A performance unfolds a shapeshifter speaker towards the subliminal part of our exhaustion, everyday struggles and fight for a dignified life. This piece urges us to call on the power of dreaming, with sharp tenacity and unyielding imagination - until us all are free.

This sonic trance compiles glitch-y-fied conversations, recorded communiquès, poems and speeches of Djassi mixed with samples and live theremin sounds. Here through Djassi’s voice, I want to address the scarcity of hope we find ourselves to live by these days. And to find rooting on our commitments to fight fascism, and colonial-capitalism, and every violent system that is birthed or adjacent to it.

Text accompanied with live instrumentals on theremin and sound

“Diasporic Life: Black Solidarity/Towards Liberation unfolds as the second chapter of Diasporic Life. It builds on the earlier manifestation Diasporic Life: Black Togetherness as a Lingua Franca, developed with Barby Asante between London and Amsterdam. The project continues a multi-year international and interdisciplinary research process that considers the meaning, multiplicity and complexity of Black aliveness in Fortress Europe, in relation to the African continent and its many Diasporas. Diasporic Life centers the Black imaginative world and the ways it enchants everyday Black diasporic life beyond the shadow of anti-Black violence. How do “we” keep each other alive? In what ways does Diasporic Life manifest itself in visual and sonic cultures Black people make for themselves for each other? And what methodologies, dreams and processes (re)shape the practices and daily lives of Black artists, activists and cultural producers?”

At the invitation of Metro 54 iteration' of Diasporic Life: Black Solidarity / Towards Liberation, I will be conjuring a sonic trance that is both meditation, poetic recital, lecture and ritual - bringing forward the anti-colonial and revolutionary legacy of Abel Djassi (also known as Amilcar Cabral).

Performed t Metro 54, Amsterdam, Netherlands on the 17th July 2026

Thank you to Idil and Alec from Metro 54 for the support in bringing this there.


I  bring you into  a conjuring journey with Abel Djassi as our honored guide. We’ll be receptors of his word. I bring an experimental remix of his speeches, communiqués, poems, conversations between us and space for your own internal conversations with him and your comrades. I act as a mediator, a channel if you will.

Abel Djassi is a war name; a chosen name for a life dedicated to militancy for the revolution of the colonised in Guiné Bissau and Cape Verde. 

You might have heard Abel Djassi in the skin of Amílcar instead. 

Abel Djassi as the poet, the traveller, the connector that could speak to anyone. A mercurial native.

Amílcar as the comrade war theorist and strategist. 

I have seen my-selves and others evoke Cabralisms when we feel lost in community or have lost our footing, our hope amidst conflict, grief, disillusionment, exhaustion and heartbreak. Whenever I feel stuck in any of these complex feelings / sensations / emotions / situations, I go back to Djassi, to his poetry or the documentaries that have been made about him and his powerful work. Or his passionate speeches and conversations with his comrades. To remind my-selves that collective alienation is a product of  violent and oppressive structures we navigate. That conflict, the avoidance, the apathy we find in our communities are also products of the structures that socialise us and run us down. I get reminded that we need deeper footing and commitment in our movements of liberation, in the fight, and such will always be a hard work practice full of struggle, complexity and contradiction

Amílcar Cabral the great revolutionary. A man with his contradictions nevertheless. He paid attention to the contradictions of his people and expected it specially in the revolution

Amílcar as one of the leaders of PAIGC, the African party for the independence of Guiné Bissau and Cape Verde.

Djassi as the passionate warrior. A dreamer of utopias.

Amílcar as the Virgo, nature lover, gazer, agricultural engineer. A sensitive confluent with plants.

Um revoltado armado. 

His words, fight, wisdom, revolt, love for his people, the world, nature, the land continues to live today. His work and spirit will echo in your subconscious. I hope you make yourselves curious and are open to hearing from him.

