Anna Yeboah (Berlin): Decolonial culture of remembrance in the city

As the Brandenburg-Prussian royal seat and later the imperial capital, Berlin was the political decision-making center of the German colonial empire and a prominent site for colonial science, technological and cultural production.

It was here that the momentous Berlin Conference on Africa took place in 1884/85 – a key moment for the European colonial project, which consolidated colonial frontier demarcations on the African continent. As the capital of an imperial state, Berlin was already a destination for colonial migration in the late 19th century – especially from the German colonies – and thus developed into an international center of anti-colonial resistance. Long suppressed and faded out, these historical events and developments have recently gained presence: on the initiative of civil society groups and the community, concepts of remembrance and reappraisal are finally emerging that demand a critical approach to the city’s coloniality and transform the urban culture of remembrance. The model project Decolonial Remembrance Culture in the City is an attempt to find new ways of cooperation between institutions and critical civil society and thus reconstruct colonized people as subjects and as an immanent part of Berlin’s urban history, despite the inherently precarious and incomplete source situation in public archives.

Anna Yeboah is an architect and curator. She studied architecture with a focus on cultural theory at the Technical University of Munich and UPC Barcelona. Her research and artistic practice deal with systems of power in architecture and urban planning. Her research on the topic has been shown at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale and published in international professional media. Anna Yeboah was a lecturer at the Institute for History and Theory of Design at the Berlin University of the Arts. Since 2020, she has been responsible for the overall coordination of the five-year model project Decolonial Remembrance Culture in the City for the Initiative of Black People in Germany.

Fachhochschule Erfurt
Schlüterstraße 1, Aula (2.OG)