Sustainability journalism plays a crucial role in shaping how environmental and social issues are understood. Yet reporting on the Global South often continues to reproduce colonial patterns of thought. South-North Conversations , a research project by DADDY Magazine’s editor-in-chief Kemi Fatoba, explores fast fashion, waste colonialism, and the biases embedded in sustainability reporting, particularly in relation to African countries.
The project seeks to challenge these inequalities by amplifying perspectives from experts across the Global South and North. In doing so, it laid the conceptual foundation for The Land Remembers, a group exhibition opening in Berlin in May 2026 that translates these questions into a spatial and visual context.
Following an international open call, DADDY invited artists to reflect on how land, water, and bodies carry the traces of what the world attempts to forget. The exhibition centres on the ongoing realities of waste colonialism, a term describing the export of waste from the Global North to the Global South, where the material consequences of overconsumption are displaced rather than resolved. What is framed as recycling, donation or circularity operates as a system that sustains imbalance. Consumption remains concentrated in one place, while its environmental and social costs are lived in another. In sustainability discourse, the language of exchange often suggests reciprocity. In practice, the conditions are uneven. Materials accumulate elsewhere, entering land, water and infrastructures already under strain.
Hosted by GlogauAir , a non-profit art space and residency programme in the heart of Berlin, The Land Remembers brings together artists working across video, installation, and performance. The exhibition opens with a performance by contemporary dancer and choreographer Mayila Khodadin, who explores overconsumption and waste disposal through embodiment. During the exhibition’s run, visitors will also be invited to take part in a public workshop led by Peter D. Abayomi of the collective Circular Heroes .
Participating artists include Jere Ikongio, Marc Khafre, Mayila Khodadin, Rafael Kouto, Peter D. Abayomi & Ruby Okoro, Chie Marquart-Tabel, Studio NEiDA, Jamal Nxedlana, and Mona Okulla Obua.
Limited edition prints of Kouto’s, Abayomi’s and Okoro’s project Circular Heroes will be available at the exhibition and online . Circular Heroes embodies the idea of representing Nigerian adolescents from the coastal area of Isale Akoka in Bariga, Lagos as key players of the circular economy, portraying them with scarves they produced in collaboration with local screen printing and hand-dyeing artisans.
Bringing together artists working across video, installation and performance, The Land Remembers traces how waste moves, settles and persists. The works consider land and bodies as sites that register these movements over time. Memory here is not symbolic. It is material. Rather than approaching waste as an endpoint, the exhibition positions it as evidence of systems that continue to shape the present. Visitors will be able to view and experience the works of Jere Ikongio, Marc Khafre, Mayila Khodadin, Rafael Kouto, Peter D. Abayomi & Ruby Okoro, Chie Marquart-Tabel, Studio NEiDA, Jamal Nxedlana and Mona Okulla Obua.
The Land Remembers has been shaped in close dialogue with an advisory board whose perspectives accompanied the project throughout its development. Members include artist Akinbode Akinbiyi; curator and Fashion Africa Now founder Beatrace Oola; Contemporary And (C&) co-founder and director Yvette Mutumba; writer and researcher Eric Otieno; curator and art scholar Mahret Kupka; writer, curator and historian Celina Basra, and Berlin-based artist Constantin Hartenstein. The Land Remembers wouldn’t have been possible without the generous support of Fonds Sozialkultur and the dedicated work of its curatorial team made up by Kemi Fatoba, Elise Chastel, Karini Viranna, Janice Faith, Jennifer Anosike and Martina Thomas.
Opening: 27 May 2026, 6-10pm
Exhibition: 27 May – 2 June 2026
Finissage: 2 June 2026, 6-9pm
Opening hours: 2-6pm (outside of opening hours: by appointment)
Address: GlogauAir, Glogauer Str. 16, 10999 Berlin
