Who Will Cry for Us? investigates the analytical problem of queer African death and asks who is permitted to become an ancestor. In West African traditions, the rites and recognition that ancestorhood requires exclude queer Africans, whose lives are often lived outside public view by necessity. Their deaths go unrecorded by states and unfinished by the frameworks meant to receive them. Drawing on a decade of visual practice and work as a death doula, the project develops Queer Death Literacy: a practice of collective grieving and ancestral belonging built from within queer African communities.
Dandelion Eghosa (1994) is a nonbinary Nigerian visual artist, poet and death doula currently living and working in Berlin. For the last decade their archival practice has documented the lives of queer Africans across the continent and its diaspora, working through photography and film under methodologies of anonymity and anti-surveillance developed in contexts where visibility carries risk. They hold an MFA from the Dutch Art Institute and have been nominated for the Foam Paul Huf and Berry Koedam Awards. Their work imagines movement and fluidity between space and time, including places that do not and will never exist, as a way to wilfully create memory.
