezeofficial to cover the opening of ‘Ghosts: Visualizing the Supernatural’ - a survey of art exploring spirit over 250 years in Europe + North America specifically. Britain and British ghosts heavily featured in this exhibition with photographs and objects on loan from historical building and spiritual societies. I don’t think you can talk about ghosts and haunting in the Western context without seriously engaging with histories of colonialism, forced enslavement and other structural forms of harm that are swept under the rug but linger in our psyches and social fabric. This was only touched on briefly in the show but I expanded on these thoughts in my review, as well as the relationship between technological advancements and a desire to seek out the divine. Link in my bio via my website’s ’Writing section’, on Frieze’s website and will also appear in their Jan/Feb print issue 📖 Images: 1. Hamlet and His Father’s Ghost (1806), Wiliam Blake 3.Brutus and Caesar’s Ghost (1806), William Blake 5.Kleines Glasportal, Bellevue Sanatorium, Psychiatrische Anstalt by Heidi Bucher [to the right] and Untitled (I’m Turning Into a Specter Before Your Very Eyes and I’m Going to Haunt You) (1992), Glenn Ligon [ahead] Photograph credit: Ivana Kresic 7.Untitled (I’m Turning Into a Specter Before Your Very Eyes and I’m Going to Haunt You) (1992), Glenn Ligon [Close-up] 8.Rachel Whiteread (*1963) Poltergeist, 2020 Photograph credit: Ivana Kresic 9.Installation of Room3 on spirit photography photograph credit: Karen Gerig Photograph credit: Ivana Kresic

🇧🇷Muitíssimo obrigado por uma semana maravilhosa em São Paulo. I’m still processing last week and will be for some time. 4 quick and full days in São Paulo for the first BRICS conference on the restitution of stolen art, organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs x University of São Paulo and bringing together a global network of curators, art historians and legal experts. I shared research I did between 2017-2020 on Ghanaian museum history and contemporary case studies of decolonial exhibition architecture that responds to the needs of the community it intends to serve instead of mimicking inherited forms. Outside of that, It was also sweet to see some old friends and learn more about the city’s contemporary art scene. There’s so much more I want to see next time Crazy to think that words (from 5 years ago no less!) took me across the globe. Feeling especially proud of the younger version of me for believing in her ideas and being open to sharing them, something I hope to do more of now. 📝A scan of the essay that led to this is on my website under ‘Everything Passes Except the Past’ and the full book is available via Sternberg Press.

🔮January 29th, 2034      “When I first witness Toni Thomas (lovingly, nicknamed TT) in action, I am sat crosslegged on the floor and sandwiched between a boisterous toddler playing with my braids and her grandmother, propped up by a pile of cushions. On the drive to this server site  in Lewisham, I had imagined many different versions of what a data ritual might look like - and none of them involved what I arrived to : a mobile clinic outside in case you need to check your vitals, a table full of warm food for those who hadn’t eaten, and an actual garden - open every weekend and tended to by a roster of custodians from the neighbourhood.” For @journalsafar Issue 9:Protest, I had the chance to go deeper with my research into the politics of technological infrastructure and respond via speculation. My essay, Rooted Knowledge : On Community Intelligence, is a fictional newspaper article documenting a rhizomatic memory network created by a data steward in 2044 - a role which is part technologist, part healer. At a time where Big Tech dominates our collective technological imagination, I am grateful to have had the space to attempt to produce other visions of technologies that exist and draw on current case studies to create this story. I had fun dreaming up the world of Toni Thomas and her collective’s attempts at co-designing local communication systems whereby the foundational logic is one of care and reciprocity. Excitingly, this is also the first time that my writing has been translated! Very cool seeing my words in both English and Arabic. You can buy the magazine via their website or visit my website for a scanned pdf of the pages featuring my writing.

Summer, wrapped: not enough figs and could have swam more but overall, an abundance of warmth and silliness 🌅

🌊 Liverpool, the unofficial city of seagulls (truly, they run the streets!) and my paternal grandmother’s first point of entry into the U.K 🌊 Today is the 3rd anniversary of her passing, so what a coincidence and honour to have been able to give her flowers in a place that holds so much history in our family lineage as well as the larger makings of the Black diaspora. For the 2025 Liverpool Biennial, I was commisioned to respond to the theme of Bedrock, as in the sandstone which makes up the city, but also the social and historical foundations that charged what once was one of the primary port cities in Europe. Through this, I came to explore the theme ‘Grounding Connections’ - the relationships that hold us down despite the structural violence that can make loving so much harder than it needs to be. My essay begins with my grandma Veronica’s story as a nurse who migrated to the UK in the 50s to work for the National Health Service (NHS). This is a story about care, of who cares for us, of who cares for those who care for us, and how we might interrogate the care we practice with one another. It was a pleasure expanding on this theme through the lens of some of the featured artists namely Amy Claire Mills, Amber Akaunu and Widline Cadet (pictured on slide 12, 13/14 and 15) Thank you to @marieannemcquay and the wider Liverpool Biennial team for the invitation and hosting me to read my work out loud for the Curators’ Week Sector Day keynote. You can purchase the catalogue on their website or go to Liverpool to catch the city-wide exhibitions until September 14th.

Year so far dump, featuring many sweet faces (and many more in heart but not pictured because I’m allergic to my phone nowadays) 🤍☀️

Meet our first speaker for Softer Digital Futures! Yaa Addae @yaa.dae is a writer, design researcher, and participatory curator who is committed to harnessing design for healing structural wounds 🩷 They are currently 1/3rd of Future Inventions, a collective dedicated to expanding our technological imagination through study and design. Alongside this, she stewards Open Heart Clinic, an ongoing research project and programming series investigating systemic barriers to a more loving world and envisioning future care infrastructure. Previously, Yaa founded A-KRA Studio which housed The Imaginarium, a virtual residency program for Ghanaian digital artists and Decolonize The Art World, an anticolonial art history platform. Outside of their cultural work, Yaa works in healthcare tech as a researcher.