Ailton Krenak who wrote ancestral future or futuro ancestral in the original Portuguese said that “we cannot surrender to collapse
Or, to the dystopian end-of-the-world narrative that haunts us already
 because it makes us give up our dreams, and within our dreams are the memories of the land and that of our ancestors. We cannot accept the capitalist condition of consuming the earth.  And of being mere passive consumers under neoliberal capitalism. Because we are of this earth.

Rewind 6 decades ago and you had Djassi evoke the importance of unity. Unity is not only physical but of conscience and spirit too. Unity is embodiment. 

Abel Djassi will guide us into a meditation on the fight, today. He used this sentence a lot: “a nossa luta é a vossa luta” he’d say to the youngins “a nossa luta é a vossa luta” / Our fight is your fight. Our fight is your fight. Our fight is your fight. His words from decades ago still echo true. Our fight is your fight.

You’re a cartography that has been dreamed

〰️

You’re a cartography that has been dreamed 〰️

Listen ravagely. Reflect upon your own struggles and those of your comrades, of the land, and those of the rest of the world

Listen. Where do you meet? Where do you converge? Where do you confluence? 

Make yourself clandestine from the compulsive, yt supremacist, capitalist, techno-fascist norms that dictate your alienation 


Find your comrades

Grieve the ones who left

Grieve the ones who died 

Grieve the ones who assimilated, who subscribed to normativity, to sanitized neoliberal lies 

Grieve the confused ones

Grieve the youngins

Grieve those who don’t know how to slow down (Nehanda)


AD: It's time for you to find the courage to put an end, once and for all, to everything that is preventing our union. 

AD: It's time for us to organise ourselves well so that we can strengthen the struggle waged by the people 
AD: Let's work together for the liberation of our peoples.

We are people, or people of a people, who at a certain point in the history of that people took a certain direction in their path, created certain problems in their spirit and in their lives, directed their actions in a certain direction, asked certain questions and sought answers to those questions. It may have started with one person, two, three, six. At a certain point this problem appeared in our midst: Unity.

The more people unite, the more united we are. It correspond to what everyone knows, which is: unity is strength.

We have to see that unity is not always strength: there are certain types of unity that create weakness—and that is the wonderful thing about the world, that all things have two or several aspects—one positive and one negative at least. Those who had the idea of ​​unity, because unity is strength, placed the problem of unity in their spirit and in the reality of our struggle, because they knew that there was much division in our midst.

Unity and struggle means that to fight, unity is necessary, but to have unity, it is also necessary to fight. And this means that even among ourselves, we fight; perhaps the comrades haven't understood it well. The meaning of our struggle is not only in relation to colonialism, it's also in relation to ourselves. Unity and struggle. Unity to fight against the colonialist and struggle to achieve our unity. This is a powerful section especially nowadays as modernity and neoliberal capitalism creates all conditions for us to isolate and become achievers on our own, in competition with one another, or in struggle against each other. Atrophied. Atrophied. Atrophied.

“Reflorestar o nosso imaginário “ (krenak)

/reforest our imaginary


I invite you to find your cry of revolt.

AD: Your calling of revolt

Your cry of revolt echoes through the farthest valleys of the Earth,

Crossing the seas and oceans

your chest vibrates...

This is “cosmic intimacy” (Care) 

Djassi continues: White supremacy and colonialism divided us greatly; we ourselves divided ourselves, as a consequence of the evolution of our lives.

No to assimilation. Progressive assimilation of native populations, which turns out to be only a more or less violent attempt to deny the culture of the people in question. The utter failure of this, implemented in practice by several colonial powers, is the most obvious proof of its lack of viability, if not of its inhuman character. 

I also read here futurist echoes of Ailton Krenak in relation to this resistance to assimilation being much wider. Or we can look at assimilation as colonial sanitizing. As a sanitizing force that whitewashes and wants to exercise control and the extermination of resistance, civil disobedience,  dissidence, difference, queerness, transness,  nature, blackness, femininity

The colonialist-fascists massacre our people, arrest and torture our comrades and destroy our families. They reinforce hateful policies. They redouble their imagination and seek to maintain their domination.

