DESACTA.
Counter-spells to unravel 140 years of the Berlin Conference

Nineteen men, geological surveys, a map of the African continent, too much information, and much more ignorance about the secrets of earth’s resources. The years 2024 and 2025 are marked by the 140 year long echo of the Berlin Conference where Africa was cut up and cut open by Western colonial forces. 

The conference marks another manifestation of the European project to bring to Africa what Livingstone called the three Cs – Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation–, which laid the groundwork for the colonial exploitation of the continent. The European development of trading, military and religious infrastructures was a process which imported not just bibles and rifles, but along with it, its own christian mythology which presented a dramatically different understanding of humankind’s relationship to nature. They spoke of a god which told them to “subdue the earth…”, to have “dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Old Testament, Genesis 1:28). Desacralised nature is a European idea, employed in the service of European objectives of domination, dehumanisation and extraction.

DESACTA (unact /untie) is a laboratory for counter-spells against committed injustices and an inquiry into the ideology and roots of the west’s ongoing effort to desacralize Earth and its contents in pursuit of a treacherous extractivism and elemental displacement. Anchoring itself in two locations, Berlin, Germany, the seat of power and the site of the Conference, and Malafo, Guinea-Bissau powered by the force of resistance against European colonialism being one of the countries to militarily win an anti-colonial war in Africa. Using ritual and magic traditions, DESACTA re-enchants raw materials as a sonic, intellectual, performative, communal and spiritual anti-colonial caring and healing service between these two sites.

The manifestation of the project is envisioned in five acts. The exhibition component invites creative practitioners – artists, musicians, healers and environmentalists – to display a series of offerings stemming from their (art) work and research responding to this proposed invocation. In this manner the exhibition is staged as an altar with an offering of plants, minerals, and archive material (as film, sound, print material, resource object etc). This altar will act as the site of departure for the  acts of performing counter-rituals, or Sublimations/ Re-enchantments.