Images and video by Lungs Project

Published: June 2022

A journey through the African American lineage, “Homage: What was, Is, To Come” pays tribute to all that was, all that exists, and the dream of what can become for Black Lives in America, acknowledging that hopes for our Black Future cannot exist without ALL knowing where we’ve come from. “Homage: What was, Is, To Come” is created as a part of the Black Futures Series commissioned and organised by the Cincinnati Art Museum in partnership with OhioDance.

Words by Asia Nichols

Illustration and animation by Gabrielle Tesfaye

Published: November 2021

Asia Nichols is a nomadic writer from the Bay Area, California. She writes offbeat, fantastical stories exploring the intersections of gender, Black culture and mental health while drawing from childhood memories and travel experiences. Her works have been performed for Fade to Black Play Fest, Pride Films and Plays, MOJOAA Performing Arts, amongst others.

Published: March 2021

Created in partnership with the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and published in print and online, Love Notes is a love letter to the Dayton community wrapped up in the beauty and elegance of bodies in perpetual motion. In Love Notes, we danced together and explored our relationship to our community through a production that is one part love song and two parts visual story-telling. Deeply inspired by stories, archival and photographic narratives of love, family and kinship we collected from across the region, guest choreographers premiered short dance works dedicated to the complex facets of love. This segment presents an auditory snippet of the digital experience which included a collection of moving narratives, performances, photography, and poetry that asked audiences to feel the nuanced emotions and grand feelings of love for the place we call home. All poetry readings are by Shonna Hickman-Matlock.

Published: February-May 2021

Kanekalon Kronicles is a series of roundtable discussions, created by Lungs 2020 writer-in-residence Banji Chona. The series was established as a virtual mpasa—a traditional Zambian reed mat with many social uses—and curated in order to explore and unravel the strands between Black hair and its environmental impact. Each mpasa chat is geared towards fostering critical thinking, debates, discussions, storytelling as well as looking into innovation within the Black hair community. Banji Chona is a Zambian digital 'artchiver', writer, sustainable designer, and collaborator whose work manifests across the creative and cultural spectrum.

Recorded video of a public event hosted by AmberSide Gallery on August 7, 2020. In July, we wrapped up a three-week takeover of Side Gallery's Instagram account, where we curated photography from the African continent and the Diaspora focusing on the documentation of everyday people in their bedrooms. Expounding on our principle mission to promote the work of artists and writers from underrepresented backgrounds, in this talk, we explored the potential pitfalls of essentialism and the burden of representation in the arts. In an effort to transform the word “diversity” into tangible action, we introduced samples from varied writings on the issue, and combined theory with our experiences in practising art as Black and brown creatives within the regional scene of North East England.

Words by Sheyda A. Khaymaz

Published: August 2020

Created to provide a concise summary of the main discussion points in Lungs Project’s public talk with the same title, which was facilitated by Side Gallery & Amber Film & Photography Collective, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. In an effort to promote a more critical and nuanced understanding of diversity, the essay looks to explore potential pitfalls of representation in the arts and aims to dispel the myths about the notion of diversity as it is most commonly understood.

Published: June 2020

Veli Mpho Mnisi is a South African poet and a student in Literature, Law and International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. A winner of the Deon Hofmeyr Creative Writing Prize for poetry in 2018, Mnisi’s work has appeared in Cobnetwork, Odd Magazine, Poetry Potion, and TypeCast. In 2019, he presented his research on ‘African Literature As a Form of International Relations’ at the Millennium Journal Conference at LSE. He was also credited as a researcher in Makhosazana Xaba's book "Our Words, Our Worlds" (2019) which examines the work of Black Women Poets in South Africa throughout 2000 and 2018.

Photography and text by Hilal Kalkavan

Published: October 2018

Commissioned by Lungs Project

Hilal Kalkavan is a photographer and educator from Istanbul, Turkey. She completed a Bachelor’s Degree in English Language for Education at Marmara University and uses film photography to capture the intricate textures and tones of her surroundings.