They kill defenseless populations.

The foundation for liberation rests in the inalienable right of every people to have their own history. The objective of liberation is, therefore, to reclaim the right, usurped by imperialist domination, namely: the ability to determine the modes of production most appropriate to the evolution of the people. Liberated people. 

How can we collaborate with the production of life itself?  Integrated in the wider cosmos. To be confluent with the rivers, the forests, the food we eat, our neighbors, interdependent? That is being mutually supportive to one another ? While holding contradiction, we always have, and we must permanently overcome, in order to guarantee the unity necessary for the struggle.

unmask and despond colo-mentality

〰️

unmask and despond colo-mentality 〰️

What is your weapon?

Bring attention to your inner life. Vitality. The movement of your blood oxygen, gravity.

Start with a conversation with yourself /or with comrades. Close your eyes for a moment. Settle in your seat and breath slowly, inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth. Pause in stillness and breathe (Ife)

Break the invisible bars of my prison

〰️

Break the invisible bars of my prison 〰️

AD: Our work comrades,

Our path comrades,

Is to galvanize our determination

Our enthusiasm

Our courage

Our dedication to the fight

And every man that has in his hand a mortar, a bazooka, or any other weapon, 

Should seek every day to give the enemy harder blows 

And to move quickly towards liberation of our people and of our land 

“Ask more of what we make of communing, of coming, of dispersing, of moving, of learning alongside another. Arrive and arrive again in communion” (ife)

Excerpts from Meditations on Abel Djassi by body_hacker

Credits sound samples

Amílcar Cabral Bu Morri Cedo by Tony Lima (feat. Acácia Maior)
@allanz10d
@orlandoacevedo16__”chimbangalero-vaya”
@klankbeeld
@ianstargem
@dacarpe__”end-of-brazilian-carnival”
@frabass
@glen hoban
@komit-wav
@jim-bretherick

videos Youtube

Guinea-Bissau War of Independence: Amilcar Cabral and PAIGC (1924-73)
Amílcar Cabral | The Words of a Hero of Freedom: Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau

AMILCAR CABRAL - ÚLTIMO DISCURSO (JAN1973)

References

Antologia Poética da Guiné-Bissau, Editorial Inquérito, 1990 https://www.didinho.org/Arquivo/apoesiadeamilcarcabral.htm

https://www.marxists.org/portugues/cabral/1960/06/02.pdf

1960 - jun Apelo à Consciência dos Guineenses e Caboverdianos

1960 - jul Mensagem aos povos da Guiné e Cabo Verde https://www.marxists.org/portugues/cabral/1960/07/14.htm

https://africasacountry.com/2021/09/amilcar-cabral-and-the-limits-of-utopianism

https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Amilcar-IULP-ingles-1.pdf

BlackPast 2009 (1970) Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture”

https://blackpast.org/global-african-history/1970-amilcar-cabral-national-liberation-and-culture/

https://www.marxists.org/portugues/cabral/1961/03/25.pdf

Amílcar Cabral Palavras de Ordem  Março/Junho de 1962 

https://www.marxists.org/portugues/cabral/1962/06/palavras.htm

Amílcar Cabral

https://www.marxists.org/portugues/cabral/ano/mes/97.pdf

Cabral, A. (1979). Unity and struggle: Speeches and writings (M. Wolfers, Trans.). Monthly Review Press.

Marboeuf, O. (2021, October 19). Towards a de-speaking cinema: (A Caribbean hypothesis). Non-Fiction Journal. olivier-marboeuf.com

The political implications of ease-maxxing By Natty Astrology

We can’t be abolitionist and conflict avoidant by Care, Erotics of Liberation

Kill the yt ghost in your head by Walela Nehanda

Marron Choreography by Fahima Ife

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