Through artistic research and live events at CANK, CEL launches a long-term project that fosters Black artistic innovation.

The London-based collective CEL platforms Black art, music and creative activism across many settings, and brings club culture into art institutions. Foundations launches a long-term, touring project which aims to link artists, genres and discourses beyond regional configurations. Through artistic research and a programme of live events at CANK, Foundations seeks to prototype a new ecosystem for Black artistic innovation.

Rooted in London’s underground music scene, CEL imagines local subcultures as part of a larger, global network of creative resistance and proposes ways to activate it in Berlin. Foundations is inspired by the griot, a West African travelling storyteller, who preserves and shares cultural memory through stories, poetry and music. The live events seek to link the shape-shifting nature of oral history to protest movements that form and retreat unpredictably as a strategy for survival. Foundations launches with a party curated in collaboration with Oroko Radio. Featuring Bobby Beethoven, Bamao Yendé & Le Diouck, Moneyama and LIL RISK, the international line-up brings together Black artists known for pushing the boundaries of club music. Further, CEL invites LYZZA to perform her LP SUBSTATE. Building four sound worlds of resistance out of the artist's own experiences of broken systems, LYZZA’s SUBSTATE aims to subvert the conditions of various hostile environments.

"Performance exists in simultaneity between truths and contradictions. [...] Let’s pretend the rave is diplomacy."

— Quote from short story written by DeForrest Brown Jr and CEL in the context of Foundations

CEL understands art as a space for experimenting with alternative forms of organisation and imagination. They invite local and international collaborators to, in author Octavia Butler’s words, “write themselves into” a precarious future. Expanding on CEL’s inquiry into sonic ecologies and diasporic myth-making, the events and the space dedicated to Foundations at CANK are informed by a science-fiction short story conceptualised during research workshops with writer DeForrest Brown Jr and political scientist Jeff Kwasi Klein. Set in a speculative future and displayed on reflective panels, the short story centers on the theft of a cultural artefact known as “the hum”, and one character’s heist to recover it.

"We’ve gone over our connection to the inside many times. We are taught how our cultural rhythm is tethered to their energy reserves. Our hum is how they experience the real. Not as an immense feeling of immediacy, but as a commodity or token to be consumed in scheduled doses."

— Quote from short story written by DeForrest Brown Jr and CEL in the context of Foundations

Also on view in the project space is Our Hour Has Not Yet Come, a short experimental documentary by CEL and collaborators that traces sonic movements in the UK and their link to migration, exploring the evolution of Black British counterculture and music through the eyes of some of its most important contemporary actors.

"These sounds carried over born out of our love (music get nice again). These sounds created by our love that came before us (yo, reload the ting). These sounds cross by sea and by air because their love will never leave us."

— Quote from the short documentary Our Hour Has Not Yet Come by CEL