Jollof Rice Festival is a multidirectional festival that brings the culture, history, and contemporary realities of West Africa into visibility in Berlin. At its center is Jollof Rice, a dish that is far more than just food. Jollof is a marker of identity, a cultural symbol, and an emotional point of reference for many people from West Africa and the African diaspora. This festival brings together food, critical reflection, and embodied participation. Reframing Jollof rice beyond narratives of rivalry, it highlights it as a living archive of migration, colonial entanglements, and shared West African histories. Using edutainment as an artistic method, cooking becomes performance, sharing becomes spatial practice, and eating becomes a collective gesture of remembering, reimagining, and conflict resolution. The program includes rice-picking, vegetable preparation, live cooking, music, and short discussions on identity, othering, and colonial continuities. Participants are invited to actively join the process across several stages: preparing vegetables, picking rice, and cooking together, gaining first-hand experience of each step and its symbolic meaning within a communal context. In all of this, we learn how to become neighbours and how to witness each other reciprocally. While eating together, this step becomes a necessity, helping us to relate with one another. Please bring time to be part of this shared experience.
Existing as an independent initiative, Jollof Rice Festival enters the framework of the Project Space Festival as a one-day performative intervention, repositioning the space into a site of sensory experience, political exchange, and collective becoming.

BARAZANI.berlin

BARAZANI.berlin is an interdisciplinary collective that engages with decolonial issues and practices. It has existed since September 2020, since then we have had our project space, SPREEUFER 6, in the Nikolaiviertel (St. Nicholas Quarter), across the river of the Humboldt Forum.
The word "barazani" comes from Swahili and describes a forum for regularly held, informal, neighborly, and open discussions. We aim to create such a space at SPREEUFER.
Our artistic practice is rooted in decolonial work. Through installations , collective and reciprocal choreographies we are trying to deconstruct colonial ideas.We seek an honest and appropriate way of addressing the intergenerational traumas that colonialism and imperialism continue to cause today. We join the call for a new ethics of relationships—for justice and respect, for symbolic and material reparations.
BARAZANI.berlin hosts exhibitions, performances, film screenings, workshops, book launches, concerts, guided tours, discussions, and dinner tables. Various decolonial (artist) groups, communities, and activists use the space for meetings, cooking, and productions.

Founded: 2020