Mwiko is a meditation on the impossibility  (and danger) of a complete archive. Drawing from the Karl Braun Collection and the fraught histories of the Amani Institute in Tanzania, the work unsettles colonial fantasies of categorisation and possession. Growing up, the mbuzi; a traditional coconut scraper — was an ordinary presence in my home: functional, familiar, and alive with memory. In Mwiko, I return to this object not as artifact, but as animate being, a living thread connecting personal and collective histories.

The installation transforms the mbuzi into sculptural “spines” that flicker with encoded light, speaking in rhythms of refusal. Black fabrics, collaged colonial photographs, botanical drawings, and suspended agricultural tools form a shifting, disorienting landscape — one that resists clear translation. Sound, stitched from field recordings and voices of Tanzanian descendants, pulses through the space, reminding us that true knowledge cannot be neatly contained or classified.

Here, home is both nourishment and taboo, comfort and conflict. Mwiko challenges the viewer to confront what has been muted and misnamed, to listen for what remains deliberately incomplete. It is a space of opacity, survival, and reclamation — a living archive still speaking back.